BORELLI CONSULTING: Recommended Reading

Active Shooter Training Evolution:
Adapting Immediate Response Training To Terrorist Team Attacks
By: Frank Borelli

When I took my first Active Shooter Response Training it occurred to me that the tactics I learned were:
1) militaristic in nature. A four-man diamond is an infantry structure suited to one fireteam - which is comprised of four men, and
2) relatively inflexible as a result of limited training time and rigid policy / protocols put forth by police agencies.

Now I don't consider either of those observations negative in nature, but both of them can be restrictive. When you develop your tactics around a four (or five) man diamond formation, the officers involved may not be operationally experienced enough to adapt the tactics to the circumstances that face them. Further, as important as policies and protocols are, they are both developed to manage the majority of scenarios - not 100% of them. So, there may come a time where the officers comprising the entry team may have to make and act on the decision to perform an action that is outside of policy.

Before you start screaming that such things should never happen, remember this: the first responding police officer(s) to Columbine High School did what policy and training dictated. They took up positions of cover, secured a perimeter and waited for SWAT. They have often been criticized for doing exactly what policy and training mandated they do. How many times has it been said that they should have instead made entry to engage the Active Shooters inside? If they had, that would have been the kind of decision I'm talking about: ignoring policy to do what is necessary to protect innocent life and bring about a more expeditious end to the situation.

Therefore I put this question to you: is there a need to evolve our Active Shooter training to "the next level"? I believe there is and I'll describe why as I go through the paragraphs below.

Current Active Shooter training was developed based (largely) on the events at Columbine High School. That was the incident that brought police policies into the media spotlight and resulted in a societal demand for a change in tactics. To provide the average patrol officer with the necessary knowledge, skills and tactics, Active Shooter Response Training was born. I submit to you that most Active Shooter Response Training programs were developed and designed specifically to address the one-or-two-student-shooters-within-the-school scenario. With one or two armed students, a four-man police team should be sufficient to find and neutralize the threat.

In the training I've attended, there are always a couple of topics that are glossed over very briefly that should be (I believe) addressed more thoroughly. They are:
- the fact that an Active Shooter scenario is not restricted to schools, but could occur in malls, business buildings or post offices (since that has happened so often in our past we now have a slang term for someone losing control and committing multiple murders - it's called "going postal").
- the fact that as the team moves through the school toward the sound of shots, they may be exposed to things they have never before seen; things such as gunshot wounds, severe trauma injuries, dismemberment, etc. Additionally, they will have to ignore potentially hundreds of cries for help from dieing children to focus on the mission.

There is certainly a need to address those two issues in Active Shooter Response Training, and since we're going to have to redesign the training anyway, I think we might do well to make the evolution as complete as possible given current knowledge and circumstances. What do I mean? I mean this: Active Shooter Response Training exposes the average patrol officer to the reality of contemporary combat. Active Shooter Response Training, to some extent, weeds out those officers who know they don't have it in them to walk to the sound of the shots. Active Shooter Response Training is currently to narrow in its perspective and too restrictive in its training methodology. Why do I say that? Here's why...

The tactics developed for, and taught in response to, Active Shooters are excellent for response to other - potentially more dangerous - situations as well. Consider this: Instead of two students with whatever weapons they can scrounge, get purchased for them, or make (improvised explosives), attacking their fellow students in school, what if it was a terrorist team? Using five-man cells, as is common among today's terrorist fanatics, armed with AK-47s and hand grenades, how much carnage could a terrorist team cause in a school? While it's difficult for most of us to consider the option of killing children, terrorists have already shown their will to do it - just look at Beslan, Russia where they killed hundreds of people and some of them were still in diapers.

Using that same five-man-terrorist-team example, how many people could be killed and how much property damage could be caused in a shopping mall? In an office building? In your favorite local restaurant? Now, while it's true that a terrorist target would have to offer a potentially large number of casualties (because they like to make big statements which requires higher death counts), attacking targets with fewer casualties could be equally effective in reaching their goal(s). After all, if several of these teams attacked several different schools in a coordinated fashion, what would happen the next day? How many parents would keep their children home from school? How many parents would stay home from work? How much money wouldn't get earned or spent? The impact on our economy could be devastating, and disruption of our way of life would make them quite happy.

