Effective Active Shooter Strategy

Active Shooters have happened since at least 1966 and are becoming more frequent. Some experts are concerned not just about a lone person who goes postal but organized attacks similar to Mumbai and Beslan. Both those scenarios are possible and increasingly likely in the United States.

Effectively responding to active shooters begins with a good strategy. Reviewing historical and recent police active shooter responses can help develop one.

Texas Clock Tower Massacre and the Contain and Wait Strategy

In 1966 Charles Whitman took a gun locker containing 5 rifles, 3 handguns, a sawed-off shotgun, ammunition, binoculars, food and water up to the observation deck of the University of Texas clock tower. Whitman began shooting at people from that elevated location for the next hour and a half. Rick Armellino’s article about early active shooters describes how two officers and a citizen kicked open the barricaded door to the observation deck and shot Whitman while he was still shooting at innocents on the ground.

Many attribute this incident as the reason SWAT teams were created around the country. For the next 30 years police departments generally would approach active shooters as barricaded suspects with hostages and employ a contain and wait for SWAT strategy.

Columbine and the Immediate Entry Strategy

Most discussion about active shooters starts at Columbine in 1999.. This incident is generally attributed to be the turning point when police departments abandoned contain and wait strategies because while the SWAT team was gearing up outside Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were shooting children unimpeded inside.

Now experts universally agree that active shooters require a quicker response than traditional contain, wait, and negotiate strategies. Many have labeled this response Immediate Action Rapid Deployment (IARD).

IARD has responding patrol officers attempt to make contact and engage the active shooter to minimize death and injury to innocents. It is a paradigm shift for many in law enforcement who grew up in a time where high risk operations were shifted away from patrol officers to SWAT.

Ron Borsch and Solo Officer Entries

There is active discussion about officers making entry without waiting for any additional officers. Right after Columbine, most active shooter training schools advocated waiting for 2 or 4 officers to gather up before making entry. These schools taught formations and group tactics to quickly search buildings.

Ron Borsch has become the advocate and focal point for single officer entries. His techniques and research were published in Force Science Newsletter #97 Ohio Trainer Makes the Case for Single-Officer Entry Against Active Killers in May 2008. His thoughts led to much debate among officers and Force Science put out an additional newsletter, Force Science Newsletter #98 Solo Officers vs. Active Killers: Officers Speak Out, that month documenting the comments and discussion.

Personally, I believe this strategy can be effective for the most common active shooter, the lone suicidal gunman. Those types of active shooters are devistating against unarmed, passive innocents but can be overcome by even a single aggressive, armed police officer.

In March 2009, Borsch’s strategy was affirmed by Officer Justin Garner of Carthage, North Carolina, when he made entry into a nursing home by himself to confront an active shooter who had already killed 8 people. Garner encountered the shooter, Robert Stewart, in a hallway and exchanged gunfire with him. Garner was shot in the leg but was able to disrupt Stewart’s plan by shooting him in the chest and taking him into custody.

American Civics Association in New York

The latest active shooter occurred at the American Civics Association in Binghamton, New York. Despite the fact that experts have agreed for years that contain and wait for SWAT tactics don’t work, the police response to this active shooter does just that. Rick Armellio gives a detailed account of that incident and the backlash from the public in his article, Responding to active killers requires training and trust.

According to his statements afterward, Police Chief Joseph Zikuski didn’t let patrol officers make entry because they didn’t hear any shots fired after they arrived. He concluded that no one was actively being killed or dying. Making entry with patrol officers is dangerous and since no one was dying, he didn’t need to risk them and waited for SWAT. Other local officials like Broome County District Attorney Gerald F. Mollen defended Chief Zikuski’s decision to wait with the fact that the 13 victims were too critically injured to be saved and would have died anyway.

The problems with their logic are this:

1. The absence of shots does not mean the shooter is not killing people. He could be killing victims with any number of quieter means like stabbing or strangling them. Also, many buildings like schools are built to absorb sound and you often can’t hear gunshots even when they are occurring.
2. The shooter could be doing other activities that need to be immediately addressed such as:
   • Searching for additional victims to kill.
   • Raping the women and children before he kills them.
   • Fortifying his defenses for the impending police assault.
   • Setting up booby traps or explosive devices.

All of these have been done before by active shooters and are additional reasons why experts advocate making entry early.

3. The victims he has already shot may survive if they get treatment soon. Just because the killer is not active that moment does not reduce the exigency of the situation. Chief Zikuski had absolutely no way of knowing the status of those victims when he made his decision to wait. Knowing later that the victims would not have survived means his decision was lucky not good and depending on luck is not an appropriate strategy.

Preparation of Officers and Command are the Key Elements of Success

It is obvious by his decision that Chief Zikuski did not have faith in his patrol officers ability to respond to this incident. No entry is without risk, even for SWAT officers.

If the patrol officers are:

• properly equipped,
• trained to respond to active shooters,
• and tested with a realistic scenario

then Police Chiefs should have faith in their patrol officers.

An often overlooked element of preparation is command. The supervisor on scene making command decisions also needs to be properly training and tested with realistic scenarios. Otherwise he will not be confident enough to send officers into danger and fall into the trap of waiting for SWAT, hoping the active shooter doesn’t kill anyone else or the victims don’t bleed to death.

Wait and hope is not an effective strategy. It is obvious after repeated incidents that active shooters have a strategy, kill as many as possible while deterring police response. Contain and wait doesn’t disrupt the shooter’s strategy, it allows him to kill without resistance. Simulations and actual incidents show that immediate entry is the best police strategy to disrupt the shooter’s efforts and minimize the loss of innocent life.

Further Reading

Articles by Charles Remsberg
To access these articles you will need a Police One logon for restricted users.

• 72 minutes of madness: How Denver cops hunted an active killer in a surreal scene from hell
• Lessons learned by Denver cops who hunted an active killer

Articles by Rick Armellino

• When they come to kill the kids: The critical need for “Immediate Action Rapid Deployment” in school invasions
• Revisiting the Amish schoolhouse massacre
• School invaders don’t take hostages

Related posts:

1. Keeping Your Police Tools Sharp and Ready Mentally, I think of tactics and techniques as tools in...
2. The OODA Loop: A simple concept for modern combat strategy Editor’s Note: This is a repost of a popular article...
3. Guarding Life and Faulty Belief Systems Editor’s Note:This is a guest post from Ron Borsch. Ron’s...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.