By Gretchen Webster

WESTPORT — Police Chief Foti Koskinas, reacting to the recent Georgia school shooting that claimed four lives, told TEAM Westport this week that such tragic events have implications for security measures at the town’s schools.

Koskinas also reported the Police Department has recorded “an all-time high” in the numbers of criminal and motor vehicle arrests as a result of enhanced enforcement.

Since a current focus for police is school security with the start of a new academic year last week, “the very sad incident in Georgia yesterday was extremely alarming,” the chief said at TEAM’s Thursday meeting. A 14-year-old is accused of fatally shooting two fellow students and two teachers, and injuring nine others, at Appalachee High School outside Atlanta on Wednesday.

“It’s also discouraging; the fact that [the shooter] was on the radar of the school security officials, the local police and FBI,” the chief said. “I’m not pointing any fingers, but when that many people know about a possible threat and it happens this early in the school year, obviously it’s extremely concerning.”

Westport school resource officers and school safety officers, as part of a school safety unit created last year, have been working throughout the summer to address school security issues, he said. All five of the officers in the unit have received special training in school security measures. 

Town and school officials, in consultation with police, also enacted a new policy last spring banning outsiders from school properties while classes are in session.

“Threat assessments — as important as they are — are only about 10 percent of what they learn,” Koskinas said. “A better assessment comes from the school officers working with the students, from understanding the brain of students as they work in the elementary school to middle school to high school and how they will be a resource to those students,” he said. 

Harold Bailey, Jr., the TEAM Westport chairman, asked the chief how Westport could avoid a situation as apparently occurred in Georgia, where the accused shooter had previously been identified as a potential threat, “but not being able to put some kind of a boundary around them or keep an eye on them.”

“To what extent are the rules different here?” Bailey asked.

“It’s way too early to give you an assessment of exactly what happened,” Koskinas responded. “I’m not a in a position to gauge what the school officials or police officials or FBI officials [in Georgia] were doing, but when there’s that much data, it is concerning.”

Westport police and school officials have had to deal with threats in the past, he added. “There’s always followups … I can tell you that incidents have come up and we’ve been extremely aggressive.”

Locally, he said, the response to similar situations has been the student’s suspension — “in school or out of school, and there certainly have been expulsions over the years,” he said, but what becomes extremely important is continued monitoring of a reported threat.

“I can’t say enough about the social workers and the counselors in the schools and how they work with our officers,” he said. But continued followups on the issue are vital, he added, “and that doesn’t mean just with the students.”

Following up on a school-based threat could include a required assessment of the identified student before he or she is allowed to return to school, as well as learning more about what’s going on at the student’s home, the chief said.

“A lot of times though problems end up in school … there’s major problems in the home, or there’s lack of parenting, or there’s lack of discipline. There’s other things going on,” Koskinas said. 

“Hopefully it will never happen, but the commitment we’ve given you is that when we have all those alarms going off, we cannot miss them,” he said. “And we’re hoping that working together we can we can prevent something like this.”

Stepped-up enforcement yields results

On another topic, Koskinas reported on recent results of the Police Department’s enforcement campaign, resulting in the largest ever number of criminal and motor vehicle arrests.

The higher rate of arrests, he said, is not because more crimes are being committed in Westport.

“I don’t want to scare the public. …  It’s not that the community is not safe. We’re doing more with what we have,” he said.

“If you come to town to do bad things, you’re going to get caught.”

Freelance writer Gretchen Webster, a Fairfield County journalist for many years, was editor of the Fairfield Minuteman and has taught journalism at New York and Southern Connecticut State universities.