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Episode 51: Listener Question - Who Sets Tactical?This week are live on the road with the ASIM team in New York City. Today we are answering a former ASIM student's question on "Who sets tactical with only three or four officers on duty?"Bill Godfrey:Bill Godfrey: Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. I have with me today, three of the C3 instructors, Kevin Burd, our Director of Training. Kevin, thanks for being here today.Kevin Burd:Thanks for having me, Bill.Bill Godfrey:All right. And we got Jason Kelley. Jason, good to have you here.Jason Kelley:Thank you, sir.Bill Godfrey:Or, as we call him, Slide Deck. And we have Coby Briehn. Coby, welcome back.Coby Briehn:Thanks for having me.Bill Godfrey:All right, so today we got something a little bit different for our topic today. We actually have an audience question. The question comes from a former student of ours from an ASIM course, and he says, "I work for a university police department in a city of about a hundred thousand. Our active shooter instructors have a question about setting up tactical. If we only have three or four armed officers on duty, such as the weekends or second shifts or third shifts." And the question is, "if we only have three officers to respond, do we send in a two-officer contact team and keep the third for tactical to manage the city and county officers who respond into the campus? Or do we give up tactical to have our third officer make entry and search for the threat and let the city officer take the lead on running tactical operations?" He goes on to say, "There's been some discussion both ways. There's not a consensus." And he is asking if we could provide a recommendation and the reasoning why we would recommend that as our course of action.So, a number of interesting things here. He's concerned about the shifts where they've only got three or four officers on duty. Okay, so that's first of all. So, obviously, they got backup coming from the city and the county. I'm guessing one of the questions you guys have is, what's our response time for the city and the county? Let's assume the city's going to be right there because the university's in the city, a couple minutes, they're there pretty quick. And for the county, let's say it's a little bit longer, a little over 10 minutes for that. Before we get rolling on thoughts, does anybody have any other questions that they want to ask about it?Kevin Burd:My first question would be, what is the standard policies and procedures that they would operate under? Is everybody who's responding under the same guidance? Is it a countywide response plan? Is it three individual plans? That would probably dictate some of our answers or thoughts on this.Bill Godfrey:I think those are both great questions. And actually, I asked him a couple of those questions and he did give me some additional information. He said that they all three have some common training, but they have different policies and procedures. The university police has adopted the ASIM process. The others haven't gone quite that far. They've had to negotiate some things, so instead of tactical taking up the position and doing staging, they have tactical go to the door and control everything at the door. The other thing that I think is important to mention, is they do not have compatible communication systems. The university police doesn't have the ability to go to the city channels and the city police do not have the ability to go to the university channels. All right? Any other questions before we start talking or who wants to lead off?Jason Kelley:Oh, I'll lead off. This is Jason. I'll lead off. I guess my first concern is, three agencies on three separate channels. If you're going to place a university officer outside the tactical as that third officer, and sending to his contact teams to stop the killing. To me, that probably makes sense. So, they have direct line of communication from tactical to the interior units, additional resources responding. My opinion is, you need to then send a city and county to tactical, to that university officer, so now we have communications for additional responding officers.Bill Godfrey:All right. That's a tough call, right? I mean, you've only got three or four gun-toters to begin with, we're going to minus one to keep them outside to try to coordinate the rest of this response. Coby, what do you think? Two going in real quick with hopefully a couple more coming in a few minutes?Coby Briehn:Right. All good considerations. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking where in the building? Is it a multi-story building? That would lead me towards having somebody there at the doorway or the crisis-site entry to relay that, to follow-on responders, initial responders of, "hey, you're going to the seventh floor," that kind of thing. If you need access passes, all this stuff, getting key cards to them. They may be collecting up key cards from officers that are coming to give to other follow-on responders. You may have to put those relays in place to get officers into the multiple stories, but obviously the communication's going to be the big thing.And if, let's play on the other side of it, if they don't have communication issues or compatibility, then we're simply running individual contact teams that would have no communication, so everybody's going to self-dispatch, which is defeating the entire organizational process. I would hope there's a way to integrate that, having county, state, and city guys all in there, so the radio frequencies are in play. But the goal is to go in and stop the killing, obviously. If you can do that with two or three and then have that fourth or fifth at the door to relay it on as to what they need upstairs or down the hallway, that's going to be the best bet for me, I would believe.Bill Godfrey:All right, Kevin, what's your quick reaction.Kevin Burd:So, a few things are coming to mind here and Coby just touched on it. Where are we in this incident? And what environment are we working in? If we have active stimulus, we obviously have to address that threat, so obviously the first couple officers need to go in. And I think back to a lot of incidents I've been involved in, where we've had to integrate other teams on the tactical side to work together because we weren't sharing the same radio communication. They don't have it in place, but we need to look at, if we don't have it in place, how are we going to integrate that? By leaving somebody from university, as an example, there and the city or the county comes in, we need to integrate because we need to manage this thing at some point. We can't have teams working inside individually, right? Somebody's got to be in charge.So we need to agree...Bill Godfrey:Otherwise we end up blue on blue, we're doing duplicate work. We're missing things.Kevin Burd:Absolutely, a hundred percent. We need to organize that. And I think part of the question was too, do we lose that interoperability or communications when we go inside? Can we operate in there? And the relays that Coby was talking about has come into play in some of these incidents and we need to coordinate all that. Where are we in our priorities? Is it still an active threat or do we not have stimulus? Now we're going into the rescue part, but we have to manage this, right? Somebody has to put the brakes on and manage this scene. And if it's going to be an integrated response, multiple agencies coming, how do we integrate that communications and command so we're all on the same page to avoid those blue on blues and everything else?Bill Godfrey:Sure, sure. I'm going to step back from this question, the specifics of this question, which are very tactical in nature, and I get, and put my chief's hat on and look at the bigger picture here. To me, there's two ongoing problems that the chiefs, the chiefs at the university, the chiefs at the city, the chiefs or the sheriff at the county, that they own and need to solve.Number one, inability to operate on each other's radios. As a guy that spent a number of years working with interoperable radio technology, I can tell you from a technology perspective, we solved this problem 15-20 years ago. There is no reason, even if you're operating on different bands, there is no technical reason that you cannot have one system be connectable to a different system. That is a technical problem that can be solved, probably a dozen different ways and some of those ways of solving that are not expensive.That's to me, problem number one and one of the lowest hanging fruit and the quickest things to fix, is to get that interoperability across their radios fixed immediately. And that's an issue for leadership, that's got to work it out. And there's going to be a little bit of cost there. Who's going to bear that cost and how are they going to divvy up those responsibilities? That might even hit the elected officials or the city manager, the county manager, things like that. That's problem number one.Problem number two, is that they're not all on the same policy and procedure. A police department for a city of a hundred thousand is not a big enough police department that they're going to take care of an active shooter event on their own. They're going to have other agencies and entities from the county and every place else coming in. You need to get everybody on the same policy. Once again, that's a leadership issue, where we need to push through the politics, the relational challenges, history, the biases. We've got to find common ground and get everyone on the same page.And what I would say is, his whole question, the fundamental basis of his question of, can those first three officers go in? Or do I need to sacrifice an officer early on to stay outside? Well, you know what? If you've got interoperability on your radios and everybody's trained on the same process, all those officers can go in because the city guys following behind you are going to know how to set up command. They're going to know how to structure this. They're going to know how to carry on the response. Same thing with the county guys. The problem is when we don't ha

Ep 50: Implementing the ASIM ProcessSheriff Michelle Cook and Police Chief Terry Nichols share their experiences implementing the Active Shooter Incident Management Checklist process and their tips for success. Don't miss this discussion!Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. It's good to be back with you today. My name is Bill Godfrey. I'm your podcast host, and I have with me today two former C3 instructors as our guest stars today, both of them law enforcement leaders, and hoping that one day when they do retire-retire, we might actually get them back as C3 instructors; hint hint, Chief Nichols, who just retired in the last few weeks. So I have with me Michelle Cook. She is currently serving as the Sheriff in Clay County. She also did ... Michelle was almost 30 years at Jacksonville?Michelle Cook:26 years at Jacksonville, yeah.Bill Godfrey:Yeah, so 26 years at Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Police Department as the operations chief, so she had an awful lot of responsibility there. Did a short stint as the Police Chief at Atlantic Beach, which was kind of a retirement job, but too easy for you. You needed something with more, and so now she's the elected Sheriff at Clay County, which is in north Florida. And we have with us Terry Nichols. Terry was the Assistant Director at Alert from the founding to, what was it? 2018, 20-Terry Nichols:2016, 2016.Bill Godfrey:2016. Left Alert, became the Police Chief in Brownwood, Texas, and then you did, what, a little over three years there?Terry Nichols:Three years there, and then moved to Seguin as chief, and spent three years there, and now I'm retiredBill Godfrey:Like a week and a half ago, two weeks ago? It's been pretty recent.Terry Nichols:It's been a month, it's been a month.Bill Godfrey:So it's exciting to have both of you here. I really appreciate you taking the time. I know the sheriff especially, you have a very busy schedule. But I wanted to have a podcast where we talk about implementing the Active Shooter Incident Management checklist and the process that goes with it. Because it sounds simple on the surface, and when you've gone through training, it's fairly straightforward, but trying to roll that out to a whole organization is a little bit of a logistics machine.And the two of you have each done this, not only in your organizations, but you've done it more than once. So sheriff, you did it at Jacksonville, then did it at Atlantic Beach, now at Clay County, and Terry, you did it at both Brownwood and Seguin. So what I wanted to just get from you guys is, what was it about this process that made you say, "This is the way I want to go," and what were your lessons learned? How did you approach it and go along the way? So sheriff, you want to start us off?Michelle Cook:Sure. First of all, thank you for having me today to talk about this. I'm very passionate about this. You've asked why ASIM, why choose this method of managing an active shooter event, and I will tell you, I'm entering into my 30th year of law enforcement, and I've worked some huge cases, some huge incidents, thousands of them, and for me, being a street cop for so long and then the leader of street cops, the ASIM process, the ASIM methodology, it just makes sense.In our industry, and Terry, correct me if you see differently, we teach young officers, young supervisors, to handle everything themselves. And on 99% of the calls that we handle, that can be done, but on a mass critical incident, like an active shooter event, relying on one person to handle everything is just unrealistic, and that's how things get missed, and unfortunately, that's how people die, is you got one person trying to handle everything.Terry Nichols:Yeah. For me, everything the sheriff said makes perfect sense, and she is spot on. Having been involved with Alert and standing it up from the get go, driving it post-Columbine, and how we were training cops, and then fast-forward several years and get introduced to the ASIM model, and realizing we had been missing the boat early on. When we started first training our officers, we were missing the management piece of this. We were doing good at going in and realizing that we have a different duty. There's no longer sit and wait for SWAT, that we had a different mission on these active shooter events.But there's a whole management piece of this, and like the sheriff alluded to, that we're real good at teaching cops to go handle a problem by themselves, and they do it 9 times out of 10, but these events are catastrophic. They are geographical in nature. It doesn't just happen in a vacuum in one little place, and it takes significant resource management being trained to do that, and that the ASIM, I was just pulled to it and said it makes all the sense in the world.Bill Godfrey:Well, it's very humbling to hear that, and I'm thrilled that you guys ... I was thrilled to have both of you as instructors and as founding members, if you will, of what we were doing a very, very long time ago. Terry, when you were at Alert, you had a hand in helping us get the pilot up and running, and Michelle attended one of the very first pilots. Wait, in fact, I think it was the very first pilot delivery we did for certification, when we did it at Seminole County, so you guys have certainly been on the road with us for a long time. Terry, what was your strategy? So Brownwood, you might want to ... Brownwood was a little more rural, Seguin's a little more suburban. What was your strategy when you wanted to implement it the first time around, and then how did that change for you the second time around?Terry Nichols:I want to back up to something that you said on the intro too, if I can remember what it was now, that it's not just an agency that we implemented these in, it was a geographical area. So it was multiple agencies.Bill Godfrey:Good point.Terry Nichols:Yeah, I may have been the Chief of Brownwood, but I had the Sheriff's Department, and I had two of the law enforcement agencies right there in the county as well, and it was very rural. If you look at Brownwood, Texas on a map, it is in the geographical center of Texas, and I tell people, "You go out to nowhere and turn left, and you're in Brownwood," and not a lot of resources out there.Our closest big city is Abilene, Texas, and that's an hour away. But I knew, A, the need when I got there. I saw the quick needs assessment that we had no active shooter training. We had nothing. We had zero partnership with our fire and EMS partners, we had a third-party EMS provider, we were not working with our Sheriff's Department who was in the same building as us, so a lot of basic leadership stuff.And it was fun to bring the ASIM stuff to us, and we did it through Counterstrike first. That's how we introduced it to the organization, but we brought in the Sheriff's Department and other law enforcement agencies in the county. And that brought us all together, where they weren't playing in the sandbox prior to me getting there for multiple reasons, but this was something we could all gather around and actually embrace.And that really helped build relationships and, "Hey, we're not that bad. Hey, the people across the hall, hey, they're not that bad. They wear a brown uniform, we wear a blue uniform." So but it's also a rule. What we had is what we had, and help was a long way away. So we introduced it through Counterstrike, and then we did ASIM and the checklist, and we recurred training on it, and it was a success.Bill Godfrey:Sheriff, your first implementation was at Jacksonville, which, contrasting to Brownwood, is about as big as ... it's a big job. What was your strategy there? I know you had to play the long game. It took a while, but talk a little bit about what you did at Jacksonville.Michelle Cook:Sure. So in Jacksonville, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office actually, at the time, was the 25th largest agency in the country, so a large agency. And what we decided to do is offer the ASIM class to those who wanted it first, because we thought if we could get those folks who are interested in it to buy into it, then they could go out and help sell it to the rest of the agency. And that really, for us, worked out good, because we ended up with ASIM disciples, is what I call them, and those are folks who were all in, who, on the street, if somebody had a question, they could speak to what ASIM was, and the benefits of it, and stuff like that.So it took us several years. We had to get through about 1,400 people trained, so it took us several years, several training cycles, to get everybody through. Contrast that to ... Let me go back. In Jacksonville, we also had a really close relationship with the fire department, and so they were in on the training from the beginning with us, and that was very, very beneficial.In fact, I think it was in Jacksonville, we started using rescue task forces at special events, and that was a chance for us to practice a concept with our police and fire working together on all of our pre-planned special events, so when the the day did come that we had an active shooter, we would be prepared to ... and we wouldn't have to stop and explain to people what a rescue task force was, so that worked out really well.And we had the active shooter incident at The Landing, and we got fortunate that day because there was actually a fire department unit training a block away. But if you go back and you listen to the radio broadcast, and you listen, and you read the after-action reports, it was very clear that not only the active shooter tactical training that we had been practicing and training so hard for worked, but also, the Active Shooter Incident Management portion of that trained, and people fell right into place.And so it was really ... I had just left when that happened, but it was very gratifying to see all that hard work going into saving people's lives. So move forward to Atlantic Beach, again, much like Terry, a very small agency. We had 30 people total, including myself, and for me, I incorporated not only some of the fire department folks again in this, but public works. Our public works folks had a big presence out there in the city

