Six months after 17 students were killed in a school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, state lawmakers are still puzzled over what measures should be taken in order to prevent another tragedy.
Apart from raising the minimum age to purchase a gun from 18 to 21 and implementing a ban on bump stocks, Florida has not passed any meaningful gun control legislation post-Parkland shooting. A bipartisan school safety law designed to bolster school security and provide more mental health resources to students, however, was signed by Gov. Rick Scott (R) in May.
Among other things, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act allocated $400,000 for a mobile safety app called FortifyFL. The app would allow students to anonymously report “unsafe, potentially harmful, dangerous, violent or criminal activities” to local law enforcement so that authorities have enough information to potentially avert a tragedy.
According to Florida’s Office of School Safety, the app is expected to be launched within the next week or two — coinciding with the start of the school year.
“Basically, it’ll be an app that allows students to anonymously, or confidentially if they want, provide some information and report suspicious activity,” Trey Stapleton, the Director of Public Affairs of the Florida Attorney General’s office, told the West Orange Times. “The information would then go directly to [Florida Department of Law Enforcement] and local law enforcement and depending on how we set it up, it might go to the schools as well.”
The app will be modeled in part after Colorado’s Safe2Tell, a hotline created after the mass shooting at Columbine High School.
While Safe2Tell has had some success, some Coloradans worry it is too easy to abuse the system. According to Denver’s CBS 4 station, Safe2Tell has resulted in bullying. A 15-year-old girl told the station that she was the victim of three false reports from someone who claimed that she was suicidal and addicted to drugs provided by her parents.
Reporting mechanisms, such as hotline numbers and public safety apps, are only effective if law enforcement and school officials know what to do with the sensitive information shared with them. The Broward County school district has been criticized in recent months over how much was known about the Parkland shooter’s history and if anything could have been done to prevent the tragedy.
Safety measures that dance around the issue of gun control have been mocked by the survivors of the school shooting themselves, who have repeatedly called for tighter gun laws in the state.
In April, two months after the Parkland shooting, the Broward County school district instituted a safety policy of mandatory transparent backpacks, which many of the students believed to be a breach of their privacy.
“I feel sooo safe now,” wrote Lauren Hogg, a Stoneman Douglas and sister of gun control activist David Hogg, on Twitter. “As much as I appreciate the effort we as a country need to focus on the real issue instead of turning our schools into prisons.”
Stoneman Douglas students recently returned to the school for a new academic year and were greeted with a beefed up security system, new classroom locks, and a higher police presence.