Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security

The Tragic Repetition of School Shootings (aired 12/17/2025) by A Public Affair on WORT in Madison, WI.This week marks the 1-year anniversary of the shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison. Meanwhile the search for the Brown University shooter is ongoing. To talk about these events and the ongoing crisis of school shootings across the US, host Ali Muldrow is joined by Dr. David Riedman who tracks these shootings and the online communities that foster gun violence.Dr. Riedman takes an evidence-driven approach to the study of school shootings. He’s tracked 3,400 shootings back to the 1960s, including 226 of which were deliberately planned. He says there are some common denominators when it comes to shootings: the vast majority are committed by a current or recently former student who has likely experienced abuse in their home, has easy access to a gun, and has shown signs of distress, like leaving weapons out, leaving out maps of their schools, and making shrines to previous school shooters. These realities may run counter to the desire to view school shooters as deranged, lone-wolf outsiders. Instead, Dr. Riedman calls the majority of school shootings “violent public suicides.”They also talk about the stereotype that public and urban schools are more dangerous than private, rural, or suburban schools, even though the majority of school shootings occur in small suburban communities and rural schools. Dr. Riedman advises that parents be educated about past school shootings in order to spot signs that kids are becoming radicalized by online communities like the True Crime Community (TCC) and Groyper movement, led by white nationalist influencer, Nick Fuentes. Meanwhile young people in Wisconsin have been calling for better mental health resources and better gun storage laws.David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security at riedmanreport.substack.com/subscribe

Guest: Retired police chief Patrick Flannelly served 27 years with Lafayette Police Department which borders Purdue University in Indiana. He served 10 years as chief of the department and now hosts of the Coptimizer Podcast.Brown University has 235 buildings (most built between 1770-1926) on its 143-acre urban campus in downtown Providence, RI. The school has 20,000 students in a community of 200,000 people.Latest photos of suspect (white male around 5’8”):Locations of the doorbell cameras where photos of the suspect were recorded:Background on Brown University shooting:* Why hasn’t the Brown University shooter been arrested yet?* Brown University school shooting and brief history of higher ed attacks* Prior episode with Patrick: Systematic Failures: Why Predictable Problems Repeat at SchoolsDavid Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security at riedmanreport.substack.com/subscribe

Article (pre-submission/pre-publication): Early Medical Response in Active-Shooter Incidents. A Systematic Review of After-Action ReportsGuests:* Dr. Dominique Wong is an attending physician the Cabell Huntington Hospital Emergency Department and chair of the hospital’s Medical Readiness Committee. She also serves as a tactical physician and medical director for police SWAT and Tactical EMS teams, trains law enforcement officers and the US military, and serves in leadership roles with the American College of Emergency Physicians, Tactical and Law Enforcement Medicine Section.* Dr. Clay Young is a board certified emergency physician with over 25 years of clinical experience. As a former director of a flight service he has demonstrated leadership in pre-hospital emergency medicine. Dr. Young is committed to advancing public safety through the education and training of law enforcement personnel in life saving interventions and active shooter medical response. He is a graduate of the University of Kentucky college of medicine, a father of four, and an active hiker and fly fisherman.* Dr. Beth Toppins is an emergency medicine physician practicing in her hometown of Huntington, West Virginia. A graduate of Marshall University School of Medicine, she has served as an Emergency Department physician at Cabell Huntington Hospital since 2003 and currently serves as the Emergency Department Medical Director. She previously held leadership roles in regional EMS and has worked alongside Drs. Wong and Young to provide medical training to law enforcement across West Virginia. Outside the hospital, Beth is a proud mother of four and wife to Eric, and the children’s pastor at Christ Temple Church in Huntington, where she is an active member.Abstract: * Background: Timely medical response can improve survivability in active shooter incidents (ASI). This systematic review evaluates law enforcement, emergency medical services (EMS), rescue task force (RTF) and tactical emergency medical support (TEMS) medical response in ASI.* Methods: After-action reports (AARs) from U.S. ASI (1999–2022) were retrospectively reviewed. Point of injury (POI) medical response time for police, EMS, RTF, and TEMS was reviewed. Medical response type provided by law enforcement was also examined* Results: Thirty-one AARs representing 19 ASI were analyzed. Police provided medical response in every case, most commonly (84%) casualty extrication. In 21% of incidents, law enforcement provided the full spectrum of response: direct care, extrication and transportation to a hospital. RTF victim access was frequently delayed and in 43% of incidents, RTF providers never reached casualties at the POI. TEMS medical response times varied. Barricade hostage situations delayed all medical responders.* Conclusion: Police consistently provided early medical care in ASIs, while EMS, RTF and TEMS faced challenges accessing ASI casualties in a timely manner. These findings suggest law enforcement officers play a critical role in early medical response and may help reduce preventable deaths in AS incidents.My additional points on this topic:School shooting victims who could be saved with rapid transport to a hospital have died inside their schools because EMS crews are directed to wait outside until police issue an ‘all clear’ order. To address this long-standing problem, many agencies created combined EMS/police ‘rescue task force’ units or tactical EMS units with body armor to go inside and find victims…but these units take ~30 minutes to arrive and assemble. At this point, critically wounded students and teachers are already dead.In October 2022, a teacher and student were shot with an AR-15 rifle inside CVPA High in St. Louis. They were still alive when police killed the shooter, yet EMS waited outside for 20 minutes until police gave the all clear. Teacher Jean Kuczka and 15-year-old student Alexzandria Bell both died waiting for help inside. With military-style rifles being used by most school shooters, a school campus is like a battlefield where “the majority of combat casualties die within ten minutes of the trauma” (PubMed: Wounded in action: The platinum ten minutes and the golden hour). Instead of unnecessarily cautious policies that protect adult EMS providers against theoretical (and often imagined) dangers, we need to shift the status quo to accepting managed risks to save the lives of innocent children with critical gunshot injuries.Here are two of my articles about this problem:* When ‘Eddie Would Go’ so should police, fire, and EMS* Wounded victims can die when plans are based on the ‘second shooter’ fallacyDavid Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security at riedmanreport.substack.com/subscribe

