JPL Center Director Freaks Everyone Out With Dumb Email Subject
Keith’s note: This morning the email account for the Center Director of Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent out a lab-wide email with the subject line “active shooter” (see image of full email)
From: Office Of The Director [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2017 9:45 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Active Shooter
Sources report that this caused a great deal of disturbance – just one day after shootings in Fresno. The email was not about any threat to JPL but rather describing a course about how to deal with a situation in which there is a hostile person (with a gun) in the work environment. An hour later, the same email was sent out with a different subject line – “Clarification: Training for Active Shooter Event”. No one ever admitted that an error was made or apologized for freaking people out.
I shared this with my Management Communications class last night on the importance of choosing appropriate wording for email subject lines.
One of the students indicated a similar event happened a couple years ago at the government agency they worked it. After the email was sent out folks were hiding under desks and barricading office doors. Even the HR manager that sent it out barricaded themselves in as warnings were shouted out down the hall. It shut the agency down for a least an hour until senior managers and security figured out what happened. They indicated not much work was done until after lunch because everyone was so shaken.
That’s one way to make sure your emails are seen, if not actually read.
This is up there with the incident in 2009 when someone decided it would be a great idea to circle Air Force One around New York Bay for a photo op, thus creating a panic when people saw an airliner flying low and circling near the city.
Although technically it was SAM 28000 since President Obama was not on board.
I don’t think NASA is likely to suffer such an attack because it is difficult for the public to enter a NASA facility and more accessible and crowded areas can be found in any city. However if we are really concerned about “active shooters” we should be concerned about preventing such incidents before they occur through increasing resources for the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Mass shooters are not going to be deterred by security forces, harsh punishments or armed citizens simply because they do not expect to survive.
Numerous state (i.e. tax-supported) mental hospitals have been closed or converted into prisons, with little or none of the increased community-based (also tax-supported) mental health resources that were promised. Resources for treatment, particularly residential care, are inadequate even in prosperous communities. As a result of the politicization of firearms regulation in the US, there is little or nothing to stop individuals with even severe mental illness from obtaining guns.
If we are going to panic when it happens, why don’t we think clearly now and work to prevent it?
Workplace mass shootings are typically carried out by an employee (or recent employee), not by a random person.
The Johnson Space Center shooting was an incident of hostage taking that occurred on April 20, 2007.