Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security

By several measures, 2024 is on course to be one of the worst ever in terms of gun violence on school campuses. My guest this episode to discuss these tragic incidents is David Riedman . David is the founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database , arguably the most complete accounting of school shootings in the United States. As you will hear, David's own analysis of the data has revealed some chil...

Host : David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database Guest : Dr. Tahir Rahman , Forensic Psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. Book : Extreme Overvalued Beliefs: Clinical and Forensic Psychiatric Dimensions Article : School Shooters: Recognizing Extreme Overvalued Beliefs (Forensic Psychology). Non-delusional, rigidly held beliefs m...

This episode was recorded with Devin and Caitlin from GVPedia . The recording is also available as GVPediaExplains Episode 26: Interview with David Riedman of the K-12 School Shooting Database YouTube version: GVPedia arms policymakers, advocates, and the public with facts and data to create evidence-based policy to reduce gun violence. GVPedia started as a project to provide ready access to acade...

The 14-year-old kid was not a monster until the second that he pulled the trigger inside Apalachee High killing 2 classmates, 2 teachers, and wounding at least 9 others. For at least a year prior to the attack, this kid cried for help and was ignored by police, teachers, school administrators, community members, and his own family. Committing a school shooting is a final act of violent public suic...

Every school shooting—the latest at Apalachee High in Georgia —is the culmination of a long chain of failures as parents, police, and school officials all missed their chances to act on overt warnings. Could analyzing and studying the information within the K-12 School Shooting Database be the key to stopping them? From Freakonomics Radio+ episode: The Only Person That Tracks Every U.S. School Sho...

Host : David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database Guest: Dr. Matt Nobles , Criminologist and Methodologist, University of Central Florida * All research projects start with finding data or evidence, and then applying a research methodology to answer the question. * Federal crime data is incomplete, published ~2 years after crimes occur, and doesn’t add up when multiple sources are...

Host : David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database Guest : Dr. Jason Koele , Missouri middle school principal Dissertation : Differences Between Missouri K-12 Educator Perceptions of Safety on Campuses that Allow Teachers Concealed Carry and Those That Do Not David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database , Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm , an...

Host: David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database Guest: Dr. David Perrodin , Professor at Viterbo University and author of School of Errors & Velocity of Information School of Errors establishes another voice in the discussion of how to promote safe schools. It challenges the unchecked expansion of school fortification and questions the realized benefit of inter-agency collaborati...

Host : David Riedman , founder of K-12 School Shooting Database Guest : Dr. Ken Trump is the President of National School Safety and Security Services , a Cleveland-based national consulting firm specializing in school security and emergency preparedness training In this episode we discussed : * Evolution of school security during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s—all time periods t...

Host: David Riedman Guest: Jon Romano , convicted school shooter and mental health advocate on TikTok The purpose of the corrections system is to: * Confine and separate a dangerous threat from society. * Punish an offender for their wrong. * Rehabilitate a person so they can re-enter society as a pro-social contributor. It’s the department of corrections not the department of confinement . In mos...

Host : David Riedman Guest : Sonali Rajan , Ed. D., M.S., Associate Professor, Department of Health Studies & Applied Educational Psychology at Columbia University & President of the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms Research Paper : Protocol for a nationwide case-control study of firearm violence prevention tactics and policies in K-12 schools Research Methods : Authors...

Host: David Riedman , founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database . Guest: Dr. Benjamin P. Comer , Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Texas Christian University. Paper: Definitional Discrepancies: Defining “School Shootings” and Other Incidents of Gunfire Affecting Schools We discussed: * How the K-12 School Shooting Databased started. * Landscape of ~30 di...

Host: David Riedman , founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database . Guest: Dr. Jillian Peterson , forensic psychologist, professor, and executive director of The Violence Prevention Project Research Center . I obtained exclusive access to the CVPA High School shooter’s manifesto from KMOV’s investigative reporting team . Last year, I narrated the documentary KMOV produced about this attack. Parts...

Host: David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database Guest: Justin Seals , school security director, school police officer, and military veteran. We discussed: * Justin’s career as a Navy Corpsman, Army Chaplain, patrol officer, school police officer, SRO unit supervisor, and school security director. * How school policing has changed and evolved post-Columbine, post-Sandy Hook, post-...

Host: David Riedman , creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database Guest: Dr. Rodrigo Nieto Gómez , professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School and expert in criminal innovation, AI, and national security. Articles referenced : * How does OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o assess school shooting threats compared to human police officers? * Did OpenAI create the best weapon detection software available with Cha...

Host: David Riedman Guest: Robin Cogan , National Association of School Nurses and Relentless School Nurse Blog On the show we talked about: * Robin’s career in occupational health and deciding to work inside Camden City, NJ schools for the last two decades. * Role of a school nurse as the Chief Wellness Officer and being the frontline emergency medical responder for hundreds—or thousands—of stude...

Guest: Dr. James Densley (Criminal Justice Dept Chair at Metropolitan State University and Co-founder of The Violence Prevention Project). Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman passed away in March. I started the research for this paper when I read his final book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement, back in 2021. Noise is the unwanted variability in decisions made by experts who are looking...

On May 1, police were called for an active shooter at Mount Horeb Middle in rural Wisconsin. Officers spotted a teen outside of the school with a long black rifle and killed him when he didn’t comply with commands. Four days later, police provided an update that the rifle was a $100 pellet gun available at Walmart and Amazon. Robert Chappell , the executive editor of Madison 365 News, has two kids...

On the latest episode of The Room Where It Happen with Baer Halvorson , we talked about a path forward 25 years after Columbine as school shootings are more frequent and more deadly. The status quo isn’t working. Is this because using the wrong planning assumptions two decades ago made school security more complicated than it needs to be? We also discussed school security issues including: * Failu...

Every parent wants to know any time a gun is fired at their kid’s school. I was a guest on the “ Talking About Kids ” podcast with R. Bradley Snyder to discuss the importance of collecting data on gun violence at schools. We talked about: * Government definitions of “school shooting” exclude domestic violence and gun violence in marginalized communities * Difference between “active shooter” versus...

Twenty-five years after Columbine, school shootings have become more frequent and more deadly. An entire generation of students have either been traumatized—or worse, taught how to be a school shooter —during lockdown drills. The status quo is not working. On the EM Weekly podcast, Zack Borst and I discussed how schools are missing decades of best practices from overlooking the emergency managemen...

On the Digital Politics weekly podcast , I was interviewed by Deepak Puri , CEO of The Democracy Labs . We talked about: * Differences between mass shootings in public places and school shootings * Capturing data to show a holistic picture of gun violence on school property * Understanding the drivers that lead to school shootings * Danger of swatting hoaxes that falsely report a school shooting i...

Clip from my interview on the New England Journal of Medicine Intention to Treat podcast . I’m on the show with Dr. Cornelia Griggs, a pediatric trauma surgeon and education director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Massachusetts General Hospital. David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Get full access to Riedman Repo...

Clips from my interview with Stephen Dubner on Freakonomics Radio Episode 561 . * How and why the K-12 School Shooting Database was created * Identifying someone in crisis before it escalates to violent public suicide * Need public education, playbook for school officials, and standardized reporting systems * National Poison Control Center is an example of an accessible system that can help anyone...

I was interviewed on Iowa Public Radio to analyze the Perry High school shooting on January 4, 2024. One student was killed, four students were wounded, three staff members including the principal were wounded, and the teenage shooter commit suicide in a school hallway. During the interview we discussed: * School shootings are deliberately planned for weeks, months, or even years * Plots often inv...