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BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — What used to be an unthinkable scenario, an active shooter on campus, is not only thought about at New York's public colleges but planned for the same way they prepare for weather disasters or fire.
All 29 four-year campuses in the State University of New York system have their own armed, full-time police officers and are required to plan and practice for active shooters as part of emergency management plans.
But even with preparedness written into mandates, the Oct. 1 shooting that left nine victims dead at picturesque Umpqua Community College in Oregon has campuses again contemplating if that's enough.
Days after the latest high-profile shooting, SUNY Cortland President Erik Bitterbaum announced two active shooter training sessions for staff and a seminar on deterring college shootings to better the odds his campus would "survive a similar act of violence."
"Colleges and universities are special places that promote openness and freedom of discourse," Bitterbaum wrote on the college's website. "We see strangers here every day, but there are things we can do."
At SUNY New Paltz, that means cluing in students to survival strategies, in part through the showing of a convincing in-house video that drives home the Department of Homeland Security-recommended response sequence in an active shooter scenario: Run, hide or, as a last resort, fight.
"We do a very good job here with the officers in preparing and training and drilling," said SUNY New Paltz Chief David Dugatkin, who appears in the video. "But I wanted now to really spread that out to the students, faculty and staff."
SUNY, with 460,000 students on 64 campuses, leaves specifics of emergency planning up to individual campuses. Departments look to best practice recommendations from authorities such as the Justice Department and International Association of Chiefs of Police, Dugatkin said.
Fred Kowal, president of the United University Professions, said it's difficult to say how well informed staff is about security plans or whether active shooter plans are adequate because they vary from campus to campus.
"Campus police may have contingency plans for dealing with such incidents that they keep confidential so as not to tip off would-be shooters about security measures," said Kowal, whose union represents more than 35,000 SUNY academic and professional faculty.
The City University of New York system, which operates colleges within the five boroughs of New York City, works closely with the New York Police Department "which is obviously the nation's leader in responding to emergencies," CUNY spokesman Michael Arena said in an email.
Each campus conducts officer training throughout the year, he said, and regularly reviews and updates emergency plans.
CUNY Brooklyn College faculty member Jean Grassman, who attended one of the training sessions run by the NYPD, sees a need for regular drills.
"My main concern is that the preparedness takes the form of passive lectures, as far as I know," she said.
University at Buffalo student James Corra said he was confident in his college's ability to react to an active shooter.
"We're always alerted when there's an issue," he said.
But the university's response to a September report of a man dropping what appeared to be a gun in the student union on a Monday afternoon, then picking it back up and leaving the building, received mixed responses from students, The Spectrum student newspaper reported. At least one student said he believed the incident merited an evacuation or lockdown of the building. Police officials told the newspaper that didn't happen because the dropped object may or may not have been a gun and the individual involved had left the building.
The incident illustrates the difficulties in anticipating and preparing for events on often sprawling campuses with multiple unlocked buildings and changing populations.
"The unpredictability of the shooter, the layout of a campus on any given day, weather and weekday campus population," Dugatkin said, "are just a few of the challenges."
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Associated Press Writer Karen Matthews contributed from New York City.
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