Ep 49: ASIM Checklist Endorsed as National Standard by NTOASPECIAL EPISODE - We have exciting news on this week's podcast! Our guest is Thor Eells, Executive Director of the National Tactical Officers Association (NTOA). Today, Thor shares the news NTOA is endorsing the C3 Pathways Active Shooter Incident Management Checklist as the national standard of incident management of active shooter events. We discuss the importance of setting national standards for first responder training. Thor also tells us what NTOA is working on, including a neuroplasticity program to help first responders make decisions faster and more accurately while under stress.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey. I'm your podcast host. It has been a minute since the last podcast we've done. I'm excited to be back, but I'm even more excited that we're back with a very special guest today. I would like to introduce you to Thor Eells, the executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, known to our law enforcement audience as the NTOA. Thor, welcome.Thor Eells:Thank you very much.Bill Godfrey:Hey, before we get going on this, because we probably have some audience members that aren't familiar with NTOA because we have more than just law enforcement. Can you tell us a little bit about the NTOA and its mission and where you guys are going?Thor Eells:Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunity to do so. The NTOA is a nonprofit organization we originally created in 1983 by a then-lieutenant with the LA County Sheriff's Department, who was hoping to establish an association for networking information sharing among tactical teams in the United States while they were in their relative infancy and ensuring that through this shared information and knowledge, that it would professionalize this pledging self-discipline within law enforcement.Over these past decades, this association grown now to roughly 40,000 members with specialties that now include patrol, tactical EMS, crisis negotiations, and corrections. We even now also have membership from fire and EMS as a result of the whole development of rescue task forces and the need, with these new emerging threats, for all of these disciplines to be able to work and collaborate together in critical incidents for successful outcomes. We teach roughly 200 classes a year. We have taught all over the world, and we have membership from five continents. So it has grown exponentially since the founder, John Coleman, first created the association.Bill Godfrey:Wow. That's fascinating. I didn't realize that you guys had formed back in 1983. That is pretty amazing. I'm so excited to hear you talk about the fire/EMS membership and the pursuit of rescue task force. Obviously we're going to talk about that a little bit today, but we've got a big announcement to offer today. You want to go ahead and break the news to the audience?Thor Eells:Well, happy to. We are extremely excited to be able to enter into this collaborative agreement with C3 Pathways and the endorsement and the creation of a lot of information sharing between our two entities, but particularly as it pertains to the active assailant/active shooter checklist. I think that this is really a very important and potentially impactful partnership in helping those first responders that are tasked with a very, very difficult job in making good decisions in a time-compressed and stressful environment. So I think this is just the beginning of many good things to come between our two companies and associations.Bill Godfrey:I think it's wonderful. I'm so very excited to have you guys recognize the checklist and endorse it as a national standard. I'm just blown away and so humbled by that, along with the rest of the C3 team and the instructors that have been doing training for years. It's an interesting phenomenon. We've been using the checklist and training for over 10 years now and have some 3,000 different agencies from law enforcement, fire, EMS, emergency management across the country that are using it.But this is the first time that we've actually had a national standard-setting bodies such as yourself. For those not on the law enforcement side, NTOA is essentially to law enforcement, what the NFPA, the National Fire Protection Association is to the fire department in being able to set the standards and set national standards. We are just so honored to have you guys recognize that and endorse it.I think it's a really big deal. I've obviously been gone from active duty for a little bit now, but it always made me more comfortable as a responder when I knew that the process or the procedure that I was following was a national standard. It wasn't just something we thunk up on the spot. How does that sit with you, because I know you guys got into writing the standards for originally the tactical team, the SWAT teams years ago, and it's branched much beyond that. Thor, where do you think the importance of those national standards sit with responders?Thor Eells:Well, I think they're more important today than they ever have been. I don't think you have to look very far in the news or elsewhere, your local legislators, to recognize that there is a loud human cry for standards, for some benchmark that our communities and our citizens that we serve are able to look to, to be able to better gauge, are we doing what we're supposed to do when we're supposed to do it.We talk about transparency in these things that everyone is calling for, but if they don't have something to really look at and against, it's difficult. Let's face it. If we're going very frank and honest, many of us in law enforcement and our brothers and sisters in fire and EMS get frustrated at much of the criticism that's directed our way because there's this perceived bias and/or there's this willful proliferation of misinformation, etc.But once we calm down and we get past the emotional aspect of that, and we really begin to take a hard look at it, what we realize is, well, there's really not much information out there. I had a very good friend of mine share with me once, this old adage of "If you don't tell your story, somebody else will, and you may not like it."Bill Godfrey:Oh, boy, is that true.Thor Eells:It's so true. So for us to be able to set standards that we ourselves have taken the time to objectively and very deliberately find the best minds, the best experience from all these disciplines, fire, EMS, and law enforcement, and look at our roles and our responsibilities in these critical incidents and have them provide the input on what the priorities should be, when and where we should be doing certain things when and where we shouldn't be doing other things, and then establishing a standard like that, that then can be converted into a template and/or roadmap, which enhances the probabilities of success instead of allowing just fate to determine the outcome, is exactly what we should be doing.So we, too, like you, are extremely humbled and quite honestly honored to be part of putting such a high quality, high caliber product out there to enhance our first responders' capabilities. It's really exciting to see the impact that this is likely to have.Bill Godfrey:I completely agree with you on everything you said. I think the other thing that can have really significant value to the standards is the ability to normalize the terminology because sometimes it sounds stupid. But boy, in emergency and in a crisis, when people are speaking different languages and different terminologies, it can really get in the way.The classic example of this, of course, in our business for the last, I don't know, 40 years now has been the use of 10 codes and signals day to day. But when you start to get multiple agencies together, nobody uses the same codes. The next thing you know, you've got confusion over what's going on. So standardizing that terminology.The other piece of this that just seems so incredibly important to me is when you have one of these horrible events and they are always tragic, even the ones that have the best outcomes are still horrible and tragic. When you have these events, you're going to have people responding and showing up on your scene to be part of that response that you've never met, you've never trained with. They may be from agencies you hadn't even heard of, especially from some of the federal law enforcement agencies that don't typically have a high profile. But if they're in the area, they will show up to help. If you don't have everybody on the same page, what's that going to look like?Thor Eells:Well, I absolutely agree with you, Bill. I think we know, unfortunately, through some very hard and difficult lessons learned from these tragedies. I could not echo your perspective of all of these are tragic, and we want to do our best to not repeat mistakes. Yet, we find that one of the most common mistakes is lack of communication, lack of understanding. To your point, whether it's 10 code or signals or different things, it's like speaking different languages.There's a reason that in air travel, English was selected as the single language that all airlines will use when they speak to air traffic control, so that there is consistent verbiage, terminology, etc that's being utilized, which mitigates the potential for misunderstanding and error and then outcome. We should be equally committed to ensuring that in critical incidents, knowing, to your point, that there will be multiple agencies interfacing with one another, that we are not adding to the complexity of a problem, but doing everything we can to further simplify it and then make better decisions leading to the more optimal outcome.Bill Godfrey:Boy, we are completely on the same page there. Way back when, and I know I've shared this with you previously, but for the benefit of the audience, way back when, the origin story of this checklist came from a training experience we had where things just were not going very well in the exercises. We did an analysis after the fact and said, "What's going on here?" We tried and experimented with a couple different things.Lo and behold, we found that changing

Episode 48: Interview with TEEX's Jesse WatkinsOn this week's podcast we have our sponsor of the Active Shooter Incident Management Advanced and Intermediate courses, TEEX's Jesse Watkins. In this episode we talk about the courses and training available to the first responder community.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. We have a special guest with us today. Today, we have Jesse Watkins, the director of operations for NERRTC. That's the National Emergency Response and Recovery Training Center over at TEEX out in Texas. Jesse, thanks for joining us today.Jesse Watkins:Oh, it's my pleasure Bill. Thank you for having me.Bill Godfrey:So obviously NERRTC and TEEX are the sponsors of the Active Shooter Incident Management advanced and intermediate courses that we developed that is DHS funded. And people who've heard me tell this story before, it's a little convoluted, the money flow, but it DHS to NERRTC to or, DHS to TEEX NERRTC, then over to ALERRT and then over to us to go out and do the classes. But Jesse, it's actually a little more complicated than that, isn't it? Tell everybody a little bit about how the structure works and how the pieces fit together.Jesse Watkins:It is a little bit more complicated than that. For those of you that don't know a whole lot about who TEEX is or who NERRTC is, TEEX is an agency within the state of Texas or for the state of Texas, and it's within the Texas A and M University System, which is comprised of 11 universities and now eight state agencies. And our primary mission is an extension. And within that extension, training, and in some cases, exercise. Back in 1998, as a result of the Oklahoma City bombing, we solicited Congress as a part of an organization called the NDPC, National Domestic Preparedness Consortium, for funding to go out and do online security training around the country. At the time that funding came on to DOJ and then after 9-11, it moved under Homeland Security with FEMA being the oversight organization, it was the checks and balances for what we do and how we spend the money that being said, NERRTC proper, National Emergency Response Recovery Training center, has 73 courses that we've developed under our funding to go out and train first responders, elected officials, a whole host of organizations.But you know, our primary mission is incident management, cyber security, critical infrastructure, and several other areas. I won't go into all of them, but a lot of resources, put it that way, that we pour towards going out and doing training at no cost to participants or to the jurisdictions that's requesting it. As a result of that, a few years back, we started looking at the active shooter situation that was going on in the country. Obviously, Bill, you and I had conversations at the time. Steve, in a different capacity, and I had conversations at the time and agreed that we would like to be able to fund doing some active shooter training around the country. And you obviously had the course resources in terms of going out with the materials, going and doing the deliveries. We had some funding that we could put behind that, but it's under our DHS funding.And what was born out of that is this relationship where we have now in which we subcontract to ALERRT and then ALERRT in turns, subcontracts to you. That being said, the relationship works. It is a little cumbersome. You know, when you stop thinking about how many different organizations it's taken to get this done, but we have figured out a way to make that effective and efficient over the years. And I'm happy about the relationship. That being said, the mission is the thing that's the most important piece to me. Going out and observing you all do this training obviously brings me a lot of satisfaction and that satisfaction is in knowing that we are training that first response community to be better and to react and respond better to active shooter situations and also to extrapolate out of that, using what they use in the classroom during this training and other scenarios as well.I think it makes them more effective as a operational unit by the time they're done with it. So, I love that aspect of it. That's, that's really the driver for me. But when you stop and think about NERRTC or I can explain a little bit about NERRTC, most of the training that we do, we do in-house meaning we have SMEs and full-time staff that are devoted to doing nothing but delivery of those courses that I mentioned before.So this relationship that we have with alert and with you is, it's not unique because we do have one other subcontractor that we work with that has a similar relationship, but it is out of the ordinary for what we typically do. We have roughly 80 full-time staff and we're around 300 adjunct instructors SMEs from around the country that go out and do our trainings. But at the end of the day, the way that you all go in and do your training and conduct yourselves is very much in line with how we do business here. So, is the relationship a little bit unique? Yes, it is, but it does fit well within what we do and how we do it.When I look at a bigger picture in terms of our relationship with National Domestic Preparedness Consortium, as I mentioned before, we were one of the founding members back in 1998. The consortium itself is now seven members strong. It started with four, now it's at seven. If you're interested in more information on each and every one of those organizations, feel free to reach out to Bill, or you can reach out to me. He has my contact information and I can, I can provide you more detail. I won't bore you with going through all the locations. That being said, those seven organizations have roughly $162 million a year that they pour into training. Just like I mentioned before with NERRTC. What that equates to over the last 20 years is roughly 3.5 million participants trained across the country, across the U.S and the U.S. Territories. So we are very impactful with what we do and how we do it. And subsequently every year that we solicit Congress for funding, we have gotten it. So I'm very happy about that relationship that we have with the NDPC and also the relationship we have with our federal sponsors.Bill Godfrey:Jesse, thank you for that. That's not only some very gracious words, but really a great overview of what is, quite honestly can seem very overwhelming with the number of agencies and the number of groups that are doing this, but, seven principal partners in the NDPC and $162 million. That is an awful lot of training opportunities for first responders. And, as you said, and I want to kind of highlight this, there's no cost to the responders to take these classes, right?Jesse Watkins:That's correct.Bill Godfrey:Yeah. And, the way I've always said this, and I think this is correct, but tell me if there's, if I'm missing something here, these courses are available in kind of two different buckets, either the direct delivery where you bring the course to the participants, to their agency, to their hometown or a residential delivery, where they travel into a specific location to take the course, but their travel costs are reimbursed by you guys or the NDPC for their expenses, travel food, lodging, all that kind of stuff. Is that a fair way to say it?Jesse Watkins:Yeah, that's a fair way to say it. I can, just using our 314 course Enhanced Incident Management/Unified Command, that's the only resident course we have here at TEEX. It is a monster of a course, meaning we really put the participants through their paces for three and a half days. But using that as an example, we purchased the airline tickets for the participants to fly here. We arrange for the ground transportation to get them from the airport to College Station. We cover their lodging while they're here, meaning we paid for it. The thing that the participant pays for out of pocket at the time are their meals. However, we do reimburse those meals after the training is over. There's a worksheet that gets filled out. And then we ended up cutting the participant a check whenever we're done. It really is of no cost to the participant or their jurisdiction whenever they're here, other than their time.Now, when you get into mobile delivery, what we do is we come to your location and do the training, similar to what we do with the ASIM course. And obviously the participants are already there so we're not housing anyone, but we are paying for the instructors to get there, all the materials to get there. We publish all the course materials for the students and hand those out. So all we ask for from the jurisdiction is a host venue that can accommodate the students and accommodate them safely and effectively. And that's it pretty much, there might be some PA things or some communication things but there's really no cost to the organization aside from those.Bill Godfrey:It's such a terrific program. And I do want to make sure before I kind of move us on to some other topical areas. If someone's listening, has not heard of the NDPC or doesn't know what classes are offered or how to sign up for them, Jesse, what's your guidance to them on the best way to kind of get the lay of the land on what's available and how to request those courses or request to attend those courses?Jesse Watkins:Well, the first website I'll give you is simple. It is www.ndpc.us. If you go to that website, it's going to lay out who all seven members are. It's going to give you information on courses, new courses, retired courses, what our course catalogs are, all the resources that we have available that you can take advantage of. The second website that I will give you is firstrespondertraining.gov. That is a federal website but when you go to that website and you click on the course catalog, it will give you user-friendly access to every federally funded course that you can imagine, to include all the NDPC courses, those from partners, such as EMI. There's just a whole host of information on there, and it's pretty interactive. You can do keyword searches. So if you went in and put in active shooter, I always say the active shoo

