Campus Safety Failures Laid Bare

The cameras rolled, the internet listened, and within hours the story shifted. Fresh surveillance clips and doorbell footage lit up social feeds while officials stood behind podiums with thin answers. We walk you through what changed in the last day: how crowd-sourced gait analysis reached a high-confidence match, why bios and pages suddenly disappeared, and where local leadership stumbled with tone and transparency. It’s a case study in crisis communication: when the public has tools and time, vague statements don’t calm anyone—they invite more digging.

From there, we zoom out to the failures that echo across campuses. Virginia Tech’s delayed alert. Michigan State’s access lapses. Uvalde’s broken locks. These aren’t one-offs; they’re reminders that alerts, doors, and decisions are systems that either work under stress or fail loudly. We compare stated policies to what actually happened on the ground, including the head-scratching refusal to trigger a siren that the university’s own website lists for active shooter scenarios. If you’ve ever wondered why trust collapses during a crisis, this is the anatomy.

We don’t end at outrage. We channel it into a practical, repeatable plan for students and parents: two exits in every room, alternate routes across campus, fast cover versus concealment choices, a buddy system for late moves, and clear language for 911. We explain how to report faulty locks with time-stamped notes, push for transparent alert criteria, and demand after-action reviews with real timelines. This is preparedness without paranoia—habits that take seconds to practice and can save lives when minutes matter.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Opening And Prior Episode Update
• 1:38 New Footage And Online Sleuthing
• 4:50 Press Conferences And Accountability
• 8:05 Scrubbed Pages And Transparency Questions
• 11:05 Past Campus Failures And Alerts

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:17

To the common sense practical prepper pumpkins, where priming doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. Coming to you from a well-defended off-grid compound high in the mountains. Coming to you from his Florida room in Richmond, Virginia. Neither off-grid nor well-defended, unless you count as chickens and cats, here is your host, Keith.

