It’s more than Virginia Tech’s tragedy

THE VIOLENCE at Virginia Tech on Thursday, which cost the life of a campus police officer, Deriek W. Crouse, is a heartbreaking calamity for his family and a haunting setback for the university. The fact that Tech’s new emergency response system, established after the 2007 massacre on campus, appeared to work well is welcome news, and should be noted, and emulated, by other universities around the country.

But the sobering truth is that despite the system’s efficacy in quickly alerting thousands of students and staff, it may have made no difference in how events unfolded Thursday. The gunman, a 22-year-old Radford University student whose motive remains unknown, chose to kill a policeman and, a half-hour later, to take his own life as another officer approached him. For whatever reason, there’s no indication he wanted or tried to kill anyone else or that the university’s relatively quick lockdown impeded his plans.

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Moreover, a “lockdown” on a campus the size of Virginia Tech, which has more than 125 buildings and more than 30,000 students, suggests a degree of security that in fact may be illusory. It is certainly preferable in an emergency to get students and staff indoors and keep them there. However, it may be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to ensure that a determined killer — especially one who blends in with the university community, as Seung-Hui Cho, a Tech student, did in 2007 — will not also gain access to “locked-down” areas such as libraries or student centers. If he does, the result is likely to be bloody and lethal, no matter how efficiently designed and well executed the emergency response system.

Undoubtedly, Officer Crouse’s death is a tragedy for Virginia Tech; it is an equally emblematic tragedy for America. Already this year, 163 law enforcement officers have been killed in the line of duty, a number running 12 percent ahead of last year’s rate and way ahead of the numbers recorded in 2008 and 2009. About a third of those killed were, like Mr. Crouse, shot to death.

The reasons that police killings nationwide have surged in the past two years, even as overall crime rates have fallen, are a matter of conjecture. Perhaps cutbacks by budget-squeezed states and municipalities have left some police departments short-staffed or more heavily dependent on officers responding singly to calls. Perhaps, in an era when the rights of gun owners are ascendant, there are more firearms on the streets and in the wrong hands.

In any case, the epidemic of assaults, injuries and deaths among law enforcement officers constitutes a scandal too easily overlooked. On Thursday, around the time of Mr. Crouse’s death, a sheriff’s deputy in North Carolina, Rick Rhyne, was shot to death by a suspect with an outstanding arrest warrant. A few hours later, a Virginia State Police senior trooper, M.H. Hamer, was shot and wounded by a suspect he’d taken into custody on Interstate 95 in Caroline County. But the thin blue line, it seems, is getting thinner.