Episode 47: Interview with ALERRT's John CurnuttThis week we are interviewing John Curnutt from ALERRT. We discuss how ALERRT started, it's mission, and how it works together in the active shooter picture.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. Today I've got with us a special guest. We've got John Curnutt, assistant director of the ALERRT Center over in San Marcos, Texas, and our sponsor for the ASIM class along with TEEX. John, it's good to have you here.John Curnutt:Oh man, it is great to be here. Thank you for having me.Bill Godfrey:So John, thanks for joining us today. Why don't we start off ... I'd be actually surprised if any of our audience didn't really know who ALERRT was or how you guys fit into the active shooter picture but talk a little bit about ALERRT and the mission and how everything fits together.John Curnutt:It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. It's interesting, our starts are very humble. Back in 2000, 2001, it was very localized. We were looking at our response after Columbine and trying to see how would we do something different in our training, the equipment, the policies, everything that needed to change for the new normal or the new emerging trends as we saw them.So long story short, we started applying for grants because we were ... Small to medium-sized agencies, we didn't have the big budgets, and we could not afford to get the training and the equipment to train with that we knew that we needed to have the best bang for the buck. So as we applied for grants, everything just kind of turned into a here's a program, you have a program, we'll help fund this, but you have to take this program out. So if it was a state grant, we were going across the state now. If it was a federal grant, we were going across the country.Right after we started kind of working on this, 9/11 happened. We're coming up on the 20 year anniversary of that. So that kind of kicked things into a whole nother gear. They started looking for anti-terrorism programs that were up and ready to go. They could just be retooled just a little bit to kind of fit this new national threat that we were facing, and so all this kind of contributed to what we put in our course and the ferocity and the passion behind teaching the course.So years later, we are a research-based organization out of Texas State University. We look at everything, we analyze everything. The events, the cause and effect of how the response went, any deficiencies, and we try to fill those gaps with meaningful curriculum. So what do we teach, how do we teach, what do we spend more time on, all that stuff. So we've developed civilian response training as a result of that. We've developed medical training for police, we've developed tactical training for the medical people, all this stuff over the years. The incident management piece has obviously been huge. We've studied all these events and the communication, command and control, the C3 if you will, has always been lacking, and a lot of it, it's a law enforcement issue.So we're always looking for where are the gaps and how to best fill those gaps, and the connectivity with our other sister services in the first response community, the civilian response component, the emergency management aspect, we're trying to bring all the stakeholders together as best we can with the grants that we're given. Our goal basically to sum it up is to have the best research-based active attack training in the country. So in doing that, we solicit, we look for, we seek out events and great training programs and people with a lot of experiences and friends of ours that have been through a lot of stuff, not just here in the United States but overseas, and we try to extrapolate from that what would translate well into a patrol reality, into an EMS paramedic reality, into a firefighter reality as you make the scene first on one of these incidents. So that's kind of who we are in a nutshell and what we do and who we do it for and what we're all about.Bill Godfrey:John, I think that's a fantastic explanation of what ALERRT does and the mission, and you're the assistant director there, right? What does your day to day job look like? What is the kind of stuff you end up spending your time on?John Curnutt:Yes sir. So I started as one of the lead instructors back in the day and then moved up to director of training and then into the assistant director position. My day to day now, I have IT training, logistics. I coordinate very heavily with research so that everything is all pulling and pointing in the same direction and everything complements each other smoothly across the board. So the grants that we get, they offset the costs for the training we do out the door. So right before COVID, we were tooled up and on track to do about 1,300 , maybe almost 1,400 classes per year across the United States with the grants that we were receiving, both state and federal grants. So putting that all together and sending it out the door, making it free for the end user, for the agencies, for the officers that are attending, it's a very, very herculean effort if you will from kind of a small staff, relatively small staff when you look at the amount of throughput that we have, about 35 staff members. So I'm looking at all these areas, making sure that everything kind of complements and works in unison.During COVID, the in-person training obviously was shut down for a period of time. So all of our training programs that we put out, all of the certified instructors that we had minted over the years, they continue to do their own internal training. So we're still doing some training and we're still supporting those indirects with our funding. But we had to kind of look at things a little bit differently so we created an e-learning LMS revision for ALERRT so that we could go online and we could do some meaningful training online and really try to get into that space and just expand our course offerings and how we offered it and be able to kind of permeate the training more across all of our responders. So we create a new learning division in 2020, which required us to get the LMS system and hire people. So that is under me as well and as we kind of build that thing out and figure out how that's going to complement everything that we do in-person and maybe even some of the things we can't afford to do in-person yet, we can start putting some online versions of those courses and trainings and supplemental training, instructor updates, re-certifications, all that stuff is going through our LMS now.So I basically make sure that everything that we say we're going to do on the grant applications get done, the operational output, throughput is done. Make sure that people know who we are, what we're about, and if they have something that they want or need from us, that we get it to them.Bill Godfrey:It sounds like you have a very busy day, day to day.John Curnutt:Yeah. It's fun. It's fun.Bill Godfrey:So you mentioned in the opening when you were talking about ALERRT, the research-based mission or the research-based component of the training. I know Dr. Martindale has just recently gone through and updated the data set with the latest stuff from last year. What new trends if any are you seeing? What stayed the same, what's shifting around a little bit, any insights into the data and changes that that may be driving for the ALERRT mission coming up?John Curnutt:Absolutely. Well you know early on, when we were looking at events and there were only 12 to 15 to 18 a year, you would have an outlier event and it would really skew the averages quite a bit. A large event and several small events, and you average those together, and the problem still looked a lot bigger than it really was or lasted a lot longer than it really did. So we started using median or the mean...that middle number. There was an equal number smaller, equal number larger, so that we could kind of try to frame or reference this thing a little bit cleaner. As time has gone on now, we're at well over 400 events in the last 20 years that we've studied and co-authored with the FBI's research. We're starting to see that the time duration for these events seems to be trending downward like they're over with quicker. I think that's attributable to civilian response, the messaging that's getting out thee, the training that public and private organizations are engaging with their employees, their staff, even churches are getting this and civic groups are getting this. Kiwanis Clubs were going out and doing these all over the places. So you're starting to see that these events are less people that are caught up in the event because it lasts less time.The other thing we've seen is over the last seven or so years, we're starting to see an increase in the number of attacks involving edged weapons and vehicles as the mode of injury. So they're still very predominately firearms-related, but when it's an edged weapon, a knife, a machete, something like that or a vehicle that's being used to mow through a crowd of people, there's this tendency for people to look at that and go, "Okay, so what's the training for that?" It's the same. The response is the same. There's a serious injury or death that's occurring in progress, we show up, you have to stop that killing in progress, and then you have people that are seriously injured, you have to stop them from dying as a result of their injuries and you have to coordinate with other services. You have to get all this stuff done.So the trends have been over the years getting medical training into the cops' hands, getting tactical training into the fire and EMS. Integrating them cleanly with unified command and establishing a command structure and building it as time and resources arrive on scene and trying to really refine that process of everything that happens after, after we stop the killing, the coordination, the communication, the prioritization of getting life-saving treatment to those who need it and getting them very quickly to definitive care, because it's really going to be surgical intervention that's going t

Episode 46: ASIM Basic and Counterstrike (Part 2)We are picking up from last week's topic about ASIM Basic to talk about the Counterstrike training system. Bill and Adam give some tips and tricks that will enhance your training as you run scenarios.Bill Godfrey:Today, we're going to pick up where we left off. You may remember, last week we were talking about the ASIM basic class, some tips for instructors that are either new or maybe a little rusty. We're going to pick up talking about the Counterstrike exercise system and how we facilitate that, and some tips and tricks that both Adam and I use when we're running those scenarios. There may be some people listening that are not familiar with the Counterstrike system, Adam, can you describe it for the audience?Adam Pendley:The Counterstrike board itself comes as a kit and it includes a large overhead view of a typical city or environment. The one that we typically use is the 29th Street mall, which is your typical outside, open-air, count center type mall. We also have available a school-type setting, an airport-type setting. There're different environments, it's a large overhead view and it's on a big game board, but we don't like to call it a game board because it's a training tool. In the kit, also includes some chips that act as movement for those that have been impacted by the incident, movement of the first responders, they're used in a certain way to do initial response, triage, transport, and allowing those that are taking the training to get actual inputs for a scenario that is fast-moving, but it's controlled enough that we can get to the training points we need. It starts with a large overhead view of the environment, but the kit also includes the position specific vests.It includes the staging area board, and it also includes some tools for command to use. The point is, that like a lot of the other training we do for active shooter incident management, the kit itself is really more about setting up a training environment, so you can do a tabletop exercise that has a realism to it and has some randomness to it, that allows what is happening, what the instructor presents, starts the scenario, it has a scenario go in a certain direction, but the input from the students kind of guides where the scenario ends up. I like to say a lot that the Counter-Strike board itself is more about up a training environment that focuses back on the training itself.I think that's really important for people to know, is that it's not just about, hey, moving some pieces around on a game board, it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with being able to do a scenario from start to finish that hits on the training points that are important to, not only be the ASIM process, but that are important to the agency that's using it for the training.Bill Godfrey:I think that's a really great description and overview. It gives you a sandbox, that allows you to get your students or your trainees up around the table. More than just a tabletop, it actually enables some functional role play. You can have them be in the different positions, simulate their radio calls, you're standing up the different command elements and walking through the scenario. So I think that's a great description, Adam. Thank you.Adam, let's talk a little bit, just take it from the beginning of, how do you set up your board when you're getting ready to do a scenario in the ASIM basic class?Adam Pendley:Sure. Throughout the training, throughout the four-hour block, the students will have an opportunity to do three scenarios. The first scenario is usually a relatively low complexity, typically a single shooter in one of the environments on the board that has enough room to show the movement of the responders and the movement of the survivors and those who have been injured. Typically just start with the bad guy chip in one of those areas on the mall scenario, I use the Macy's because it's got a nice amount of space to it. One of the interesting things about the Counter-Strike board is, it allows for randomness. There is a single die that represents what the shooter may do, so you roll that one single die, and it comes up with a number of people that have been shot, and you add that randomness to it.Then you call out those student numbers, the law enforcement chips each have a unit number on them, so you dispatch them to the scene. They arrive and park their vehicle and then they have a personnel chip that goes along with it, and represents them, the person, getting out of the police car and moving towards the crisis site. In that first scenario, you're really controlling the movement and making sure that everyone sees how the board works. You show, as you get to the point where you established tactical in a staging area, and all the positions that follow on, on the checklist, you walk through it slowly. The board allows for the bad guy to always, get the first move, if you will, until the bad guy has been eliminated in some way, but they can move through some spaces.Then the responders can move through some spaces. The board has a grid on it that allows for faster movement when you're indoors, slower movement when you're outdoors, because of distance. There's a lot of ways to control that movement, and what I try to encourage the instructors to understand, is that they need to have the full scenario in mind. Obviously, the students can make some decisions, that moving in a different direction, but the instructor is essentially the exercise controller, the exercise SIM cell and the exercise evaluator, all at the same time. It's also important at this point, when we're talking about things that add to success and things that might detract from the training, is to not over coach while the scenario is going on, let it unfold, make sure you're controlling the direction of that scenario, but don't provide too much input. Let them depend on the checklist, let them work it through, and then later you'll have the opportunity to add some more complexity for scenarios two and three.Bill Godfrey:I think that's a fantastic description. I love the comment about over coaching and we'll talk about that one a little bit more. One of the common mistakes, I'm going to call it a mistake, that may be a little bit harsh, but I'm going to call it a mistake anyways. One of the common mistakes I see with new instructors or instructors that are rusty, is that very first scenario, as you said, we try to make it a low complexity scenario. They get focused on trying to keep their bad guy alive or in play or, quite frankly, just trying to win. And they start moving the bad guy and you end up leaving this, just a string of casualties behind you in multiple locations. That actually is a fairly complex scenario and it's way too difficult for the first one.Responders for the very first scenario, struggling to get their feet underneath them. That's too difficult a scenario to give them. One of the mistakes and the corrections that I frequently provide is look, the very first one, keep your bad guy in one location. Like you said, using the Macy's store. Okay. Maybe I move around from one grid to the grid right next to it inside the store, but I'm not going to move all over the place. I'm going to basically stay there until they come and neutralize the threat by either taking me into custody or some other action. Have you seen that as well, Adam?Adam Pendley:Absolutely. On that first scenario, I usually almost always never leave that first environment. What I do is, you can actually slow down the responder a little bit. And you're just clear about that. You say, "Look, I realize that you would probably be able to make your way through Macy's very quickly, to address the threat. However, we're going to let some other parts of the scenario unfold", and then they understand that, right? You're controlling the pace at which that first scenario moves, and it needs to move slowly enough to see all the elements of the training, but absolutely let the first contact team make contact with the suspect. And when they reach the same grid, when they're within eyesight of each other, again, that's where the Counter-Strike tools come into play, usually have a contact team, that first one almost always has a good number, four officers on it.And they each get diced as well, and then they roll against the suspect. So with four officers on the contact team, they almost always will win the gun battle, so that the highest number out of the guns on the contact team versus the single gun of the suspect, that's how you decide who wins the shootout, if you will. That's really important, you want that first contact team to win. You want them to enjoy the idea that they've come in and eliminated the threat to save lives, right? So-Bill Godfrey:Yeah, that's the other classic new instructor mistake is trying to win, not your job to win. It's your job to lose. You just want to make them work for it a little bit.Adam Pendley:Then, after you built all these building blocks, you get to see how the board works. People understand that. It's always funny when you first are handing out, because they look like poker chips, right? The training tools for the responders and the survivors are all, they look like poker chips. Invariably you get the, "Oh, I'm all in", and all those jokes that go along with that. But then immediately afterwards, once they start doing it, they realize. I've had people comment that like, wow, I didn't realize that would be as realistic or as stressful as I expected it to be. Because, again, the training tool just provides inputs for them to have to make a good decision. After you get all that done, you do the module two, which we talked about with response integration.Now you can come back in that second scenario, everyone stay seated, and you actually call them up as their dispatch. It provides more realism to responding to an actual event, listening to the radio, since folks are responding. Now when you come in as 5th man, or when you come in as medical branch, you're having to depend on those people down range. Because at this point you shouldn't let everyone stand and look at the board. They

Episode 45: ASIM Basic and Counterstrike (Part 1)We are splitting this week's topic in two parts. First, we are discussing some tips and suggestions for instructors teaching ASIM Basic classes. Next week we will continue with the Counterstrike System we use for training scenarios.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. I've got with me today one of our C3 instructors, Adam Pendley, who's joining us from the law enforcement side. And today's topic, we're going to talk about... We're actually going to talk about two things. We're going to talk about the ASIM Basic class and some tips and suggestions for instructors that are either new or maybe a little rusty. And then, we're also going to talk about the Counter-Strike system that we use for doing the training scenarios. And so, we're going to split this podcast into two parts. Part one, we're going to talk about ASIM Basic, and part two, we're going to talk about the Counterstrike system. Adam, thanks for being here with me.Adam Pendley:Yes, sir. Glad to be here.Bill Godfrey:So Adam, talk a little bit about some of the high points that you see in the ASIM Basic class that you think would be good things for our instructors who maybe have had a... maybe they haven't taught one in a year or so, with the gap with COVID, for those high points of what's the point? What are you trying to get home? Because ASIM Basic's a four hour class. It's not a lot of time to cover the material.Adam Pendley:Sure, absolutely. So, the basic class itself, it's remarkably low tech, meaning you could set it up in a... As long as you have enough space, you could set it up at a firehouse. You could set it up in the conference room at your police station, because the board itself does not require any sort of radios or any sort of high tech stuff. The most high tech thing is the PowerPoint presentation to present the material, which of course you can do that on any screen, a television monitor, or even in a small group setting, even on a laptop if you had to. But the modules for the presentation, there's only two modules. And module one really hits, I think, on one of the key points of what is the main deliverable for understanding the Active Shooter Incident Management process, and that is that we're fighting two things: the killer and the clock.And it starts off with that material. And when I help coach other instructors, I make sure that they emphasize the point that... like some of the other material we use, that you have people that are about to be threatened by an active shooter. And even though the active shooter, that threat, has to be dealt with, he may be the one trying to kill people. The other thing that's going to kill people is the clock, that if we don't have a good response or rapid response between police, fire, and EMS to get in, deal with the active threat, begin rescue, and continuing the clearing process, those priorities are the early focus of unit one. And then, it kind of goes into making sure that we understand the common terminology that has become the best practice across the country, and also understanding the validated ASIM checklist process.And there's a very good demonstration video that has some audio to it that kind of shows how people would arrive and work through the checklist. And then, we discuss briefly how... after you get past the initial response, how you continue through the clearing process, how you also have to think about early intelligence, PIO, and reunification. And although in the four-hour class, we don't often have time to get deep into those topics, it's certainly part of that module one discussion. So, module one is really a boiled down version of most of the talking points that we we think about when we think about the Active Shooter Incident Management process.Bill Godfrey:I think that's a fantastic overview. We shifted gears a number of years ago to focus the message on, it's not just the bad guy, it's also the clock, because you've got to get ahold of that time that it takes you to get in, rescue people, stop the bleeding, and then get them on an ambulance to the hospital. I mean, that's the other thing is, sometimes we get into them quickly and then we kind of... We bumble things a little bit trying to get onto the ambulance on the way to the hospital, so that... The thread and the clock, I think, is a huge thing. And the terminology, Adam, I... Some of the high points for the terminology contact team?Adam Pendley:Right. So, we define contact team as... A lot of police agencies understand contact team as kind of that hunter killer team that is going after the active threat. Well, in reality, a contact team is a group of two to four officers. And the number of officers aren't as important. That's a policy-based decision. But it's some number of officers that are downrange doing security work. So, it is a common term for the team of officers that may be... They may be the team that's going after the threat.They may be a team that's securing a casualty collection point. They may be a team that is securing an ambulance exchange point, or a corridor, or providing a strategy that's guided by the tactical to hold a floor, or to hold a stairwell. So, contact team... We try to broaden that term a little bit to understand it as any sort of downrange security work.Bill Godfrey:Boy, that's a very, very good description, Adam, for those that are listening. I don't think there's very many places teaching this anymore. But they used to have so many names for different teams, these trailer teams and search teams. And it just got... It made the thing way more complicated than it needed to be. And so, we split it into contact teams and rescue task forces.Contact teams focus on security problems, just like you said. Rescue task forces focus on medical problem, but they have their own security with them. Now, you also mentioned casualty collection point and ambulance exchange point. So, can you talk a little bit about what each of those are?Adam Pendley:Sure. A casualty collection point is an area within the warm zone. And what we, again... Real quickly, what we mean by that is... The entire area, when we first respond is probably considered a hot zone until we have isolated, contained, or captured, or eliminated the active threat. Right? So, once we are able to push through an area and it is no longer a hot zone, we establish those casualties, or those people that have been impacted by the event, into a secured area within the warm zone where law enforcement can begin initial care, assessing patients, doing law enforcement triage, which is simply, "Hey, this person is... A serious injury is probably a red patient. These folks have some injuries, but they're able to move around. They're probably a green patient."And calling out those numbers back to the rest of response is really important. But once you establish that casualty collection point, you are immediately ready to call for rescue task forces to respond. And of course, as many of us on the call know, that rescue task forces are a mixed discipline law enforcement and some sort of medical element working together, moving down range from the staging area to a known casualty collection point, a warm zone area. So, the security element gets them there safely. The medical element works for triage. And they make decisions about patient care once they get into the casualty collection point.Bill Godfrey:I think that's a perfect, perfect description of the casualty collection point. In a perfect world, which we do not always get, when the thing flows optimally, we're looking for the contact teams to quickly establish the casualty collection point. They're already down range. They know the lay of the land. They can look around. They understand the security implications. They know what they can and can't secure. And so, they're better suited to figure that out.And so, we're hoping that the contact teams will establish a casualty collection point, so when the RTFs move up, they're moving up to a known casualty collection point. That doesn't always happen. Sometimes, it just doesn't get done before the RTFs get down range and that's okay. But that's our goal is to get them into a casualty collection point. So Adam, talk a little bit about ambulance exchange point and how that differs from a casualty collection point.Adam Pendley:Sure. So again, once the RTF is into a casualty collection point... And to the point you made, once an RTF is there, they may have to assist with continuing to consolidate some patients into a casualty collection point, trusting law enforcement to secure that as a warm zone so we know that we have the safety measures that we need in place to begin that indirect threat patient care. But then, once that RTF... And hopefully, relatively rapidly, they do their own triage. And they start to separate a little further. And they have those red tag critical patients that need to be transported right away, then those yellow tag patients that have important care needs that may be able to kind of go secondary to the red patients, and then those green tag patients. And then also, the RTF would unfortunately separate those patients that are now deceased or black tag patients as well.But once they have that first critical patients that are ready to be transported, in cooperation with their law enforcement security element... They may have come in to the environment through the front door, where everyone else rushed in to deal with the active threat. But once they're inside, they may see a service door that's off to the back, of the room that provides much better access to ambulances, requires much less caring of the patients, and allows us to move them with a lot less effort, and again, more quickly, because we're constantly fighting the clock. And they say, "Hey, right outside this door, can we secure this as an ambulance exchange point?" And so, through law enforcement, we need an additional contact team to secure that ambulance exchange point. Law enforcement handles that. The medical side, calling up through triage and the transport group supervisors, they