SPEAKER_00: 0:44

My name is Keith, December 16th, 2025. I'd like to apologize to my friends down under. It is Bondi Beach, not Bondi Beach. My apologies. Bondi Beach. So the episode last night from Brown to Bondi has got a lot of traction. I've got a lot of emails and a lot of messages about it. But I want to give an update, a few updates of what we've learned basically in the last 24 hours. Part of that update is the realization of how absolutely inept Providence Police, campus police, the president of the university, and the mayor of Providence, these people are absolutely clueless. I'm a retired cop, so I can get judgy when it comes to bureaucracy within a police department and how everybody's afraid to say something because they don't want to offend somebody. So let's get into it. So while I was putting the script together for last night's episode, some enhanced and additional surveillance footage of the suspect, I'm sorry, the person of interest had been released. Providence PD released it, the university, the FBI released it. They actually, in that video dump, actually had a lot of video from folks ring doorbell cameras that are very high quality. So that gets out there,$50,000 reward. You know what happens after that. All the armchair quarterbacks, all the armchair detectives, all the internet sleuths do what internet sleuths do. And within a few hours, through all sorts of social media forensic tools, I guess you could say, several people have identified this person of interest. The way they identify the person of interest is through how he walks or his gait. Now, gate analysis is a thing. It's not as foolproof or it's not as precise as fingerprints or DNA, obviously, but gate analysis is very much a thing. So these internet detectives went out there and compared several clips of the surveillance footage that was released and compared that with tons of other videos that were captured around the universities, protests, marches, just general footage all around the area. They've identified the person, and through the gate analysis, the gate of the suspect in the video matches the gate of a student, and that matches 97.6%. Very, very accurate. I'm not going to give you the name of this student or how they're affiliated with the university. I am not going to give this person any more bandwidth. They've had some press conferences. They had a press conference last night. As I've said before, I've done press conferences. And if you're going to get up there in front of people, you better be ready. You better have your answers, and you better be ready for tough questions. The press conference I had was not about a homicide. It was about a high-profile arrest I made. So I knew some of the questions going into it. And I also knew the questions I would be able to answer and the ones I would not be able to answer. When they pressed the mayor, Mayor Smiley, he said, quote, We've been working 49 hours straight. We're all tired. Can you believe that? How tone-deaf do you have to be to tell reporters and family members and friends of the family, faculty members, people around the country, around the world, how dare you say tired? We're tired. We've been working. Well, no kidding. You have people to assist you, you have other law enforcement, you have university folks. You haven't been working 49 hours straight. I can tell by looking at you. You're tired, I'm sure. You're tired of answering questions, and you're tired of let me rephrase that. You're tired of answering questions, and you're more tired of answering the difficult questions that you do not want to answer or you choose not to answer. So this person that the internet detectives identified, his page from the university has been scrubbed, his bio has been scrubbed, his ex account has been scrubbed, any social media links or any posts that he's made previously and all of his social media posts have been scrubbed. At a press conference today, someone asked the president of the university, are you familiar with the websites and the pages that have been scrubbed from the university domain, I guess? And why were they scrubbed? The president of the university, the person in charge of the entire university, gets up there and says, I have no information about any websites being scrubbed. This is the same university president that six hours after the shooting, she went to a press conference and said she had no information to share. Then why are you up there? You are the figurehead of the university. People look to you for answers. You're in a position of authority. They give you bajillions of dollars to send their kids to this Ivy League school and you don't have answers. So she is not familiar with any websites that have been scrubbed. And the mayor's very tired. There is other surveillance video of the person of interest that literally was walking by police officers, walking in front of police cars that were parked on the side. So people are asking, where is the dash cam footage? Where is all the other footage that you have that you can use to help identify this person? Now, I'll put on my tinfoil hat for a second. Do I think that the university and local law enforcement has more information than they are sharing? Yes. Do I think more of that information should be shared? Yes, as long as it doesn't compromise the investigation. Now, let's assume the person of interest is truly a suspect and they'll be arrested or whatever. Why scrub that? Why preemptively scrub that? People went to the Internet Archives 36, 48 hours ago, that information was still there. I don't have any information on when it was exactly scrubbed. It'd be very interesting to see how long after the posts came out saying, hey, this is the guy in the video, how quickly after that these pages were scrubbed. And again, it amazes me that these people are falling over themselves not to provide basic answers to basic questions. We have parents out there that want to know why their children were murdered or injured, and they want to know why a suspect or why it's taking so long to arrest somebody because they detained some cat 20 miles away in a hotel Sunday and then they released him. So look, let's tie this back into being prepared. Now, this is not the first university active shooter where some things went wrong. I believe it was 2007, the Virginia Tech shooting happened about 7:30 in the morning. That was the initial shooting. The university did not send out an alert for nearly two and a half hours afterwards. In the meantime, between the first shooting and then the lockdown, the suspect went to another dormitory, to another hall, another lecture hall, chained the doors, and murdered more people. The university, by their own account, said it was a catastrophic mistake. Same thing happened at Michigan State several years ago. Some doors that should have been locked were unlocked. Somebody gained access and there was a shooting there. The Uvaldi, Texas school shooting, teachers for years had requested that locks on certain outside doors be replaced because they weren't locking correctly. The killer walked through a door that had not been repaired. Speaking of emergency notifications, sirens, a lot of universities have those. A lot of school systems have apps. They can send out messages, mass alert messages, the parents get them. The university president today at Brown was asked why didn't the emergency siren activate during this active shooter situation? Her response, that's not what the siren's for. Follow-up question by the reporter and kudos to the reporter. No. Actually, your own website says the siren is used in case of an active shooter. Her response, it depends. It depends on what. What we're saying is, don't know your university, you don't care for the faculty, you don't care for the students, you're just gonna take your$310,000 salary and go to your little cocktail parties and hobnob with all the big wigs. Okay, I'll stop. I'll stop. Little too judgy, but this has got me really riled up. So to recap, a person of interest has been 97.6% verified as the person of interest, the true person of interest, by a gate analysis. The university pages have been scrubbed, all social media, Twitter, everything's been scrubbed. It has been archived. People have located those pages, so they're still there. So it's not like they disappeared truly forever. When it comes to universities and it comes to school, you send your kids to university, you send them to high school wherever. It pays to be situationally aware. I understand an 18-year-old or 19-year-old kid running off the college. The last thing they need to think about, the last thing they need to worry about is a shooting on campus. But if you have not already, teach your school-age children, whether they're in elementary school, middle school, high school, college, or whatever you guys call it in different countries, teach them to be situationally aware. Again, being prepared is not being paranoid. It is truly being prepared for situations if they arise. And in some circumstances, it's not if they arise, it's when it's going to arise. Teach your children, teach your young adults, basic situational awareness. When you go into a lecture hall, you'll be there every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for an hour and 15 minutes. Or if it's a Tuesday, Thursday class, you'll be there for an hour 45, whatever it happens to be. They go into a lecture hall, look at the exits. They go to a restaurant, look at the exits. They're walking across campus. You're walking straight to the dormitory, you're walking straight to the student union. No other ways to leave the quad. No other ways to get out of an area if it becomes part of a situation or part of an active shooter. It is much better to be prepared and not have to use those plans, not have to be situationally aware. It's much better to have that as a backup plan and not have to use it than being thrown into a situation and you have no plan at all. All right, folks, thank you for the rant. But the more I did my research today, the more fired up I got. And I just absolutely, absolutely incensed at the university's handling of this and local law enforcement's handling of this situation. All right, I'm gonna take a deep breath and maybe grab a Diet Coke. All right, folks, as always, be careful out there, take care of one another, and until next time.

SPEAKER_01: 12:24

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