Cop Tips: Surviving Active Shooters

Dec. 8, 2015 (Mimesis Law) — Active shooters are a concern for the police, but they are also a concern for the public, and there are many different responses to these shooting incidents.

Recently, there have been active shooter incidents in two different locations, with differing facts and results.

November 27, 2015. Colorado Springs, Colorado. Robert Dear killed 3 and wounded 9 people at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

December 2, 2015. San Bernardino, California. Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik killed 14 and wounded 21 at a party for county employees where Farook worked.

Dear was a fundamentalist Christian bent on stopping abortion. Farook and Malik were radicalized Islamic terrorists. Both were intent on killing as many people as possible. One succeeded, one failed.

In Colorado, Dear entered the Planned Parenthood Clinic, but was stopped by their interior security door. He could not get inside, where the 15 other clinic staff were located, and where they immediately executed their drill to lock themselves inside a safe room. Dear was limited to where he could get to, and basically trapped by responding police. In fact, of the 12 victims, half of those shot were police officers. Two of those killed died trying to protect others; Officer Garrett Swasey, a responding police officer, and Iraqi War veteran Ke’Arre Stewart, who ran back to warn others in the clinic after being shot. Stewart probably gave the staff enough warning to live through the attack.

In California, Farook and Malik opened fire at a holiday party for Farook’s employer. It was a wide-open area and many of those present hid under tables, where 14 of them died and 21 more were wounded. The husband and wife pair sprayed the room with shots, but did not appear to take aim, yet hit nearly three times as many as were shot in Colorado. They were killed by police officers much later, while fleeing in an SUV.

What was the difference between the two incidents? Both have been described as religiously based terrorism. Both had weapons which were legally obtained, both occurred in states that have strict gun-control laws. But the shooting in California succeeded and the one in Colorado basically failed. Why? Training.

Planned Parenthood has been the recipient of repeated acts of violence by those opposing abortion. In the last twenty years, there have been over 80 acts of terrorism against abortion providers—eight providers have been murdered and ten clinics have been bombed. Planned Parenthood learned that they had to be prepared, or they could die at the hands of terrorists. So they followed the plan recommended by the federal government. Run – hide – fight.

You first run.

Have an escape route and plan in mind

Leave your belongings behind

Keep your hands visible

Then you hide.

Hide in an area out of the shooter’s view

Block entry to your hiding place and lock the doors

Silence your cell phone and/or pager

And only if you have to do so, you fight.

As a last resort and only when your life is in imminent danger

Attempt to incapacitate the shooter

Act with physical aggression and throw items at the active shooter

In California, where they did not have any reason to believe that it might happen to them, they were trained to just hide. So the victims tried to hide under tables that provided no cover, no concealment, and did not actually hide them from any one.

No one ran. No one fought. It’s not because the ones in California did not have courage or guts—Shannon Johnson died when he used his body as a shield to protect a co-worker. It’s because they didn’t know what to do, because they never thought that it would happen to them. They did not believe that a radical Muslim terrorist was a co-worker, or that they were in any danger. So they didn’t think about what they would need to do.

That’s not unusual, people never think about this stuff. I remember a presentation to the student services staff of a university on what to expect in an active shooter situation. They were shocked when, during the question and answer session, they were told that the initial officers would not stop to help the wounded, that they would need to be prepared to help each other. You see, the first officers there are going to try to locate and stop the shooter before they do anything else, because the officers know that every second counts, that a shooter will kill someone else every thirty seconds or so.

So the officers will move towards the gunfire, to try to stop him or her as soon as possible. The problem is that it will take the officers time to get there. In Colorado, Stewart likely bought the staff the time they needed at the cost of his own life. In California, they didn’t believe it was really happening, and they died where they sat.

The difference in the two incidents boils down to mindset and training. In Colorado, the people were properly trained on how to respond, they expected it to eventually happen due to the history of violence in their field, and they reacted the way they were trained. So most of them lived.

In California, the people were not trained, did not believe it would happen to them, and they also reacted the way that most had been conditioned to respond. And many of them died.

And yes, I understand that there are other factors, and that the two situations are different in other regards.

But you can’t convince me that with proper training there wouldn’t have been a better result in California.

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