Episode 44: 911 Communication Center Challenges in Active Shooter Events (Part 2)In Part 2 of this week's podcast, we are continuing our topic of 911 and the dispatch center during an active shooter event.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. Today we're picking up part two coming back to our topic of 911 and the dispatch center during an active shooter event. I've asked our three instructors that were here for part one to come back and join us again. We've got Ken Lamb from the law enforcement side. Ken, thanks for coming back.Ken Lamb:Yes, sir. You're welcome.Bill Godfrey:Tom Billington from fire EMS.Tom Billington:Glad to be here again. More good information to cover.Bill Godfrey:Fantastic. And Leeanna Mims. Good to see you again.Leeanna Mims:Glad to be back.Bill Godfrey:All right, so let's get into part two. Let's talk about the non 911 phone calls that have to be made and come in. I'm talking about, I need mutual aid but I don't have an automatic CAD connection so I have to call this agency on the phone. Then the agency has to check with a supervisor, they've got to call me back. I've got every supervisor in the agency calling in because they think they're important enough to get a personal briefing on what's going on, on the incident. I've got a handful of notifications I've got to make to all of the off duty chiefs that don't, well, we used to all wear pagers, but don't respond to their notifications. We're required to give them these notices. I need to call EOC, emergency management, all these activations.And then you've got the media calling in. First of all, did I miss anything in that windup? And then what are some of the tips and suggestions we've got on how to manage that volume of calls coming in and out that are not 911, but still somewhat, I wouldn't call them all essential, but they're certainly related to the call.Tom Billington:I think one of the things that I've experienced in my career is you have to have systems in place, whether it's a reverse 911, automatic paging, automatic phone messaging, where instead of calling nine or 10 supervisors, the dispatcher pushes one button, it sends a message to nine or 10 supervisors - here's what's going on. Again are you talking about like systems like Everbridge, IPAWS, all those?Bill Godfrey:Yes.Tom Billington:That way. You don't have one dispatcher making multiple phone calls. And also you're going to get the politicians and the higher-ups calling you and you don't want to hang up on the mayor, that's not always a good job. So you want to make sure that you have a dispatcher that can handle that type of pressure, a separate person, just for that. We used to call it rumor control. It's phone calls that were not 911 intentive, but they were about the incident and they needed to talk to somebody to get an update.Ken Lamb:Yeah, just to add on to what Tom was saying, I think an idea as far as who to bring in to be the conduit to some of those communications would be your local EOC. Who is going to be more than willing and able to assist in these incidents and they have the contacts established. And letting them know exactly the need to know information, as well as plugging in your PIO, public information officer, and utilizing social media to get that information out to the public. Because presumably there's going to be some intelligence that comes in through some of those phone calls from the public at least, and you want a way to funnel some of that information.And when we talk about some of those internal contacts, I think that you can solve a lot of heartburn by having a notification system, to what Tom was saying, and making sure that you're putting out that information to the internal contacts, as well as the media, so that everyone's getting the same information. Because the last thing you want to do is start providing different information to different people. You want one clear and consistent message.Tom Billington:And, Ken, a good example of that through our history is the Amber alert. There is now a system in place where somebody types in a couple of words, push a button and thousands of people hear the right information that they all agree on and it goes out. So that's a real good example.Leeanna Mims:Well, and you know in advance who some of those calls are going to be from that are going to overload your system. And you have to have those discussions with them ahead of something happening and let them know what kind of procedures that you have in place. And one way to do that is with status updates, over whatever system that you have, and making sure ahead of time they know we are going to tell you as soon as we can what it is it's going on. On certain things this is how we have it categorized or broken down. Trust you're going to get an automatic notification. You're going to get an automatic notification again when we hit certain benchmarks.And for the most part, in a lot of those calls that are coming in, if they know that ahead of time, that's going to be all that they need. They need to be able to answer questions that they're receiving. And, in some cases, depending on who it is in your system, they have reason to know. They really do. But you don't want to make 50 phone calls. And then again, what Ken brought up, too, is the PIO. Your PIO in those cases really can serve as a liaison officer in helping field those calls, help dispatch sort what is immediate and what can wait till later.Ken Lamb:And I think in the context of this conversation, when we were talking about the call center dispatch center is recognizing that you need someone to start working on all this information that's making it into the dispatch center or the call receiving center, and reaching out to either the officer or the incident commander on the ground and saying it would be helpful for you send an officer up here to start sorting this information. Or reaching out to a comm center supervisor and saying we need someone else over here to start sorting through this information. Because the reality is there's nothing stopping this information from making it to the communication center. The important aspect is having a process in place to organize it, synthesize it, go through it, find out what's necessary and what's not. And then get it to the people that need to know in an efficient manner. So that if it's important and you need to act on, you can as quickly as possible.Bill Godfrey:And I don't want to leave this without distinguishing between two things. So one is the need of the incident itself. And when I say that I mean the idea that the intelligence officer needs to be able to go through the CAD notes, go through the incoming 911, go through the incoming text messages that came through the 911 texting system, and be able to process that for any actionable information related to the incident. So that's one bucket. The other bucket and the one we were just talking about that I think is, I don't want to say this in relation of importance, but certainly in terms of volume, is the bucket of all of those, what I'll call utility calls. Calls that the dispatchers have to make to get mutual aid moving, the notification calls, the calls that are coming into them.And, Leanna, you mentioned making arrangements for plans ahead of time, and I think part of that needs to be the supervisory staff at the comm center, having some discussions with the chiefs and with their higher-ups, to let them know there's a habit of people calling in and we get it, but when we have something like this, we're going to be slammed. What can we do? Can I say to you, when you call in, I don't have time to talk, but I need some additional people here. Can you send me a couple additional bodies just to kind of handle those what I'll call utility calls. You don't necessarily need to know how to use the CAD system. Because quite frankly, if you're a field responder and you've never been in 911, you walk in and sit down one of those consoles and you're lost. You don't have a clue how to use the radio, how to use the CAD system. Quite frankly, even how to use the phone.But at least with that bucket of utility calls, someone from the chief ranks or the supervisory ranks or just some additional line personnel, can come in and begin to handle some of those phone calls. We didn't specifically talk about texting on the 911 system, so I do want to mention that before we leave it. Many dispatch centers, not all, but many have implemented the ability to receive text messages sent to 911. And some more successfully than others. Part of what I want to hit on here is dispatchers, because they're so overloaded are, I think it was Tom earlier that said how quickly can I get them off the phone? How quickly can I say we've got that information we need to get off the phone, and move on to the next one.They're moving so quickly that they might move right over a key piece of information that really matters. And unfortunately we've seen this on a couple of after actions where it was discovered that there was some fairly actionable information that could have really mattered on the scene. And it just got missed because there was one person on duty or two people on duty trying to handle all this stuff. And so it's not like anybody did anything wrong. It's just the reality of it. But I didn't want to leave this topic without kind of talking about that.Tom Billington:And, Bill, I agree totally with the texting thing. There are rural areas of the country, which we teach at, they don't have all this technology.Bill Godfrey:Or more than one dispatcher on duty.Tom Billington:Right. So they have what's called a chain letter calling where the dispatcher calls one person, a fire officer or law enforcement officer, and that person's position is responsible for calling other positions, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's interesting how even the rural areas, they're very small, one or two dispatchers, three or four deputies, maybe volunteer fire department. There are things you can do if you practice it and put these systems in place.Bill Godfrey:Yeah. I think I've heard it called call tree b

Episode 43: 911 Communication Center Challenges in Active Shooter Events (Part 1)In Part 1 of this week's podcast, we talk about some of the challenges in the 911 dispatch center during an active shooter event. A few topics we cover are the best sense of location, radio traffic, and recognizing when the active shooter event happens.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your host of the podcast. Thank you for being with us today. We are going to be talking today about what it's like in the 911 dispatch center during an active shooter event and some of the challenges that go with that. Thank you for joining us. I got three of the C3 Pathways instructors with me today. Ken Lamb from law enforcement. Ken, thanks for being here.Ken Lamb:Yes, sir. Happy to be here.Bill Godfrey:All right, we got Tom Billington back in the house. Tom, it's been a minute since you were in. Good to have you back.Tom Billington:Good to be here, Bill.Bill Godfrey:All right, and Leeanna Mims, also from... Like Tom, I didn't mention. Tom from the fire service. Leeanna Mims is also from fire service. Leeanna, good to have you back.Leeanna Mims:Thank you. Glad to be here.Bill Godfrey:All right, so today's topic, we're going to be talking about some of the challenges that occur in the Comm Center in 911 and dispatch areas during an active shooter event. And I think probably ought to just start right off the bat with what some of the challenges are and recognizing that the 911 calls coming in are actually an active shooter event recognizing the event. Tom, you want to lead us off? What are your thoughts on that?Tom Billington:Well, a little background. I started out as a dispatcher in 1979 and dispatching was a paper map and a rotary phone and one microphone. So it has progressed over the years to be such an important position. I like to call the, I'm one operators, the true first responders because in an active shooter event or any other event, they're going to be overloaded immediately. They're going to have victims or survivors calling them. They're going to have bad people calling them. They're going to have texting. So it's a whole new realm that we have to deal with now. And then the active shooter incident adds a whole nother layer of issues that are going to be faced by the 911 center.Bill Godfrey:So Ken, when it comes to that first couple of 911 calls coming in, what are some of the things that jump out in your mind just from your experience in the law enforcement side and a couple that you've dealt with that might be the tip offs that the dispatchers are looking for or listening for I guess, I should say?Ken Lamb:Right, well, first and foremost is the shootings still occurring and how many individuals have been impacted because that's going to necessitate not only how large the response we have, but also where we're responding, the exact location. And what the shooter is wearing, what they look like, that information is so critical. And the common understanding that there's going to be multiple colors and the deconflict some of that information so that you understand as best as you can how many shooters are involved because oftentimes, four or five people may be calling in the same person. And if you're requesting information such as what are they wearing, what do they look like, then you can oftentimes deconflict some of that information so you understand how many shooters there actually are because that's going to be very important to the responding officers.Bill Godfrey:Sure, Leeanna, from the medical side, what are the things that you think are real the important things to get in those first few moments, those first few calls?Leeanna Mims:Yeah, so we, just following up on what Ken said, we need to know how many people have been injured if they can gather that in the front end. We need to be thinking about letting our hospitals know that it's occurring, that we're probably going to be giving them a surge of patients. So and that there's something else that dispatch has to consider obviously a little bit further down into the incident. And when we talk about all of the information that is coming into them, making sure that dispatchers are relaying what's needed for the safety of all the first responders that are going into that law enforcement, fire, medical because they're taking in a lot of information that has to be sorted and put out to those unit center responding in.Bill Godfrey:Yeah, I think all of that make sense. It would seem to me some of the most critical things to get right off the bat is the best sense of the location, especially if you've got multiple callers that are calling in with what may seem like different information, how many locations are involved or what was location trying to narrow down where the injured are, where the suspect was last seen or last known or where the shooting is going on, which often, Ken, can sound more than one incident. You got different callers calling in, but it's just a person moving around. And that sense of the numbers, how many people have been shot. And I like what you said about how many shooters, what are the suspect descriptions and things like that. Anything else, before we leave this one, anything else that is the kind of tip-offs that low-hanging front that dispatch may want to watch out for?Ken Lamb:Absolutely, so when you mentioned location, I thought that was an excellent point. And I think that point that is commonly overlooked because we just think, oh, location. Yeah, that's simple. We should be able to explain to other people an exact location, but anyone that share directions with their spouse on the phone can understand describing a location can be very challenging. So-Bill Godfrey:That's why they invented Google Maps to save marriages.Ken Lamb:.... Absolutely, so what I like to encourage folks to use is a common location language and that can be a number of things. You could get really technical and use US National Grid coordinates or dare I say, GPS coordinates even harder. But I like to simplify things and just say points of interest. So if you're trying to get a point of interest from the individual, the call taker and they can look around and say, well, there's a bell tower here or we're in parking lot next to a street lamp or we're next to a concession stand, anything that could specifically identify to streamline that approach for officers. And it would also assist in identifying the hot and the warm zones, but it will be a more specific common location language so that we can really get the resources to that area as quick as possible.Leeanna Mims:And Ken, you're exactly right about getting there as quickly as possible. And it's also about the responding units be able to determine the route that they go in. So the sooner that they can have that information in advance, it gives them what they need to help them figure out the best way to gain access depending on where the shooter is and whether or not there's multiple locations or are they moving, that tells to both law enforcement and other responders and in which way to go.Bill Godfrey:Yeah, and I would kind of piggyback on both of those and Ken, I really like... You made my eyes gloss over US National Grid. But the points of interest I think is a really good one because people immediately assume north, south, east, west, I'm in the Northeast corner of this and that actually turns out in practice to be a terrible way to describe locations. The directional indicators are just not reliable. Most people very easily get turned around. They get confused. Either don't know the area that well or they're confused about where they are. They get mixed up. It's just not a good reliable indicator.But what you're saying, points of interest, I think are really good way to do it. And Leeanna, you talked about the route of coming in. I think also the streets, especially in a larger building. I'm in the back of the building by fifth court. I'm near the alley in the rear or I'm on side street over here to give a description on what side of the building they're on or things like that. And so I think that would be one of the things I would encourage dispatchers to think about is to try to avoid, when you're trying to get those locations bend down, don't waste your time with directionals because they're not reliable from the callers or quite frankly, even with law enforcement, fire EMS in the field.Tom Billington:I mean, Ken, do you imagine responding to a shooting in a parking lot at Disney and saying, "I'm in the parking lot at Walt Disney World?"Ken Lamb:Right, super helpful, yeah.Tom Billington:I mean, there's a reason why they label the parking lots, Goofy, Mickey, Minnie and that's because it's easier to identify exactly which part of the parking lot is.Bill Godfrey:Yeah, absolutely. All right, so let's move on to the next topic. So Tom kind of mentioned this when he made his opening comment there about the overload and the overload is inevitable. I don't think it really matters how big your Comm Center is or how small it is. You only got enough staff for the typical load of calls that you've got. There's nobody wasting money putting extra dispatchers on just in case and we all know that. Most Comm Centers are barely staffed adequately as it is. Some of them are chronically understaffed. And so an event like this is going to come up and be a real kick in the teeth on overload. So let's talk a little bit about that. Tom, talk about the volume of 911 calls, especially today in the light of cell phones and how that can impact their ability to process the call and get it out.Tom Billington:Well, it should be able to... Yeah, we're finding out today with cell phones and texting that many large 911 systems overload and get shut down or break down. It's not uncommon to get thousands of calls. So like you said, even if it's a big agency or a smaller agency, there needs to be procedures in place. I know there's some smaller agencies that have procedures in place where they have a message that they give out when they answer 911. If you're calling reference the shooting on West Street, we already have units in

