Alcorn hosts Community Awareness Briefing Training
Alcorn State University students, faculty, and staff participated in a training session geared toward campus and community safety.
The University hosted the Community Awareness Briefing Training Tuesday, Feb. 21, in the Dr. Clinton Bristow Jr. Dining Hall – Gold Room. The training is designed to guide Alcorn and community liaisons to maintain safety by developing an understanding of violent extremist, recruitment tactics, and exploring ways to prevent such threats at the local level. The training results from the University receiving the Mississippi Department of Homeland Security Community Grant.
The training session included awareness of social platforms, risk factors that lead to extremism, recognizing a change in behavior in potentially radical individuals, what bystanders could do to prevent attacks from extremists, violence prevention programs, and more.
Emery Nauden Jr., the U.S. Department of Homeland Security regional prevention coordinator for Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, facilitated the event. Nauden talked about the importance of these programs and how they could save communities.
“This training is about prevention work and creating multidisciplinary teams to help intervene with an individual planning to become violent,” said Nauden. “This training will help the Alcorn community to train and set up disciplinary teams going forward.”
Malik Rodgers, a Houston, Texas native pursuing a Master of Business Administration, appreciates Alcorn providing the training to help its community identify and prevent extreme danger.
“This is a great opportunity that allows us to have funding to conduct this training,” said Rodgers. “It also feels great to be at the forefront of HBCUs that received this grant. I believe that is one of the best opportunities we could have.”
Dr. Alfred Galtney, Alcorn's chief compliance officer, talked about how valuable the training session is for the University and surrounding communities.
“Mr. Nauden’s presentation was very educational,” said Galtney. “This training provided great information as a start for us to spread it throughout our local communities and prepare them to mitigate extreme situations in our environments. With this information, we could equip local school systems, law enforcement, and community-based organization so that they could be aware of different threats.”
