The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Gunset Training Group or its affiliates.
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It has been a busy week. In the last 10 days I’ve done 2 days of active shooter training for 2 local police departments and 3 days of active shooter instructor training for the State of Ohio. Those 5 days were good days of training and I wanted to share some things I noticed along the way.
Let’s start with the training I did for some local departments. There were A LOT of young officers. I trained these same departments 8 or 9 years ago and I’d say less than 30% of those Officers were still at those agencies. Which means many of those young officers have had no or next to no active shooter training since it is not part of the basic academy. I was very happy with how they performed. Mistakes were made, of course, but there was no hesitation to act.
Each session (there were 4) was a 4 hour block. There was a lot crammed into the 4 hours. Since the agencies wanted to get Continued Professional Training for the training I dusted off the paperwork I used for the training I talked about in last years AAR and updated it for the State. We started with a lecture on responding to active threats that covered solo officer response that included some legal stuff and some debriefs of recent and historical active threat incidents. After that we went and did a walk through of the school we were using and discussed some of the tactical problems the school presented. That led to a discussion on hallway movement, use of angles, door assessment and fighting from the threshold when possible. After that there was a short trauma review and then we finished up with scenarios.
During the lecture, I showed the Covenant School surveillance video and body camera video (same videos from last year’s review) I used for the other agencies last year. As I hoped, this spawned a great discussion on the good and bad things we observed in the video. There was one main “good” and one main “bad” we discussed. The “good”? A couple guys took charge when leadership was needed. Including physically pushing guys forward, when needed. The “bad”? Muzzle discipline was a problem. We talked about how that is undoubtedly going to happen to a certain degree, which makes it even more important to keep your finger off the trigger until you’ve DECIDED to shoot. We also spent some time talking about the problems with the Uvalde response.
I think anyone reading this will agree that the response in Uvalde was a mess. But (there’s always a but), not everyone has taken the time to look at the tactical problem to have an educated opinion on why it was a mess. So I showed the full pictures I’ve posted above and we had a very frank discussion on, “ok, you’re the responding officers to this, how do you get into the room to confront bad guy?” What’s the plan for a locked metal door with wire mesh in the narrow window? What if you’ve got a door and window like the one in the picture AND there is some sort of additional active shooter lock/barricade?
We discussed tools they had on hand in their cars and whether or not they were sufficient to get into a classroom like the one in the Uvalde pictures. Then we talked about the classroom we were using for the lecture and talked about other options for either getting into the room or at least effectively controlling the room. The room we were using had quite a few options. We also talked about the additional classroom door active shooter locking device the school district added to all the classrooms in the district. I showed them the “key” needed to unlock those devices and talked about where the key is kept (an easy to find standard location at each school) and then later on I had everyone practice using the key. We found out an interesting fact about this particular system that could pose problems and prevent the device from being released. It is naive to think that kids who attend the school who have ill intentions haven’t figured out how to use those devices, so I stressed having a plan B for getting into rooms if you can.
After the lecture we walked through this particular school to discuss some of the problem areas and tactical considerations they needed to keep in mind when responding to an incident at this school. Points of ingress, Knox box access, master keys, 3M film and its associated problems for law enforcement were all parts of the discussion. I also did a short presentation on door and threshold assessment and things to think about when opening doors during a solo response. It was a lot of information jammed into an hour.
And then it was time for scenarios. My favorite part of any active shooter training. One of the pitfalls with scenarios is finding roll players. Especially when you are talking multiple days. The local PDs had found plenty of roll players, but they cancelled a week or so before the training. So I decided to call an audible and keep things fairly simple. I used just 3 role players. A bad guy, a dead guy and one I call the “running man”. The cue for the solo officer to start moving was the fire alarm going off (and yes, we called the alarm company and out the system in standby for the day). Once the fire alarm went off, there was enough stimulus (gunfire) and indicators (dead body) to guide the officer to where the shooter was at. When the officers located the shooter, he was shooting out the window of a classroom at responding units. Sound familiar? It should. That’s basically what the body camera video from the Covenant School incident showed guided those officers to the shooter.
One thing I added that was not a factor at the Covenant School was the “running man”. In this case, the running man was placed in a classroom right after the officer passed the “dead guy” and would come running out of the room with his hands up and a cell phone in his hand begging for help. Because what do we see all the time? People running from danger with their phone in their hand recording or live streaming what’s going on. This made the officers have to rapidly identify whether the “running man” was a threat or not.
One of the things I noticed during these scenarios (and it’s been pretty consistent every time I do this type of scenario) is that movement speed seems to be a key factor in whether or not the officer correctly identifies the “running man” as a non-threat. One of the things I preach when I talk about the speed at which we should be moving down the hallway is that you should never move faster than you can accurately process what you are seeing. 99% of the officers who incorrectly identify the “running man” as a threat target are moving way too fast. During the debrief I’ll ask why they felt it necessary to shoot/shoot at the “running man” and they almost always say something about closing too fast and I’ll paraphrase their comments – they didn’t have enough time to process what they were seeing.
Overall, I was very pleased with how well these officers performed. I’ve received quite a bit of positive feedback from the agencies and I hope this will become an annual training. For any coppers out there who are reading this, please go out to your local schools and get a tour of the place. There were a couple of young officers who told me they had never been in this particular school before. Don’t let the first time you’re in a school be when bullets are flying.