Episode 42: Common Day One Training ProblemsOn this week's podcast, we discuss the common obstacles you may encounter during day one of training.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey. We appreciate you tuning in today and today's topic, we are actually going to spend some time talking about some of the common challenges that we see on the first day of training.Our goal here is for those out there that are ASIM basic trainers, or they have a departmental responsibility for conducting some sort of active shooter training, or you're trying to do some internal training on active shooter incident management, we wanted to share with you some of the common things that we see, some of the common problems, so that you can watch out for them, and maybe try to adjust in your curriculum.As usual, I've got three of the fantastic instructors from C3 Pathways here with me today. On the law enforcement side, we got Robert McMahan in the house. Robert, how are you?Robert McMahan:I'm here in all my spectacularness.Bill Godfrey:That's fantastic. And we have Mark Rhame from Fire-EMS, Mark.Mark Rhame:Hoping some of Robert will rub off on me.Bill Godfrey:And Mr. Billy Perry from the law enforcement side. Billy, how are you?Billy Perry:Great. Thanks for having me here.Bill Godfrey:Absolutely. So let's dig in. So I thought guys that this might make the most sense to just take it in order, start with contact teams and the RTFs, and talk about tactical triage and transport, some of the challenges that we see in the command post staging, and dispatch. So with that, let's start off with talking about the contact team.Billy, you spent a lot of time as the contact team coach downrange. Tell me about the day one challenges, the stuff that the first couple of scenarios, they just really struggle with.Billy Perry:Across the board, you can watch it. And you see it, you actually can see it in their eyes, for lack of a better word, that they know what to do, they know to go through the checklist, but they don't do it. And they try to alter and try to shortcut, they get overwhelmed. You watch them freeze. They undergo cognitive freezing. And it's because they don't have enough repetitions, enough correct repetitions, and they do get mission lock because of trying to do too many things at one time.Bill Godfrey:I've listened to a number of those first size up reports that are coming out of there. I'm not often in the room when they're doing them, but I'm listening to them on the radio. How much work is it on your part on those first one or two scenarios to get a size up report out of them?Billy Perry:It is so much, and you have to say it five or six times. Go ahead and get the size up report. Go ahead and go through the checklist. Go ahead and go through the checklist. And sometimes they'll even say, and they're not being obstinate and they're not being adversarial or militant, they're just, I did. Well, no, you didn't. You may have done it in your mind but you didn't actually say it radio.Bill Godfrey:You didn't actually say it radio.Billy Perry:It is a challenge, but it happens all over. Every class, virtually.Bill Godfrey:It does.Billy Perry:It's not geographic. It's not demographic. It just is.Bill Godfrey:Happens in the face-to-face classes, the virtual classes.Billy Perry:Happens in real life.Bill Godfrey:Happens in real life.Billy Perry:Spoiler alert.Bill Godfrey:Robert, how about you? You've spent a fair amount of time doing contact coaching as well. What are the common things that you see?Robert McMahan:Besides what Billy mentioned, forgetting who your boss is, and talking back to your boss, your contact teams.Bill Godfrey:Saying command as opposed to tactical.Robert McMahan:Using the word command instead of tactical. But talking to your boss is a big thing, and giving those size up reports to your boss, and that comes through repetition of training, just like everything else we do, whether it's hooking up hoses to fire trucks, or shooting bullets down range, it takes a lot of repetition to get that down. And as the classes progress, they get better. But I think that talking to the boss is the number one for me.Bill Godfrey:How about keeping the boss, keeping tactical, updated about where they are and what they're doing? Is that a challenge?Billy Perry:Yes and no. That does vary. Sometimes they do it too much, because tactical's busy and they need to stay in their mission lane. And sometimes they don't do it, obviously, near enough. And there is a fine balance. And one of the things that we forget is this, like shooting, Robert likened it to shooting and doing the other skillsets that the firefighters have, it's a perishable skill and if you don't do it, it goes away.Bill Godfrey:You better practice. Mark, how about you? I realize you and I are a little bit disadvantaged on the contact side because we're a couple of fire guys, but is there anything that you've seen that sticks out at you that Billy and Robert haven't already mentioned?Mark Rhame:I think sometimes they over complicate it. I mean, frankly, sometimes the easiest path is the best path, and especially in the training environment. I think Billy mentioned that earlier, that following the checklist is probably the simplest road you can take in regard to this training environment. And whatever training environment you're at, there's probably some internal checklist that you need to make sure you get that stuff done, and for some reason they get off that path. They wander off into the weeds or something like that and they're starting to do someone else's job. As much as we keep telling them, say, do your job, stay on your path, you've got one boss, answer to that one boss, for some reason they think they have to talk or go another direction.I'll give you example, what a reason we keep telling law enforcement that the RTFs are built out in staging, but they're owned by triage. And it doesn't matter how many times you tell the law enforcement officer who's the staging manager, when they sit there and say, well, I need to deploy RTFs and go, no, no, no, no, you're getting out of your lane. Stay in your lane. Don't make it more complicated than it is. Get those tasks done that you're assigned to do, and your road's going to be so much easier.Billy Perry:I forgot something.Bill Godfrey:Okay, go.Billy Perry:The three priorities of work. Active threat, rescue, and then clear. And instead of ARC, they CAR, they ACR. Seriously I mean...Bill Godfrey:They forget the order. We see that a lot.Billy Perry:It's crucial, because you can't rescue until you put doofus down.Bill Godfrey:Or unless he's left the scene, because that's the other thing we see, is we clear up all this little stuff on day one, we roll into day two and they're starting to look stronger, and then we give them a suspect where there was shooting when they arrived on scene but the shooting stops and they don't know why.Billy Perry:And then they left.Bill Godfrey:They just can't get out of clear mode. They can't stop and switch gears. So, yeah, interesting. So those are all good topics for contact teams. Let's talk a little bit about rescue task forces. Mark, you mentioned that. What's the things that jump into your mind about the RTFs, day one, common issues?Mark Rhame:Well, I would say in the beginning, we'd struggle sometimes in those first couple of scenarios of getting people to lean forward, building out their teams. And then as much as we talk about it, in real world, especially, but also in training, that's when you got to get the team together, and introduce themselves, and talk about what the rules are, rules of engagement, if you will. And as much as we talk about it, we just generally don't see it when we're in the scenarios.They got to flip that mindset that this should reflect real-world, what you train, you should be doing that same thing. We'll make those assignments, people who were on RTFs, and then they just go in their own little corner of the room until they get assigned to the room. Well, that's the time they should be sitting next to each other and going, guys, here's the rules. I'm going to be one talking on the radio, here's the equipment we're going to carry, all those rules need to be done in staging, and we just don't see it that much.Bill Godfrey:Yeah, absolutely. And I think the one that sticks out to me is, you said it earlier, you can see in their eyes that they know what they're supposed to be doing, but they don't quite get that engaged with action. So they'll come rolling into the room, into the casualty collection point, and they just look around and vapor lock a little bit, they're just not sure what to do. Not sure where to start. Not sure who to talk to. Not sure who talks to who or where to start when, of course, what we always say to them is, okay, you've rolled into the casualty collection point. There's a contact team here that got this started. Let's get a briefing from them. Get them to tell you what's going on and what they already know, and then let's divvy this thing up and go to work.Mark Rhame:The weird thing is that from real-world experience for me, I always believed that it was actually easier to be in charge than it is actually to get the task and be told to go out and do something. Give you an example, that first RTF we tell them over and over again, when you come into that casualty collection point, at that point in time, you've got to take control of that room medically. And to me, it's a lot easier if that first RTF, if you come in there and go, okay, RTF twp, you got that patient there, RTF three, you got this patient over here, and give assignments to other people. For some reason, there's that vapor lock when they walk into that casualty collection point, that first RTF team, and they don't take control of that room medically.Bill Godfrey:It is something that we see get cleared up on days two and three, but it's a very common first day issue. So Robert, what about you? What have you commonly seen the RTFs, day one, common RTF mistakes as they come in the room?Robert McMahan:Well, again, it's that communication back to triage, trying to sort out and

Episode 41: Micro TrainingFor this week's podcast topic, we discuss different types of micro training to help reinforce active shooter incident management methods.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey your podcast host. We're happy to have you with us today, where we're going to be talking about micro training. Things that you can do in 10 to 15 minutes during your roll calls or briefings to help people stay on top of Active Shooter Incident Management. I have with me today, three of the other instructors from C3 Pathways, Robert McMahon from the law enforcement side. Robert. Good to see you.Robert McMahan:Good to see you, Bill.Bill Godfrey:All right. We've also got Mark Rhame on the fire/EMS side, Mark. Good to have you back.Mark Rhame:Yeah, always enjoy it.Bill Godfrey:And Billy Perry, Billy it's been a little while.Billy Perry:It hasn't been. It's been a minute, but I'm glad to be back.Bill Godfrey:Oh, it's good to have you. Good to have you back in the house. All right. So I almost feel like the first thing I want to do is go around and talk about all the different names we've heard this called. So roll call training, briefing training, quick drills. What else?Robert McMahan:Seven minute training where I came from.Bill Godfrey:Seven minute training. Okay.Mark Rhame:Morning teleconference review issues. Yeah.Billy Perry:Hip pocket training.Bill Godfrey:Hip pocket. All right. So the idea here is that during these opportunities, whether it's roll call, shift change, whenever you're going to do it within your organization, to be able to take 10 or 15 minutes and kind of reinforce some of these ASIM topics. And so I've asked the instructors to kind of come up with some things that they thought would help. And some of these are things that you can do really without any preparation, without any warning. Some of them are going to acquire a little bit of planning, but not a whole ton of planning. And we're going to kind of go through them. Mark. Do you mind leading us off?Mark Rhame:Sure. I guarantee you the three, four of us sitting here at this table and the people listening probably can go to their file cabinet, go to their book, whatever they keep their certificates of the classes they've taken, and they stick them into those files, stick them into that book. And then they pretty much ignore it from that point forward for the most part. Part of the failure, I guess, in the public safety environment, whether it's fire/EMS, law enforcement, is that we do a lot of good training. We get together and we come together and say this is a good thing, but how much do we practice this? How much do we talk about it? How much do we go out there and engage our partners? Whether if you're on the fire/EMS side or your talking to the law enforcement, especially the guys you run with, girls who run with on a regular basis than a community and talk about these topics and reinforce what we're going to do when we get on those scenes.So one of the first things I look at is for fire and EMS is you need to invite your fellow law enforcement brothers and sisters out there stop by a firehouse. And let's re-emphasize what our roles are, what we're going to do when we get on the scene. When you build out an RTF how much equipment you're going to carry? Who's in command, who's going to do talking on the radio, make sure we have that radio discipline. So there's a lot of things that we can do in a very short period of time. But again, it's up to that battalion chief or assistant chief or whatever that ranking person is on that morning teleconference to say, "Hey guys and girls go out there and get with your brothers and sisters." On the law enforcement side as I'm talking about fire/EMS and let's reemphasize and talk about what our responsibilities are and what our roles are going to be in these environments. Because again, all of us has taken these classes, but how much do we practice it afterwards?Bill Godfrey:So real quick and simple Mark, you're talking about just invite your local law enforcement guys and gals that work in your area, ask them to come by pop by the firehouse 10, 15 minutes for a meal.Mark Rhame:A simple thing as open up the cabinet and show them what you're going to carry so they can actually see what your intent is when you arrive on the scene at staging, and you build out your RTFs-Billy Perry:And what your ability is.Mark Rhame:Yeah, exactly. And maybe they're going to go, "Oh, wait a second. That's too much. You can't carry all that stuff." Or maybe after the scene's been cooled down a lot the known threats are either contained or neutralized. You can bring in that scoop stretcher or Blackboards or whatever it happens to be. So that's where you re-emphasize this stuff and go over the rules of engagement if you will, in that fire/EMS side. And it doesn't take that long, just make sure everybody's on the same page.Bill Godfrey:Billy. One of the things that kind of jumps out to me as Mark says that is the idea of reinforcing that RTF introduction about rules and responsibilities and most fire guys and gals don't have any knowledge about tactics or how to move.Billy Perry:Right. And frankly, a lot officers don't either, spoiler alert. But you're right. And I think, yeah. That's all of us. We all fall into that, but yeah, I agree. And it all boils down to relationships.Mark Rhame:Yeah. That's actually a really good point though, Billy. In the class, we talk about it, and we do a little demo sometimes in the live class where we show building the teams out every shakes hands and does the introduction. But how often has someone gone out there and say, "Hey, let's practice this." The law enforcement officer gets with the fire/EMS guys and say, "We're going to be an RTF. Let's demo or practice this in the parking lot or in the station or whatever on our expectations from the law enforcement side.Billy Perry:Yeah, and we're all trainers. And we know we accept the fact that a lot of people don't understand. Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect because if you're practicing wrong, it's not better. And you're right. And it's getting the reps in, the good reps. That's why SWAT teams serve warrants is for reps for hostage rescue. There's a lot of reasons for it. And I think that's where we need to do that in what we do in building relationships and familiarity.Robert McMahan:I think another way to do that is just on the opposite side. When law enforcement is conducting training, tactical training, invite those fire guys to come out there with you and do that with you. Practice those movements, figure out if you've got the right kit. Figure out how much you're carrying actually. You may want to adjust that kit based on that training and actually running it, communicating down the halls and all that kind of stuff. When we're doing our tactical training to make sure we're including them as well as our dispatchers to tie up that communication piece.Bill Godfrey:Now, Robert, when you say kit, what do you mean there?Robert McMahan:Well, I mean, both for fire and for law enforcement. Law enforcement's got their stuff, their kit that they put on their body armor that they get in there long guns out and that kind of stuff. The things they're carrying into that hot zone or warm zones. And for the fireside whatever those tools are that they're going to be carrying down range as an RTF to the patients, they need to make sure that that kit or whatever they're bringing is going to be right. And it's going to be manageable.Bill Godfrey:One of the things and I've talked about it before here on the podcast, that was a surprise or an awakening moment to me when I first started kind of doing this and working with some of the specific lingo. Things like the X, understanding hallway intersections, T intersections, how to keep a light touch, but not grab on when you're moving. How important are those things to talk to the fire/EMS folks about on the law enforcement side. Because I mean, if you don't have the law enforcement background that was foreign terminology to me.Billy Perry:Sure. It's huge. It honestly is. I mean it can be a total unhinging of the operation. It can be nothing and it can also be grievous. So I mean its knowledge is power.Bill Godfrey:Okay. Very good. Well, that's the first one off the board there, Mark. Billy what's on your list.Billy Perry:On my list is knowledge. And I say that jokingly. The big thing in law enforcement, and this isn't being condescending, I fall into this category as a trainer and as having been a trainer for decades, we in law enforcement used to be really, really good at the initial neutralization as Mark put it of the issue. When it came to ASIM Active Shooter Incident Management, we used to be really good at that. And we've kind of not gotten as good lately. We've had some challenges. And I think a lot of it is born of ignorance of our craft and our profession. And I think a lack of knowledge and a lack of familiarity can cause professional and cognitive freezing. And I think knowing what we do and why we do it and how we do it is huge. And I think this is one of those situations where hip pocket training can be so event changing.And we talk it where our work, the why we do it response to resistance. And you can call it response resistance, use of force, whatever. In the words of Shakespeare, "A rose by any other name," whatever. But no the statutes, wherever you are, know the statues that justify or that cover your justification of use of force and in Florida, it's 7, 7, 6, know that. Know your orders. Know your case law, you're Graham v. Connor, Tennessee v. Garner. Scott v. Harris for pursuits and whatnot but know those things. And so that way, when the drop down menu appears in your mind, you act professionally. In law enforcement we reached a level of frankly, of unconscious competency. We accidentally do the right thing a lot of times when we can't articulate why. Words mean things and we need to be quoting those statutes.And that's part of the issue we're having with a public right now is words do mean things. We can't explain why we've done what we've