My concern, as I ponder such possibilities, is that I'm not sure a four-man-team in a diamond formation is going to be sufficient manpower or firepower to neutralize that terrorist team. I'm not sure a five-man-team is enough either, but it's a step in the right direction. How about this: how about if, instead of developing our tactics around the media-spotlighted two-student active shooter model, we develop our tactics around the five-man terrorist team model? I certainly believe that such training, while it might be "overkill" for the two-student model, will enable our officers to adequately address both potential situations.

Now I know there are staffing and budgetary concerns. There always are. In my own home county I think it would probably take the better part of twenty minutes to even get five officers on the scene of such an incident, much less five officers properly equipped to form up and engage the enemy target. However, if we train such tactics, and mold our officers to be adaptive thinkers under stress, then we've empowered the four-man entry team as well as the five-man response team, haven't we?

So, accepting that we could evolve our Active Shooter Response Training to "the next level", I make the following recommendations (and I welcome all comments: positive, negative, critical, etc):

1) that we move away from the "Active Shooter" nomenclature only because it's so commonly attached to school-based shootings, and focus on "Immediate Response" training.

2) that we design the training with multiple environments in mind rather than just schools with a casual mention of possible other battlegrounds. Let's design training that puts the practicing response teams into multiple environments as much as our community and budgets will allow.

3) that we recognize there is a major difference between a sixteen-year-old revenge-seeking student and the sixteen-year-old trained and devoted terrorist want-to-be-martyr.

4) that we develop our tactics in response to the four / five man terrorist team model, rather than the one or two student model.

5) that we therefore begin teaching five-man diamonds as a minimum (dependent on circumstance because we're also teaching adaptive thinking), with a six-man "modified cigar" formation at least in the curriculum.

6) that we develop accelerated Use of Force guidelines that take into consideration the greater casualty numbers usually attached to terrorist events. When the potential immediate loss of life is greater, shouldn't the potential immediate Use of Force be proportionately higher as well?

7) that we begin training our paramedics and other EMS personnel as well. While the entry team is doing its job, secondary rescue teams should also be making entry into the battleground to rescue and assist victims. Paramedics are trained for the medical service side. Let's incorporate that reality into our training and practice a six-man modified-cigar with the paramedics protected in the middle.

Thanks to Officer Al Garcia - a military service veteran and experienced police officer - I can throw out these recommendations too. They are all operational in nature and exceedingly good ideas that came from Officer Garcia:

1) The formation of Immediate Response Teams, comprised of properly trained patrol officers, specifically equipped with rifle-caliber weapons (AR-15s), ballistic armor plate carriers, helmets and a protected breathing system (protective mask, SCBA, etc).

2) The implementation of basic level Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) training among those patrol troops. Improvised Explosive Devices were deployed at Columbine and are a favorite tool of terrorists so this has equal applicability.

3) For the smaller agencies in relatively suburban areas, the formation of multi-jurisdictional patrol based response teams trained and authorized to respond across the jurisdicational boundaries to respond to terrorist incidents. This is an absolutely fantastic idea as it would not only reduce cost in manpower and assets, but it would also increase the chance of properly trained and equipped officers being on the street when an incident occurs.

4) The judicious use of retired and/or reserve law enforcement officers, as well as retired and/or reserve special operations personnel - most especially from National Guard Units - to be employed by high-risk entities (malls, airports, hospitals, etc) to serve as a Ready React force. This Ready React Force would be available on call to assist the responding law enforcement units with permitter security, crowd control, and other necessary services.

Obviously, we're a long way from implementing any of those ideas, but only because we're not opening our minds to the possibilities and benefits from an objective point of view. The terrorist attacks of nine-eleven are nearly four years in our past. There aren't as many flags flying as there were on nine-twelve. There aren't as many volunteers for service. There aren't as many people paying attention to what's going on around them - actively looking for suspicious activity and reporting it when it's found. The statement made by Wendell Phillips in 1852 is equally true today: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

When I write an article like this I always assume I'm going to have aggravated someone, or that one of the readers strongly disagrees with me. I invite you to make intelligent comments, critical or otherwise, about the concepts put forth herein.

We police officers, sheriffs' deputies, firemen, paramedics, and other public safety personnel have an on-going responsibility to protect life and property. That responsibility has an attached commitment to insuring that our training constantly evolves in a reasonable and effective manner. To develop and design training around specific scenarios, when the tactics being taught have multiple application, seems to me to be less than the maximum efficient use of that training time. Let's fix what we can and do the best we can.

Be safe!

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