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Virginia localities should be required to conduct active shooter drills, ensure that police have easy access to their municipal buildings and invest in technology that would allow officials to detect weapons and track the whereabouts of a shooter, a state commission convened after the 2019 Virginia Beach shooting has recommended.
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The shooting by a disgruntled Virginia Beach engineer who killed 12 people at the government complex — all but one of them city employees — exposed security lapses inside local government facilities, rattling officials in Virginia.
In a report submitted last week to Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and the General Assembly, the state commission tasked with investigating the shooting issued 52 recommendations aimed at minimizing such risks in the future.
“Tragically, this was one of many mass shootings in the Commonwealth of Virginia,” the commission’s chair, Ryant Washington, a former deputy secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security, wrote in an introduction to the report.
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One category dealt with the underlying motive of the shooter, DeWayne Craddock.
Craddock, a longtime engineer with the city’s Department of Public Utilities, had struggled on the job and complained of mistreatment at his job for several years, according to a 2021 FBI report.
In the weeks leading up to the shooting, Craddock was dealing with a vendor payment problem in which the city attorney’s office had become involved, the FBI found. He sent a terse resignation letter to one city official before starting his rampage.
The state commission recommended that municipalities require that all new managers undergo training that includes how to recognize the signals that an employee is troubled and where to go to get him or her help.
Grievances by troubled employees should be directly handled by trained human resources personnel, instead of an HR department liaison to employees, which is the current industry practice, the commission’s report said.
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To better guard against a shooting inside public buildings, the General Assembly should set statewide standards of safety for such facilities, including regular active shooter drills that test the effectiveness of communications during a crisis and a requirement to make building blueprints available to first responders, the commission recommended.
The commission also sought to address some of the confusion during the Virginia Beach shooting, where local police had problems getting key card access to the building where Craddock, armed with a pair of .45-caliber handguns, was in the midst of his rampage.
The state legislature should adopt minimum security measures for all state and local government buildings to ensure that first responders get access to all parts of any building, the commission said.
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“This lack of standardization was a problem at Virginia Beach for first responders,” the commission’s report said.
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The approach to alerting employees of such threats should mirror the rapid text alert systems in place at colleges and universities in Virginia, the commission stated.
A portion of the report dealt with the commission’s frustrations with the process of investigating what led up to the shooting and how it could have been prevented.
The commission had a budget of $35,504, with no access to pro bono attorneys, while a similar commission created in the aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting had a $460,000 budget with eight pro bono attorneys assisting, the report said.
Getting information from Virginia Beach employees was challenging, the commission said.
Two of those workers refused to cooperate, citing fear of retaliation by the city, with one saying “if he did talk to the Commission he might be fired,” the report said.
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“Consideration should be granted to afford commissions, such as the Virginia Beach Commission, to have subpoena power,” the report said. “Subpoena power affords those talking to the Commission protection against retaliation.”
Virginia Beach officials did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment.
Finally, the state commission sought to address some of the frustrations of those affected by the shooting.
Some of those individuals have pressed for a $40 million disbursement from the state to deal with the lingering impacts, saying the city has failed to provide for the victims’ families and the municipal employees physically and emotionally scarred by the event.
The commission agreed that a mechanism for some sort of state compensation should be established, recommending the adoption of a Virginia Mass Violence Care Fund for all victims of mass shootings in the state.
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“Such a bill should guarantee medical care for victims in perpetuity,” the report said.
The General Assembly allocated $10 million to assist victims of mass shootings in the state budget signed by Youngkin last month.
Under that appropriation, the Youngkin administration will form a work group to, among other things, identify options to help those with costs related to health and mental health expenses that are not covered by insurance.
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