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It’s only a matter of time until this quote finds its way in to a closing argument.

“…ladies & gentlemen of the jury, as you can plainly see, all of the warning signs were clearly posted. VTU should have done more.”

Even the legal hurdles won’t necessarily get the job done: Just two weeks ago, you may recall, there was a fatal shooting out here at University of Washington. A female employee was killed by an ex-boyfriend who had been stalking and harrassing her; she obtained a restraining order against him and had posted his picture around the department where she worked. Nonetheless, the man came in to the department where she worked, confronted her in a hall, killed her, and killed himself.

UW’s not a gun-free campus, if anyone’s wondering; dorm residents are proscribed from keeping guns in the dorm, but that’s the limit that I’m aware of. (Also, I don’t know if the killer violated any gun laws at the time he got the gun.)

I dread the idea that UW is going to get sued over some perceived security failure (the campus and most buildings are wide open to the public), but it doesn’t take but 10 minutes reading of OL to see that someone will see UW as a deep pocket.

There was nothing wrong with campus security. This woman was not injured because of her position or employment with UW, it was because of her contact with a person unaffiliated with UW. She had a unique personal risk that was increased by this affiliation regardless of her location. How is it UW would have any more responsiblility for her safety than any other person or entity might if she happened to walk into their home or business. There are obvious reasons not to get too close to people with restraining orders (to avoid the crossfire), she shouldn’t make the burden of being around those with restraining orders any greater.
If UW or any employer becomes responsible for enforcing civil restraining orders then employers will have to start screening out employees more likely to wind up in this situation. This largely means women employees, as they obtain restraining orders at much higher rates than men.

I agree that employers shouldn’t take the liability of enforcing restraining orders for any reason. Furthermore, UW’s security force consists of a branch of the Seattle PD; I don’t recall any layer of rent-a-cop security at all when I was there, and so she was as safe on campus as she was anywhere else in the city, inasmuch as the police were protecting her.

It’s easy enough for you to argue that UW isn’t responsible, but would it be hard for a lawyer to argue that it was? What if an uninterested party, a student passerby, was indeed caught in the crossfire, unaware of the posted images of the stalker?

To focus on Roy’s comment, all she’s saying is that it’s hard to civilly commit people (or otherwise compel them into some form of psychiatric treatment) on the basis of angry writings alone, with no prior history of violence. Obviously, that policy led to grief in Cho’s case, but there aren’t easy ways to do away with the “legal hurdles” involved in civil commitment.

I didn’t interpret Prof. Roy’s comment as meaning that she’d tried to get him arrested or involuntarily committed. The fact is that many lesser steps, such as approaching Cho’s family or requiring regular counseling as a condition of remaining enrolled, would also get nowhere against an uncooperative student. See the coverage in today’s entry.