Case Western Reserve University professor to discuss school violence prevention at White House

CLEVELAND - A CWRU professor will participate in a White House panel discussion Wednesday about school violence and prevention.

Dr. Dan Flannery is director of the Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education at CWRU. He'll talk about threat assessment programs as part of the discussion about violence prevention on college campuses.

"You can't stop every act of violence when someone's intent on producing harm, especially when we have our campuses as open communities and open buildings and facilities and places of learning," he said.

"But I do think we are talking more about trying to study, for example, successfully averted incidents as an actual systematic approach to learning about what works and how to do this right as opposed to relying, for example, just on the post incident psychological autopsy that we tend to try to figure out why did this happen and why did this person perpetrate such an act."

Flannery said there's no single, simple answer for preventing school violence. 

"I think the bottom line is that we all sort of need to be aware of our surroundings and what's going on and when we're concerned about something, make that known," he said.