Not All Locks Are Created Equal
Publication
Martaindale, M. H., Sandel, W. L., & Duron, A. (2023). Successfully securing a classroom door in a lockdown: Evaluating two types of door locks. Journal of Mass Violence Research. https://doi.org/10.53076/JMVR74565
What Was the Issue?
Schools across the United States use lockdowns to protect their students from active shooters. This is a highly effective strategy as we have never seen a shooter successfully breach a locked classroom door (the windows right next to classroom doors are another story).
Schools have installed a variety of locks on their classroom doors. Given what we know about stress reducing the ability of people to perform actions requiring fine motor coordination tasks, the authors were particularly concerned about locks that required a key to secure – especially when the person who is trying to secure the lock must use the key on the outside of the door. This study compares the ability of participants to secure either a key or push button activated lock under stress.
What Did They Do?
The authors recruited 95 college students to play the role of a teacher whose job was to lock the door to their classroom to protect their students when they heard shooting. The participants were randomly assigned to secure either a push button lock or a keyed lock (see image below). When the scenario started, a lab assistant started firing a blank gun to create stress. Participants were also told if they were not fast enough they might be shot by the shooter with a training round (No one was actually shot with the training round. The students were just told this to increase stress). The scenario ended when the participant shut the door or walked away from the door as if it was secured. The experimenters then inspected the lock to see if it was successfully secured. The time it took to secure the door was also recorded.
What Did They Find?
The authors were primarily interested in two issues. These were, did the participants successfully secure the door and how long did it take? The table below presents the errors by condition. Not surprisingly, participants in the key condition failed to secure the door about 1/3 of the time whereas the participants in the pushbutton condition failed about 1/20th of the time. This difference was statistically significant and indicated a large effect for type of door lock.
Speed was assessed only for participants who successfully secured the door. The figure below shows the differences. Participants in the key lock conditions took an average of 11.18 seconds to secure the door. Participants in the push button condition took an average of 6.59 seconds to secure the door. This difference was also statistically significant and indicated a large effect for the difference.
So What?
These data are very clear. Participants failed to secure the key locked door almost three times as often as the push button. It also took almost twice as long to secure the key locked door! The stressor here (blank gunfire) was nowhere near as intense as the stress that an actual active shooter would create. Also, don’t forget that while the person is taking twice as long to secure the door, they are also exposed to the shooter because they must stand in the hallway. Look at your schools and see how they are securing their doors.
Our schools have a policy that all classrooms with students present inside must have their doors closed and locked. One of the roles of an SRO is to ensure this and send regular security checks to building administrators with a list of unsecured doors. They are keyed doors but the rule above negates the issues of the study.