Police to students: “The way you guys were eating chips, it picked it up as a gun. AI’s not the best. Can’t trust stuff like this at a school man. Good thing you guys didn’t run [laughs]...that would have made a major problem.” Bodycam footage shows Baltimore County, MD police handcuffing 4 students who were waiting to be picked up after football practice when they got an alert from AI software that detected a gun on the school’s CCTV system.What happened in Baltimore County is more than a minor technical glitch because four teens were forced to the ground at gunpoint because faulty software misinterpreted a bag of Doritos as a gun. The school district spent the equivalent of twenty-five teachers’ salaries on an AI system that can’t tell the difference between a snack and a threat. The outcome is students are even less safe when police with guns drawn show up on campus looking for a shooter who doesn’t exist.Until AI can truly comprehend context rather than just pixel clusters—and using the most advanced models becomes financially feasible for video analysis—basing student safety on image classification probabilities will continue to cause avoidable disasters like this. When outdated 2010s machine learning software can’t tell the difference between a bag of chips versus a gun, it doesn’t belong on a school campus.Read more: * AI classified Doritos chips as a gun and then police pointed real guns at students* CNN: I study school shootings. Here’s what AI can — and can’t — do to stop them* How do AI security products being sold to schools really work?* FTC takes action on school security tech vendor after investigation* What happens when a school security startup fails?David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security at riedmanreport.substack.com/subscribe

Guest: Allizandra Herberhold, LMSW, works with radicalized, at-risk, and violent teens and young adults to prevent mass shootings and counter violent extremism.Host: David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database.Samples of TCC Content:TCC style cartoon that I used ChatGPT to generate:Links discussed in the show:* Allizandra’s Website: Parents4Peace. We center our work on those most affected by extremism—families and targeted communities—while equipping frontline professionals to intervene early and stop hate before it escalates. We address hate at its source, across every ideology.* Ep 57. TCC, gore videos, groypers, and online radicalization* Meme culture, Groypers, school shooters, and ‘Anomie Extremism’* Discord Platform: What schools and parents need to know to prevent a school shootingDavid Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security at riedmanreport.substack.com/subscribe

Guest: Simon C. Osamoh, a former British detective and security director at Mall of America.Host: David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database.Book: How to Survive a Mass Shooting: Practical Tools to Prevent Gun Violence and Protect Yourself When It HappensDavid Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security at riedmanreport.substack.com/subscribe

Guests: School principals George Roberts and Andy McGill, both experienced a school shooting on their campus.Host: David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database.Website: Principal Recovery NetworkResource: The NASSP Principal Recovery Network Guide to Recovery (In August 2022, the PRN published the Guide to Recovery, a collection of best practices to assist school leaders in the aftermath of shooting tragedies.)David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security at riedmanreport.substack.com/subscribe