Episode 40: SSAVEIMIn this podcast with John-Michael Keyes from the I Love U Guys foundation, we talk about school safety and violent event incident management.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast. Thank you for being with us today. We have a special guest today. I'm excited to welcome back to the fold John-Michael Keyes with the "I Love U Guys" Foundation. John-Michael, thanks for taking the time to join us on the podcast today.John-Michael Keyes:Oh, thanks for the opportunity, Bill. I always look forward to conversations with you.Bill Godfrey:It is so exciting to have you back. We got some really, really great comments about the last series you and I did, which ironically, we had recorded just before COVID shut everything down.We'll talk a little bit more about that, but I know I'm catching you literally after you've just finished the last day of your briefings. How did it go? Well, you know what? Tell everybody what the briefings were about. I'm anxious to hear how it went.John-Michael Keyes:Yeah. We started, I think almost 10 years ago now, holding an annual conference. We did it in the summertime. For the first several years, we held the conference at Columbine High School. Part of my goal with that was a special ... Not everyone can do that, and so we were delighted that Jefferson County School District and Columbine let us use the school to conduct a school safety conference.We kind of outgrew the auditorium there. It's an unusual conference, because we get a lot of first-person accounts. It feels a little different than many of the safety conferences you may have attended.Bill Godfrey:John-Michael, I'm curious. On the briefings, is there one highlight that really sticks out in your mind that was very moving or thoughtful or meaningful moving forward?John-Michael Keyes:Absolutely. Oddly enough, it's a repeat. Carly Posey is the mission director of the “I Love U Guys” Foundation. Her family story is both difficult and inspiring. She had two kids at Sandy Hook who survived the shooting. The story of the aftermath and their journey, and dealing with active killer event survivors is truly inspirational. I've seen it a half a dozen times. Even seeing it again yesterday, it gets me. Certainly, the virtual audience was moved dramatically by Carly's presentation.Bill Godfrey:I can only imagine it would be impossible not to be moved. I've seen you do yours, I've lost count, but it's well over a dozen times. I don't know how you get through ... I can't get through it with dry eyes. It just doesn't work for me. It's always a very emotional and moving topic.Any highlights that you've got planned for the next set of briefings, which is what the mini set in the winter? Am I remembering that right?John-Michael Keyes:Yeah. We started doing a winter briefing. It was a unique venue. Jefferson County School District in Colorado has 160 schools. The safety and security director there, John MacDonald, did something that I've not seen anywhere else in the country. He successfully stole an elementary school. He convinced the school district to turn the power on for a weekend of training. Having that physical school facility is essential in training for active killer events. He just forgot to have them turn the power off.Bill Godfrey:Conveniently forgot, right? Yeah.John-Michael Keyes:Actually, as the school district saw the benefit of it, they began training, not just Jefferson County public safety, but law enforcement, fire and EMS from around the state and then the country. Navy SEAL team has been there.They secured long-term funding, and it got rechristened the Frank DeAngelis Center for Community Safety. What was Martensen Elementary is now a full-on public safety training venue. I think last year, I looked pre-COVID, they had something like 70 different agencies doing nearly 200 days of training in that building.Bill Godfrey:That's a lot. That's the kind of stuff that really, really makes a difference, I know. Wow. Fantastic stuff. Well, hey, congratulations on getting the briefings done. I'm really happy that things went well, especially with the virtual challenges. But you and I are here to talk about a new program that we're doing together called SSAVEIM, School Safety and Violent Event Incident Management. You want to tell the group, tell the audience what this is about?John-Michael Keyes:Yeah. We developed the Standard Reunification Method in 2012. It was based on practices that we saw around the country in how districts could successfully reunify students with parents, with accountability, and accommodating for psychological first aid. It started gaining some traction. In 2016, we released version two.It was some time after that, when I saw a training of the Active Shooter Incident Management, ASIM, and the Counterstrike method of functional exercise in a classroom environment. It was fascinating to me. You and I got to talking, and I said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we did something like this for reunification?" I'm pretty sure it was during dinner, and perhaps a drink, because you agreed.Bill Godfrey:It's funny how those things ... Yeah. For the audience, if you ever end up at dinner with John-Michael, watch out. It comes fast and furious. Yeah.But I think it was a really great thing. We did it in a couple stages. As you mentioned, we first modified the Counterstrike training system to support being able to do full functional reunifications with students, and the paperwork, and the attendants, and the teachers, and the role players, and the responders and everything else.We began working that into the course that we do, our ASIM courses. We've got a suite of those Active Shooter Incident Management courses. We also built that into our simulation system that we use on the road for doing the advanced class. There's 3D first-person point-of-view system we can use for doing reunification, and then also the Counterstrike.It wasn't very long after that that you and I were talking again. I believe the usual dinner setting was where it occurred. We started talking about ... I think I was asking you some questions. We were having some dialogue about some challenges that we were hitting in the reunification when we were running these exercises in these scenarios. Do you remember that?John-Michael Keyes:Absolutely. That was one of the things that...Your professional career, Bill, that fire chief occasionally comes out, and seasoned incident management, that practical crisis management where your boots-on-the-ground experience over your career, you pointed out some weaknesses in our methods.I was delighted. The foundation is committed to constantly evaluating and evolving. You proposed some modifications to the practices that we've incorporated in version three of the Standard Reunification Method. That's going to be officially published here in the clear near future.Bill Godfrey:You're not getting away with clear near future. No, no, no, no. We're pinning down a date. Next week, right?John-Michael Keyes:Say again.Bill Godfrey:I said next week, right?John-Michael Keyes:It does have a publication date.Bill Godfrey:Good.John-Michael Keyes:We've got it ready to go on the website.Bill Godfrey:Fantastic.John-Michael Keyes:We're excited about that.Bill Godfrey:Yeah, as are we.John-Michael Keyes:The changes were simple and deliberate, and made the process better. The ability to incorporate that into SSAVEIM, and some of the joint development then in the setup and the execution of that, has, A, been entertaining, but, B, I'm really excited about the product.Bill Godfrey:Oh yeah, me too. I cannot wait to see this roll out in a large scale way. We actually did the pilot delivery right as COVID was cranking up, and obviously, had to set everything aside. Now, we're back to doing face-to-face stuff, and so we're beginning to ramp this back up, and beginning this push, which is why you and I both wanted to talk about it.I think that the interesting thing here is the natural evolution. As you mentioned, it's very important to you and the foundation to constantly revisit and say, "Okay. What can be better? What can be better? Is there a better way? Has things changed? What have we learned?"That's the same way that our group approaches the Active Shooter Incident Management. Threats don't stay the same. Things change over time. Things evolve. You have to look at what have we learned, what are the new practices.You were so gracious in accepting some of the feedback, and then we truly worked together on those changes and those edits. That led to the conversation about, "Hey, what do you think about putting together, not just a hands-on class, but a hands-on class that takes school people," so school administrators, teachers, security personnel, "and puts them in the room for the same training with our first responders," police, fire, and EMS, "so that they're learning together, and we're doing these functional hands-on exercises together?"That's how SSAVEIM got born and came together. SSAVEIM basically has three modules to it. The first module is the Standard Response Protocol. John-Michael, you want to recap real quickly for everybody what the SRP levels are?John-Michael Keyes:Yeah. When we started down this path, what we saw was there wasn't common language between students, staff and first responders in a variety of crisis. A lot of schools were still using codes or response levels. We're pretty committed to the fact that codes don't work in a crisis. We found some specific language: lockout, lockdown, evacuate and shelter. Those were the initial four actions of the Standard Response Protocol.Well, we introduced that in 2009, and then iterated and iterated. Today, the Standard Response Protocol 2021 is five actions. We added another action: hold in your classroom or area, and we changed the term lockout to the term secure. We did that to avoid confusion and increase precision.It doesn't sound like a big deal, changing one word. In all honesty, I think the foundation staff had bigger heartburn than the rest of the world, because everyone else said, Oh, finally," rather than complaining.Bill Godfrey:Yeah, yeah. But it is a lot of work.John-Micha

Episode 39: ASIM IntermediateSheriff Michelle Cook shares her experience hosting the Active Shooter Incident Management (ASIM) Intermediate course remotely for Clay County (FL) on the NCIER Campus virtual platformBill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter incident management podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. We appreciate you tuning back in with us this week. We have a special guest, one of our instructors who has been on a little bit of a leave of absence, Michelle Cook. Now, most of you will remember, if you've been with us for a long time, Michelle's done some podcasts in the past, and was a police chief up in the north Florida area. Not too long ago, she was elected sheriff in Clay County in the north Florida area, and is taking the time to talk with us today. Kind of catch us up, what's going on, and tell us a little bit about her experience with the Active Shooter Incident Management, intermediate class. Michelle, welcome, and thank you for taking the time to join us. Michelle Cook:Thank you, Bill. I appreciate you inviting me back on. Bill Godfrey:So, being sheriff, it's an elected position, a lot of work with that. Was it as much fun as you thought it was going to be? Michelle Cook:The campaigning, or the actual job? Bill Godfrey:I'll let you answer that anyway you want. Michelle Cook:Sure, yeah. Campaigning was tough, but I'm truly a committed public servant that wants to do right by the officers on the street that protect us every day. So, that was my motivation to run, and since winning the election, and being in office now for just about a year, the ability to bring the great training, and looking out for the deputies that serve on the street, has really been my driving force for going into work every day. Bill Godfrey:Well, I know you're very good at it and have a passion for this like nobody else I've ever seen. We certainly miss you here on our side of the fence. I look forward to the time comes that you slow down a little bit and kind of come back to the fold. So, I thought it'd be fun to have you on to talk about our Active Shooter Incident Management, intermediate class, and your experience with hosting that. Now for the audience, the ASIM intermediate is our two day version of the class, which obviously we used to do face to face, but because of COVID, we developed a new platform that would allow us to do this hands-on training remotely. So, the ASIM intermediate two day is now available remote, and not in Zoom or Microsoft Team meetings, but in our own platform that we built, so that we could still do hands-on live scenarios. So sheriff, I thought it'd be fun to have you kind of share with everybody, what, from your perspective, led you to want to do that, have the class, tell us the story. Michelle Cook:Sure. I'm going to take you back to 10 years ago, when I started getting involved in the Active Shooter Incident Management classes, and they were in person, and they were so valuable. I saw the value, and was actually able to apply the principles in the active shooter incident management class to my work, and teaching the officers and the deputies that I work with, the principals of thought and action. The more I saw the principles working, the more I bought into this training. Michelle Cook:So, when COVID struck and really took training, came to a halt for all of us. As a police leader, I knew that I could not go out there in the public and say, "Well, we had to stop training because of COVID." That is not acceptable in my line of work. So, when the ASIM intermediate came up, and you guys talked about this virtual platform, I will say I was a little hesitant. I'm a 30 year veteran, I believe in the old school sitting at a desk hands-on, but I realized, Bill, quickly, that really the technology is the wave of the future. In talking to my younger deputies, they were not fearful of a virtual class. Now, I will say some of my older deputies were hesitant, but we pushed forward anyway. I can tell you from sitting in the class during the virtual delivery, it was absolutely spot on. It really provided the ASIM principles in a virtual platform, and the training was fantastic. Bill Godfrey:Well, that's wonderful to hear, and I'm relieved. Honestly, I was a little nervous when you said you wanted to host this class because you're a perfectionist like me, and a stickler, and I thought, "Oh, please Lord, let everything go right." So, I was a little risk, but Michelle, from your perspective, how would you describe that platform and the experience to somebody who's never seen it? Because that's always a challenge for me trying to describe it to folks. Michelle Cook:Yeah. It really is a challenge, but the the way that I would describe it, or the way I do describe it to people is you have an active shooter incident. You have a critical incident, and we do as a profession, we've done so well at training how to tactically respond, and take the bad guy out. But active shooter incident management is so much bigger than that. So, through this virtual platform where you have everybody has a character that acts, and interacts with the other characters, you're able to learn the principles of the incident management. It's less about clearing a room, and more about taking command and control of the scene. With the virtual platform, you're able to learn these principles, and practice these principles, all while sitting at a desk. Bill Godfrey:I think that's a great summary. I might have to borrow some of that for some of the materials, when people ask for the explanation. I appreciate that. Michelle Cook:I won't charge you. I won't charge you. Bill Godfrey:Sheriff, one of the things I thought was kind of interesting, you had what, 30, 30, 40 people in the class from your side? Michelle Cook:Yes. Yes. Bill Godfrey:Then we had about, I don't know, it was another half dozen, or dozen, from across the country that all joined in. You made an interesting choice, which was even though this was a virtual delivery, you made a choice to pull all of your people to one central location. So, we had this group up at your place that was taking it together, and then these a half dozen other, a dozen other students from across the country that were all remote. How did that work? What led up to you to decide that? Michelle Cook:Well, Bill, that was a purposeful, deliberate decision, and there was a couple of reasons I did it that way. Number one, my county, we have four different law enforcement agencies in my county. Plus our two different fire rescue agencies in the county. So, by bringing all of these people in a room, even though they were working virtually, we were able to establish, re-establish, and build relationships. That was lacking a little bit in my county, is the working relationship, so bringing them all together. I also purposely planted some, what I call ringers, in this class. These are guys who truly understand the ASIM concepts, and are champions of the concepts, and so during break, I encourage these guys to lead the informal discussions. "Hey, what did you think about that?" "Hey, didn't that work out well?" So, really reemphasizing the concepts through the informal conversations that would occur at each break. Michelle Cook:So, although the technology, bringing everybody in one room, there was a draw or pull on the technology side, it really worked out well for us because now we're back to some traditional training, and my trainers who were in the class are ensuring that they include these other agencies that they've never really thought about before in our training. So for me, it was very purposeful, very deliberate because what I saw that lacked in my county was some working relationships, and making sure that I got buy-in by planting some ringers in the room who can continue the conversation. Bill Godfrey:That's really interesting. I knew you had a couple of strong people in the room that were taking the class, but I didn't know that you had kind of purposely planted, as you said, some ringers. What made you feel so passionately about that? That's an interesting idea. Michelle Cook:Well, policemen love training, they hate training all at the same time. Here we were introducing some new concepts, for many of these, in the class. At the same time, we were doing it virtually. For many in law enforcement, especially, guys that have about seven years on or more, they're still afraid of the technology. They're still concerned that there's a training value on using technology. So, I wanted to make sure that I did not have a strong personality in the middle of this class, throw his hands up and go, "This is BS. This is dumb. This is not worth it," because you're informal leaders in the class can really drive how people feel about the training. Michelle Cook:So, by planting some informal leaders that were ringers, I purposely drove the conversation to the positive, and then people who had questions about what they learned, or what was said, they naturally gravitated to these leaders, and said, "Well, tell me why this happened. Why do we have to go to staging? Why can't we self deploy from another agency?" And those conversations happened. So the guys that really understood the concepts, were able to, again, really drive home the purpose, or the principles, that were being taught on this virtual platform. Bill Godfrey:That's really interesting. Now I'm curious, because we did have a number of other students that were from different places in the country that were in that same class, interacting with your team, and the folks that you had on that location. Did you hear any feedback, or reactions, about what it was like working with people from different states in the class and in the responses? Michelle Cook:Yeah, it's interesting because there was some conversation, a little bit of a conversation about lingo and tactics, and the pace of response for some of them. For me, that really gave me an opportunity for a training point. I said, "Guy, those guys are from out of state. We don't have to worry about them responding to our

