This is wrong on so many levels: Nevada has authorized the public university system — two of whose schools I teach in — to train professors and enlist them as “reserve police officers” to respond in case a VA Tech-style shooting breaks out here. Now, I’ve known a few police officers in my time — it’s a full-time discipline requiring an awful lot of on-the-ground experience to be able to make the kind of snap decisions that are demanded of real security work. Security expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out that the best security comes from trained experts that recognize and act on situations that feel “hinky” — not pulling aside every dark-skinned person in the airport, but pulling aside the handful of people who act slightly “off”. Developing this kind of sense, and then recognizing what it means and how to respond to it, takes experience and a certain mindset — which the Board of Regents apparently feels can be developed next to a 4-4 courseload, committee service, office hours, research, professional development, course development, and so on. They must be drinking the Horowitz Juice — that strange brew that convinces people that full-time profs (and adjuncts like me who carry a full-time, or more than full-time, courseload) are only working 15 hours a week and have plenty of time to devote to learning to be security experts on top of teaching.

It’s an insult to both professors and police officers, especially since we all know that the training Nevada’s “reserve police officers” receive isn’t going to be anything like what I’ve described above — neither time nor money are available for anything like that. Instead, I’ll lay odds that the “extensive training” will consist of an hour or two of basic firearm safety and police procedure (e.g. how to make an arrest and detain someone until the real police arrive) and a time requirement in a firing range. In effect, this policy will provide a ready source of guns on campus, under the protection of poorly-trained non-experts who are more at home with the intricacies of 17th century poetry or the esoterica of subatomic physics than with the demands of real security.

This is offered as an alternative, of course, to real policing, real governance, which would require either passing a new tax to increase police forces (which was voted down in referendums during the last couple elections; I should note that Nevada doesn’t have a state personal or corporate income tax) or increasing the gaming tax that casinos pay and which accounts for about a third of the state’s tax revenues (which of course the casinos that own Nevada would never stand still for). In other words, the state is offering up a classic example of what Schneier calls “security theater” in place of, you know, security.

And I’ll bet it’s coming soon to your state…