STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Two shootings highlight security on college campuses. Yesterday, somebody shot and killed a faculty member at the University of North Carolina. Students and faculty barricaded themselves in dorm rooms and classrooms for a time. Last weekend, a man walked onto campus at Edward Waters University in Jacksonville. When approached by security, he fled, but opened fire at a Dollar General down the street. Steven Healy is the CEO of the Healy+ Group, a firm that specializes in campus security. Welcome to the program, sir.

STEVEN HEALY: Thank you for having me on this morning, Steve.

INSKEEP: Is there a special problem to securing a college campus as opposed to any other public or semi-public space?

HEALY: Well, I think this is one of the challenges that we deal with on a regular basis when we think about campus safety and security, where we're trying to create and maintain an open environment that is welcoming, obviously, for our students, staff and faculty but also to the general public who we want to come on the campus and enjoy. At the same time, we have to provide a reasonable level of safety and security. And so we're constantly balancing the approach that we use to maintain both an open environment while also maintaining a safe environment.

INSKEEP: How do you rate the threat level generally for campuses? And I should explain what I mean by that. We just heard about this shooting at UNC - horrible to hear about. We heard about the near tragedy at Edward Waters that became a tragedy down the street. But campus shootings would seem to be rare compared to other things that can happen to young people in their college experiences. Do we need to worry that much about it?

HEALY: Well, I think we definitely have to have active violence situations on the radar. There's no way that we can categorically dismiss an incident like this. So it has to be part of our ongoing risk assessment. And we have to think about what are we doing to both prevent such an event but also to be able to respond if a tragedy like this happens on our campus, as we saw unfolding at Chapel Hill yesterday.

INSKEEP: Well, help me think through the situation then. If, as you say, it needs to be an open environment, you don't want necessarily walls and armed guards visible and metal detectors and that sort of thing. What do you do to make a campus secure?

HEALY: So I think there are a couple of things that we can do - that we absolutely have to do on college campuses. No. 1, we have to be proactive about recognizing and understanding what our threat actually is. And when we talk about behavioral threat assessment, we're talking about being able to assess whether there's someone who's connected with the campus, connected with the institution who we know may be experiencing some anxiety or some proclivity toward violence, right? So we call that behavioral threat assessment. That really became vogue in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy. We also have to have a robust critical incident management program. So what are we doing to be able to switch from a normal operation to an operation where we're dealing with a threat like this? That's not what we do in higher ed on a regular basis. So we have to have policies, procedures and training around that.

INSKEEP: Just got about 10 seconds. But when you talk about behavioral threat assessment, it sounds like this is less about hardware, like guns and metal detectors, and more about intelligence operations, understanding what's out there.

HEALY: I think it's a combination of all of those things. The behavioral threat assessment helps us with the prevention and our response capability. What do we do if a situation like this unfolds? Are we able to notify the campus community? Do folks know what to do? And are we able to intervene in such an incident?INSKEEP: Steven Healy is an expert on campus safety. Thank you so much.HEALY: Thank you, Steve.