Episode 38: Tips for Working Together at Tactial, Triage and TransportA discussion about tips and tricks at the tactical, triage and transport location.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your host of the podcast. Today's topic, we are going to be talking about some tips and tricks for working together at the tactical, triage, and transport location, which is an interesting challenge. We've got quite a laundry list of things I think we're going to be able to go through here today.We have with us three of the instructors from C3 Pathways, Ken Lamb, on the law enforcement side. Ken, good to have you back in the house.Ken Lamb:Yes, sir. Happy to be here.Bill Godfrey:All right. And we've got our world traveler, Bruce Scott, from the fire EMS side, like myself. Bruce, good to have you back in town.Bruce Scott:Thanks a lot, Bill. Glad to be here.Bill Godfrey:And we have Pete Kelting from the law enforcement side. Peter, good to have you back.Pete Kelting:Great to be here, Bill. Thank you.Bill Godfrey:All right. So today's topic. We're going to be talking about tactical, triage and transport, and some tips and tricks on how to make that more effective, more efficient, work together. Basically take some of the friction out.So I think, before we get too far into this, we probably ought to just take a minute and make sure that everybody understands. When we talk about tactical, triage, and transport, what those functions do. What's the main thing that happens at those locations before we start talking about how to work better?Pete, tell me a little bit from the law enforcement perspective, what are the key things that the tactical group supervisor needs to be doing on the law enforcement side to execute their mission?Pete Kelting:Yeah. When the tactical supervisor gets on scene, they've got to get that situational awareness. So everything has been going on. They may have been listening to the calls, they're responding, but when they plant the flag where they're going to be, they need to get that situational awareness. They need to talk with the contact teams and see what's going on, determine casualties, initial casualty count from the law enforcement side. They've got to see what additional resources need to support those. Either a solo officer response, or the contact team is down there working. And then they need to request for the fire department to come join them at that location. That's how that tactical, triage, and transport start to form up, and to where the communications can happen immediately, to support what's going on downrange.Bill Godfrey:So that tactical position, Pete, on the law enforcement side, primarily responsible for making the security picture better in the downrange, everything in the hot and the warm zone, they're trying to make that better.Pete Kelting:Absolutely. Putting the resources downrange that need to engage the threat that's taken place. And then, begin to look at the perimeters and the security cordons, to start to make the other resources available to come downrange. But that tactical supervisor has to request that fire department resource to come to set up triage and transport next to them, to start moving into what is next.Bill Godfrey:All right. Perfect segue. Bruce, give us a quick rundown. What are the responsibilities of triage and transport group supervisors at this forward area where tactical, triage, and transport are working together?Bruce Scott:Right. So I was standing next to Pete. Pete is my tactical group supervisor. He's got his folks down there doing security work. He's telling me, or I'm listening to what he's saying, or hearing on the radio, basically, what the security image looks like at that particular point in time, as well as some initial patient counts. As his contact teams are moving downrange, and given those, some initial patient counts, myself, as triage, gives me an idea of how many rescue task force I'm going to need. And if I'm the transport group supervisor, how many transport units I'm going to need. So it allows me to start painting my resource picture right off the bat, just because I'm co-located with Pete, and we haven't even sent anybody downrange yet, but we're already starting to go to work.Bill Godfrey:All right. Fantastic. I think that's a perfect segue into us talking about the first issue, which is co-locating together. So Ken, why don't you lead us off, talking about that?Ken Lamb:Right. In law enforcement, we've recognized that we have to have both triage and transport working together with tactical to ensure that we are beating that clock, and that we are getting those impacted individuals to the hospital as soon as possible. The only way we can do that, is if we are tied at the hip with both triage and transport. And I hate to be over-simplistic, but teamwork makes a dream work. So if we can be tied together with those individuals, and we can be sharing that information as it's coming in, and not have to worry about relaying it over a radio that's probably already being tied up, or sending a runner, obviously that would equal out in us to having more efficient response.Now what's critical, as far as being a policeman in the tactical position is, identifying that warm zone, where we can link up with those fire/rescue personnel, and ensuring that we have adequate security measures in place. And preferably a position of cover, whether it be a building, or a fire engine, or some solid cover, so that we're giving our fire rescue partners the warm and fuzzy, that, hey, you can link up here with me, and this is a safe approach.Because understandably, some fire/rescue personnel, this could be a new concept, or they could be hesitant to approach that warm zone area. And they want to know that their security is taken care of, so we're either providing that officer to provide security, or we're identifying a clearly identifiable location for that link up, to then work that a tactical, triage, and transport function, so that we can be more efficient and effective in getting those individuals the medical care, they need.Bill Godfrey:Interesting insight. Bruce, what are your thoughts? What are the key reasons that you see that tactical, triage, and transport need to be shoulder to shoulder, working together?Bruce Scott:Well, first off, I think Ken brought up a really great point, and the fact is that number one, I have to feel secure that I can get my fire/EMS folks to fill those two group supervisor positions, the tactical and the transport group supervisor, co-located with the triage and transport group supervisors, co-located with the tactical group supervisor. I need to know that I can get them there in a relatively safe place.But most importantly, as a triage group supervisor, my primary role is to get my RTFs downrange, and I can not do that until my tactical group supervisor tells me that that warm zone has been established, where they're going to be able to go work. And as Ken alluded to, if he has to tell me that on the radio, we get, radio traffic gets lost, we get lost in that... We're trying to beat that clock, and time is hugely important. Then if, he's standing right next to me and says, "Hey, Bruce, the casualty collections point is set up in the cafeteria. It's a warm zone. We're ready for RTFs to get down there." I'm very sure at that point, that he has set enough security in place for my folks to get down there and work.So starting off, that's the number one goal. If I'm going to try to get my folks downrange, the guy that knows that information is standing right beside me, and he can give it to me.Bill Godfrey:Pete, what are your thoughts on it?Pete Kelting:I think exactly what the two of them were talking about is extremely important to make it efficient, and what we have to do to make that happen is training. Training and relationships. If we don't train that, then the fire department, our fire friends are going to respond the way they've always responded, either to the staging or the command post. And we're going to lose that communication, tied at the hip, as Ken was referring to. So, relationships and training and interoperability. And if there's a fallback from that, can the fire department in that jurisdiction hop up on the law enforcement channel? Since 911, our inter-operability is supposed to be to that extent friendly, in that sense, in delegation of authority to operate across all channels. And if you train with that, and you're able to hop up on the channel, if you didn't happen to co-locate, you can at least still get the information from being on that particular tactical channel from the FD side.Bill Godfrey:Yeah. I think you guys are all hitting right on it. From my point of view, it's at a very basic level. We need each other to do the job. Law enforcement needs the medical piece of this, and the medical needs the security piece of this. And it takes all of us working together as a unified team, as one team, to make that happen. I think it's a real base level there.Okay. So we've got tactical, triage, and transport co-located together at a location where they're able to work together face to face. Hopefully, that's a safe location, that the fire department or EMS were able to come up to, if not, they got to get an escort. I think Ken mentioned that. They got to get some security to bring them up. But picking that location... I don't know, Ken, Pete, before we leave that, let's talk a little bit about that for a second, for the location. What are the kinds of decision-making things that should go through the mind of the fifth man? As they're getting ready to assume that position, how are they going to pick their location? What's the split-second decisions that are running through your head, on how to pick a good spot?Ken Lamb:Oh wow, yeah. I think it's really critical to understand that the fifth man doesn't necessarily have to be a supervisor. I believe in the law enforcement community, we could do a lot of work in educating our line level officers to understand what the fifth man is, and the responsibility in finding this location, so that they could stand up the tactical position, and k

Episode 37: Other Uses of ASIM ChecklistA discussion about uses of the ASIM Checklist beyond active shooter events.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your host of the podcast. We're happy to have you back with us. Today, we have three of the instructors with us to talk about the uses of the ASIM checklist beyond just Active Shooter. We have, as many of you know, the Active Shooter Incident Management checklist which lays out this process. But just because it's titled Active Shooter doesn't mean that that's the only thing it's usable for. We're going to talk a little bit about that today. I'd like to introduce you to the three instructors that are with us. We have Terrence Weems from the law enforcement side. Terrence, good to have you back in the house.Terrance Weems:Thanks for having me.Bill Godfrey:Absolutely. We have, of course, Adam Pendley also from the law enforcement side. Many of you know Adam. Adam, good to have you back.Adam Pendley:Happy to be here.Bill Godfrey:Of course, the inimitable Mark Rhame from the fire EMS side like myself. Mark, good to see you.Mark Rhame:Thank you, Bill.Bill Godfrey:Alright. Again, as we talked about in the opening, we titled it The Active Shooter Incident Management Checklist for a lot of reasons, but it's usable for more than just Active Shooter events. Adam, why don't you open us up and start talking about it in a little bit generically and then we'll roll from there?Adam Pendley:Sure. One of the things about the ASIM checklist is a validated process of building an incident management from the ground up. So many of us in law enforcement, fire and EMS over the years have trained on the incident command system. We go to the standardized FEMA classes, but oftentimes, we see the final org chart. We see this managing an incident from the top down model. You see all these positions filled out and what you find is that doesn't work in the field. One of the good things about the ASIM checklist process is we build a response from the first arriving unit that then builds from there. Additional units arrive, they start becoming teams, and then group supervisors arrive, and then incident command arrives, and you have branch directors.As an incident unfolds, more elements are added from the ground up. Here's the point, is that the Active Shooter Incident Management checklist can be used for other types of rapid response on the law enforcement side and especially any sort of rapid response that involves an integrated response with fire EMS. As we're arriving to a violent incident, it could be a robbery in progress. It could be some other type of crime of violence. The idea of having the initial contact teams stabilize the scene, having a tactical group supervisor come in and start managing that inner perimeter and managing those follow on resources, teaming up shoulder to shoulder with fire and EMS, and then having the higher command come in and be part of the command post and all the elements that we talk about in the ASIM checklist, the staging manager and intel and PIO all fit in, in the same way in almost any type of rapid response from law enforcement, fire and EMS.Bill Godfrey:Things like mass shooting, I think that's a no brainer.Adam Pendley:Right.Bill Godfrey:Violent attacks, whether it's with an edged weapon or something else. Vehicle through a crowd?Adam Pendley:Sure. Absolutely. Because anything that either has the potential for multiple injuries or has multiple injuries, you're going to follow the same process. I think it's important to follow that process even on those different types of incidents an all hazards approach because if you only pull out the concepts of Active Shooter Incident Management, just for Active Shooter, you're going to be rusty. Fortunately, we see a lot of these across the country, but we don't see them all the time in each of our jurisdictions. Right? You have to find other opportunities to keep those skills strong.Bill Godfrey:Almost like a generic response process, Adam, is that what you're thinking? Something along that for a subset group of calls on the law enforcement side, this should be the default response?Adam Pendley:Sure. Kind of like your standard response model where you know that if you have something that's either in progress or that has just occurred, that is a violent scene with multiple injuries...Bill Godfrey:Like a drive by or something like that?Adam Pendley:Sure. A drive by in any sort of... Even if it's a domestic violence in progress or something that might involve a hostage barricade situation. There's a lot of examples of this that we could talk about where there's opportunities to really engage each element of the Active Shooter Incident Management Checklist.Bill Godfrey:Interesting. I'd like to revisit this idea of that of setting up a default response process, maybe that's a good idea for another topic. Let's go around. Mark, what are the things that are on your mind? What pops into your head about other uses of the ASIM checklist process and where it might be valuable?Mark Rhame:Well, the first thing I think of is that nine times out of 10, the boots on the ground are going to do an incredible job. Every single time, they go out there and they get the job done. The weakest link, as far as I'm concerned, what I've seen in my career is generally the command staff is where it fails and they fall apart. It's because a lot of the things we're exposed to, those big events, maybe once in a lifetime, you get involved in something like that. Maybe you trained on something, maybe you read about it, but you don't practice it enough. You don't get involved in some of those environments. When we talk about using the ASIM checklist for other environments, it really does put us all in the same stage or platform where when we have these big events, we're ready to perform.As I see us responding to more and more of these domestic disputes, this civil unrest, these environments where we're having what looks like some type of domestic terrorism against our communities, against what we consider the norms, I think it really behooves us as public safety responders to step up and utilize a process like ASIM to respond to those events. Again, as I said before, generally I see the command side of the response to these big events as the weakest link. Again, those law enforcement officers that go in there to that threat, they're going to do their job. The fire EMS people, give them good direction and equipment. They're going to do a great job out there and they're going to perform to the standard we expect, but if our incident command side of that picture doesn't get their act together and do it right, it's going to screw up the whole environment. Again, utilizing the ASIM checklist for more than just an Active Shooter incident will make us better in the whole, as a public service or a public response to these types of environments.Bill Godfrey:You're talking almost like what Adam was saying about having a default response process, but it's not just a law enforcement response process, it's an integrated one. It runs across the disciplines. I don't know that I've ever seen or heard of anybody else doing that before. I definitely think that's one worth coming back and revisiting in a future podcast. Terrance, what jumps out at you as lessons learned or places where you think this process could be helpful in your walk of life?Terrance Weems:Yeah. Actually, one of the things that my agency we try and do with everything, anything outside of a normal day-to-day event, we utilize NIMS for that. But in looking at the ASIM model, one of the things that comes to mind immediately is a multi-vehicle crash with a ton of injuries and some deaths where the road, whether it'd be an interstate or county road, is shut down. Now, you have opportunity to put this into effect, actually building, as we said before, from the ground up. That first person arrives, sizes up the incident. They know what they have, and at the same time, they don't know what they have. All they see is a scattered mess.Bill Godfrey:You mean like one of these big, massive pile ups that we hear about on the news from time to time?Terrance Weems:Right. Few years ago, we had one on I-94 up near the Michigan State line, a number of vehicles, semis, and all of that. But what took this to the next level, it was like 12 degrees.Bill Godfrey:Ouch.Terrance Weems:One thing that we forget about is cellphones generally don't work very well and the battery life dies when it's extremely cold, plus you have all of the vehicles out there. Your batteries on your portables are dying and things like that. What this does is this gives us that opportunity to build from the ground up now, putting into place, everything that we need. I think that's outstanding. Even with the reunification and getting RTFs out and everything that we teach, it is able to be utilized even in a situation like that. You wouldn't necessarily think about it in that manner, but it's very helpful because again, using it as a general response to just about everything that you're doing, and if you're doing it all the time, you're practicing it all the time. When something huge happens, you're able to follow through.Bill Godfrey:It's really fascinating. I wouldn't have thought about using that process in terms of one of those big, massive pileups, but you're right. There's a lot of overlap there. There's a lot of things that fit and help. Alright. What else? Adam, what else is on your list?Adam Pendley:Terrance brings up the idea of RTFs and the integrated response and it really strikes me that you don't want to wait for a violent active shooter type event to get and teach fire, EMS and police to move together, to carry equipment together, to find the safe path in and out. Even at the crash site, fire, EMS, they know their job. Like Mark mentioned, they're going to do a great job, but we've already assessed the scene when we first arrive. We know where the injuries are, and so us working together as law enforcement to work with EMS and work together as an RTF to move into that scene is really important. But another

Episode 36: IntelligenceA discussion about the Intelligence function in Active Shooter Incident Management (hint: it's not just a law enforcement issue).Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name's Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. Thanks for being with us today. We are going to be talking about intelligence related to active shooter events and active shooter incident management. I have with me today three of the C3 Pathways instructors. We've got Stephen Shaw from law enforcement. Steve, thanks for being here.Stephen Shaw:Thank you for having me, Bill. Good afternoon.Bill Godfrey:Absolutely. And we have Adam Pendley, also from law enforcement. Adam, good to have you back.Adam Pendley:Thank you, Bill. Glad to be here.Bill Godfrey:And our newest C3 instructor joining us. Been around ... I won't say how long, Leanna. That wouldn't be kind. Leanna Mims, a retired fire chief, like myself. Also a paramedic. A lot of years in the business and just recently retired from some service at the state and has joined our team as our most recent instructor. Leanna, thanks for being here with us today.Leeanna Mims:Glad to be here. Thank you.Bill Godfrey:Absolutely. Okay, so as we get to talking about this topic, let me set the stage. So if you're familiar with any of our literature in the active shooter incident management program, you know that part of the ICS structure that we stand up is the intelligence section. Now, technically, it's called the intelligence investigative section, or the intelligence investigation section depending on how you want to label that. And in real life, in one of these events, that section gets quite large. It gets heavily staffed with a lot of people. And if you also have an event that has to do reunification, reunification is a branch under the intelligence section. So there's a whole lot of stuff that goes on.But we're going to focus today really is just a conversation around intelligence in a general sense. So if there's some intel purists out there, please forgive us. We're going to use this in a general sense and kind of talk about some of the things that relate to it. And the first one I'd kind of like to start off with, gang, if it's all right with you is dispelling the notion that intelligence is really just a law enforcement function, but really there's more to it. Adam, you want to start us off?Adam Pendley:Sure. I think it's interesting. We talk around the country about the active shooter event. We obviously never want to give any honor to the person that is committing this terrible act. And we even say that when the officers are first addressing the active threat, we don't care what the motivation is. We don't care that the person has issues. We just have to stop that active threat.But the truth of the matter is, very shortly after getting the active threat engaged, there are investigators and those that have to ... Command has to worry about what is the nature of this attack. Is our entire community under attack? Is this a one-off domestic violence type incident? And just like saving lives is everyone's job, figuring out what happened at the scene is also everyone's job. So those first responding officers are going to be getting immediate feedback from witnesses that, "Hey, that was Joe. He just got fired yesterday and you've got the right guy." Medics are going to be transporting survivors of the incident, and the survivors are going to be telling their story about what they saw and heard. Others that are helping on perimeter, even the PIO and others that are involved in the event are going to be getting a lot of information very quickly that becomes the job of intelligence to piece all that information together to try to figure out what is the nature of this attack and how can we either prevent an attack that might be happening, or at least begin our investigation immediately. And it feeds into all of those things.Bill Godfrey:Leanna, Adam mentioned a couple things on the fire/EMS side in terms of patient care. What are some of the things that jump out at you that really the fire/EMS service needs to be concerned about and watching for on these things?Leeanna Mims:Right. And I agree. For a long time, we believed that intelligence was strictly a law enforcement function. And that's just so far from the truth. The intelligence that you can bring in changes everything that you do strategically, tactically, and when you're talking about looking at a global picture of that, everybody is going to be trained on what intelligence is. And if you have some sort of a program that does do that, such as an ILO, an intelligence liaison officer program, and all of your people are trained in that, then they know what they're looking for and when to bring it back. No matter what type of situation that you're working in.And the other piece of that that we sometimes take for granted is we don't always pay attention to what the media is reporting. We pay attention to what we're telling the media, what kind of statements we want to go out, but a lot of times, the media can work so much faster than any intelligence resources can that we might have on scene. They have just as many contacts as we do, and from local to local, state to state, even internationally. So they can start getting answers and digging quickly, and if you don't have somebody monitoring that media, there could be things out there that are being told that you haven't picked up on.So with that, I'll leave it to somebody else to talk about the key spots to be able to monitor that probably within the dispatch center if you're talking about an active shooter event, which that's primarily what we do here. But if somebody is in the communications center and working as an intelligence officer, intelligence liaison, there might be some things there that they pick up from the media that they could relay back that helps with the response and helps law enforcement. And I'll defer that as to what that help could be.Stephen Shaw:And, Bill, talking about intelligence not being a law enforcement specific job, one of the questions that comes up a lot, not just for active shooters but for just calls in general that law enforcement responds to, what information is important? And the answer is, at some point, all of it is important. So if you have people that are responding to an active shooter specifically, there's going to be a lot of information that's coming in at a very fast rate. Your firefighters, your medics, even some of your emergency managers may be gathering some information that they need to be empowered to pass up to someone who is putting all that information together. Because whether it's for intelligence for the scene that we're working currently, as far as are we going to have another incident, are we going to have a second suspect or whatever, at some point during the investigative process, all that information is going to become important. What did you see? What did you hear? What were the statements made? Any of that information is going to be used later.So our response partners who are maybe not law enforcement need to understand that all that information is important to us, and they don't need to be afraid or shy about sharing that information with the command post or with the investigators there.Adam Pendley:Right. And so I think those are both great points, and I think what its key during the initial response that we're talking about is that there has to be mechanisms in place at the scene. So that intelligence section ultimately, like Bill said when he opened us up here, is that it's going to be a large function. You're going to have lots of different people all working together to try to gather that intelligence information. So when you train to this, you have to have a mechanism in place for all of these sources of information that you've talked about to bring those pieces together and paint that larger picture. So I think that's really important.Bill Godfrey:I think this is a fascinating line of thought, and I want to chase it down a little bit. So one of the things that we so often say, I think, in every class is at these events, at a minimum you have three crime scenes that you're going to have to look at and investigate. Adam, Steve, one of you, let's talk a little bit about that and then dive into that a little bit.Adam Pendley:So I think the three scenes, you have the crisis site itself, right? And there's a lot of focus on that, especially early on. But the moment you're able to take the first breath from that, you have to realize that the suspect arrived at that location in some form of transportation. So that becomes a focus, especially if there's a vehicle there at the scene. There's a lot of information that can be gleaned from the suspect's vehicle.And then the suspect lives somewhere, so where the suspect came from. Oftentimes, we've seen in many of these incidents where the suspect has already committed some sort of terrible act against a family member or something back at home, and we've also discovered that when you finally do make it to the suspect's residence, that they have bomb-making materials and other things along those lines. And, again, it branches off into multiple areas of intelligence from there.Stephen Shaw:And one of the things that a good intelligence section will really help out with those three incidents is figuring out who this person is, what their background is, or have we already dealt with this person at some point. Has another agency dealt with them that we've not even heard about? Because the chances of all three of those scenes being in the same jurisdiction are fairly slim. A lot of times, they come from neighboring towns, neighboring counties, or maybe they'll come from the same county, but they're in a city and they live in an unincorporated area. So now we're having to deal with the Sheriff's Department, whereas a police department is responding to the actual scene.So has someone else dealt with this person, and what did they see? Did this person make some statements that they have bomb-making materials? Do we have purchases somewhere? And then when we're already dealing with som

Episode 35: Rural ResponseA discussion about how small and rural communities can respond and structure their response to active shooter events.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your host of the podcast and today's topic we are going to talk about active shooter response and active shooter incident management in smaller communities or rural communities where there's not a lot of resources. I've got with me today three of the C3 Pathways instructors. We've got with is Joe Ferrara, who has not been in for a while. Joe, it's good to see you back here. Thanks for being here.Joe Ferarra:Good to be back.Bill Godfrey:Absolutely, and we've got Adam Pendley from law enforcement. So Joe's with fire, I guess I should say that, fire EMS. We got Adam Pendley, one of our law enforcement instructors. Adam, good to see you.Adam Pendley:Yes, sir. Nice to be here.Bill Godfrey:All right. So guys, the question of the day is, and the discussion point that we want to have is for those communities out there that are smaller communities, or rural communities, that don't have a lot of depth and resources, how can they still respond to these events and structure their response in a way? And what I'd like to do just so the audience can kind of follow along is kind of follow the checklist process in terms of the flow of the thing, which is going to lead us starting off with contact teams. So Adam, talk to us about some of the challenges when you have a limited number of officers, how do you stretch those resources for your contact teams and to do the security work needs to be done?Adam Pendley:Sure. I think for initial response to an active shooter event, that initial contact to address the threat, one of the things we find when there's less officers working in a geographical area is this idea that there's an increased chance that you're going to have a solo officer entry. So we'll start there. Across the country, many departments are training to the idea and adjusting policy to the idea that we may have to have a solo officer entry to at least put something down range to stop the killing, to get the suspect's attention off of the innocents and maybe toward the officer so they can address that threat. So solo officer entry is a conversation that all departments, but especially those that might not have as many resources on duty at a particular time of day or in a particular geographical area, they have to consider solo officer response.Then as that additional officer arrives, that linkup procedure and understanding how do you turn it from a solo officer response into that first contact team. And of course, when we use the term contact team, in a perfect world, we want that to be three, four, or five officers. But a contact team might just be those two officers. Both of them who are doing the security work with their weapons platform, facing the threat, eliminating the threat, somebody available to talk on the radio, and somebody... The two of them being able to kind of get that 540 degree security with each other, an extra set of eyes is always important. But that might be the entire size of your contact team. And as additional officers arrive, maybe from another jurisdiction, they know to form up as a second contact team that may also only be two officers.So I think it's important to be creative and tactically sound and realize that as we attend training and exercises, just be cognizant of the fact that how do we change our training to address making entry into a building with just one or two officers, and how does that change the tactics a little bit. With time, more officers will arrive. And so, how do you transition to building some additional teams on top of that?And then that gets us into our discussion, which I know we've discussed quite a bit, about the fifth man, that tactical group supervisor. And it's not always a hard number. In some instances the third officer arrives, might have to stay outside in and coordinate the resources that are eventually going to arrive instead of having all resources inside. Or some communities that we've worked with their plan is to have all on-duty resources go inside and then as additional resources arrive, hopefully one of them can extricate themselves from inside the scene and then come back out to kind of take that fifth man function. So it's very jurisdiction specific on how you get creative.Bill Godfrey:So Robert, I'm curious, Adam's talking about reducing the contact team size, which obviously I think makes sense when your resource is constrained. What are the implications for that in training? When you're trying to train your law enforcement guys how to work in contact teams is there a difference in the way you need to train them and in the tactics that they need to use, if it's just a couple of them?Robert McMahan:Well, I think the biggest difference is we're actually doing it in training and working through what it looks like to have smaller numbers of officers on a contact team. And often our rural small jurisdictions don't get the same amount of training because they don't have the trained dollars. But when you're looking ahead towards this kind of incident, you've got to make that sacrifice somehow to get that training done so they know what they're doing. Officers that are responding in these hot situations that don't have that trainer are more at risk to getting injured or killed and not solving the situation without that training. So trainings got to be the first thing that to be addressed in these.Bill Godfrey:Okay. So we've got a couple there on how to reduce some of the team size, looking at solo officer entry and reducing the team sizes. I think everybody can kind of nod your head and see that. Do we still need a tactical, do we still need a fifth man when we're resource constrained? What do you think?Adam Pendley:So, yes, absolutely. The thing that is very important to realize is that the call for help has gone out so more resources are coming and if you only have three or four deputies or police officers that are on duty and they're all inside, and we know from experience that many of our buildings, especially in rural areas, once you get inside a building, the radio doesn't work anymore. So now you have follow on resources that are entering blindly if they don't have someone outside as a guide or a gatekeeper to what's going on. And a lot of our radio systems, you'll have a car to car type function that would work well so you can have two or three officers inside and that third or fourth officer that's outside that can use that car to car frequency to establish what's going on inside to establish a strategy of some sort.So when those mutual aid officers finally arrive, or even from a callback situation, we know in some communities, they have a plan to call officers at home and they quickly throw on a gun belt and there and out the door they go to the scene. And when that officer arrives, they really do need that tactical direction. So I'm not comfortable sacrificing the tactical group supervisor in these situations because I've said this many times, one more gun inside the crisis site might not be nearly as valuable as managing the 10 more guns that are on their way.Bill Godfrey:That's a really interesting point. And Adam, it kind of reminds me of the one group we work with. It was a very rural county out in the Midwest, and on a good day, they had three law enforcement officers on duty, four if you counted the sheriff, if the sheriff himself happened to be there. And they actually, after they went through training with their volunteer fire department, came to an arrangement with their volunteer fire department that all of the armed officers would go down range as quickly as possible to try to deal with the threat, and it would be the fire department's responsibility to take care of all the outside stuff, to get all the incident management positions stood up and kind of coordinate all of those other items on the checklist that needed to get done.And then as soon as the officers that were down range felt like they had just a little bit of stability on controlling the threat and it was warm enough, they would then have one officer back out and go grab the medics to kind of bring them in. I thought that was a pretty... I thought it was pretty creative, and quite honestly, a fascinating look into the mindset of a rural community who's used to having to rely on each other and make things work. I mean, I can think of any number of city or metro agencies where the idea that law enforcement would delegate those tasks to the fire department would just be crazy. But I don't know. I thought it was pretty interesting way. Robert, how does that strike you?Robert McMahan:There's a lot of things that can be done to spread the workload to maybe some unconventional areas. Everybody's got some form of road and bridge that can be brought into help control perimeter as far as access at least, maybe not the security element, but they can provide that access control to the scene and around the command post and other areas. You've got civilians within your community that may be formed into groups, that may be able to be accessed to help out with some things like a reunification program.You could get reunification on the school side, but you can also get some pieces of that from various civilian groups that come in and help staff some of those positions. So, they've got to be creative in how they can fill those things with maybe some non-commission personnel in some of those areas. And planning ahead is a big part of it because in a lot of rural areas, there's wildlife officers, there's forest service officers that we don't normally think about in these responses, and they may not even be on the channel to hear the call for help. So in the planning part of it, if they're thinking about, "Hey, there's these types of officers out in the area that we can maybe call in on." Think about calling them early on in the response.Bill Godfrey:Interesting. So before we get too far afield, down range on the other stuff, because you mentioned a couple of things I want to come back to,

Episode 34: 5 Common MistakesA discussion about five common mistakes in active shooter events response and active shooter incident management.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast, my name is Bill Godfrey, I'm your host of the podcast. Today's topic we are going to talk about five common mistakes in active shooter events response and active shooter incident management. I've got with me three of the instructors from C3 Pathways, Stephen Shaw from law enforcement, Steve thanks for coming it.Stephen Shaw:Thanks for having me, Bill.Bill Godfrey:Absolutely. We got Tom Billington on the Fire EMS side, Tom good to see you again.Tom Billington:Good morning.Bill Godfrey:And Robert McMahan from the law enforcement side, Robert good to see you.Robert McMahan:Good to be here again, thanks.Bill Godfrey:You doing well today?Robert McMahan:I am.Bill Godfrey:All right, fantastic. So today's topic, five common mistakes. And I'm going to take these in the order of how the response goes and not necessarily which ones are the biggest sins if you will. But the first one I want to talk about, and Tom I'm going to ask you to highlight on this one a little bit, is dispatcher training. Dispatchers can do a whole lot to help you in these events and can help you avoid mistakes if you provide them the training, and this is one that obviously has to be taken care of pre-event. We teach our guys on the ground, our responders on the ground what the benchmarks are that we're generally looking for which is the contact teams are downrange, our threat is neutralized or there's no active threat anymore, we got our RTFs up, they get an ambulance exchange point established and patients start getting transported, those are kind of the key benchmarks we're trying to get them to look at. And it's important for dispatch to know about those, but there's some other key benchmarks that dispatch probably wants to hear to make sure that we're on the right track. Tom, tell us a little bit about those.Tom Billington:Definitely. We have to remember that the dispatchers are the eyes and eyes for all of us, Fire EMS, law enforcement, and so dispatch needs to make sure that they are telling everybody what's going on. A big thing's staging location, if a staging is established, where is it located? Who has established it? And we need to make sure that again, law enforcement, fire and EMS know that information, it's put out there, because eventually we want everybody to report to staging and not to the scene. And so getting that information transmitted as soon as possible is very, very important. It's important that benchmarks such as when the first arriving officer arrives on the scene, obviously that's an important benchmark to note. When our contacts teams have entered or made contact with the bad guy or bad people, things like that, having those notes and benchmarks and again transmitting them not just to law enforcement but to fire, the fire guys need to know also, "Hey, the bad guy may be down," or, "Hey, there's shooting going on," or, "Here's the description of a bad person." So things like that, again, just remembering we're all on one team and sending that information to both sides and continually updating it.And you also want to make sure that we have the elapsed time noted and transmitted to both sides. It's important to know after about 10 minutes letting everybody know, "Total scene time 10 minutes folks." Then, "15 minutes folks, 20 minutes folks." Because many times I've been on incidents that last several hours and unless the dispatcher will remind me of how long we've been there, I kind of lose track of time. And we are dealing with not just the bad guy but we're going against the clock trying to save lives. So having that reminder from dispatch, that cue that so many minutes have passed, is an important part of dispatch.Robert McMahan:When I was working, we had this active shooter incident management training and I included our dispatchers in that and I encouraged them to keep that checklist at their work station so that if they weren't hearing some of those things going on, like if we didn't establish staging early, they know what we needed, I encourage them to ask, "Where would you like staging? Where would you like the command post?" To help us remember to get some of those benchmarks done and help drive that incident towards success.Stephen Shaw:And a lot of times on scene, those conversations are happening face to face or maybe over the phone but they just don't make it to dispatch, and it's up to the first responders to make sure they're putting that out to the dispatchers to that they know that so they can relay it to other people.Bill Godfrey:So Tom let me make sure I recap those ones that you hit. So we want our dispatchers to be familiar with the benchmarks, and as Robert said really, really important that they are empowered to know if we're five, seven minutes into the incident and nobody's said where we want staging, probably need to ask about that. Do we have a command post set up or it's not clear that we do or we don't have a location. Updating information on the suspect.Robert McMahan:I think that's important for the cops too because we're typically driven towards getting to the bad guy, but we also have some rescue responsibilities in there and being reminded that, "Hey, we're already 10 minutes into this and we haven't started getting RTFs downrange," or whatever it is that helps rescue those patients, get them to the hospitals, that will kind of help put a little gas on our pedals to accomplish some of those things that help that.Bill Godfrey:Yeah, what we're looking for is all patients transported by the 20 minute mark, and that's from the 20 minute of the initiation of the incident, that's a pretty aggressive timeline and if you start wasting minutes here and there, you're not going to hit that 20 minute mark. So that's I think a really great role for dispatch is to keep that clock every present in everyone's mind. All right, so for the dispatcher training, including dispatchers in training, providing them some education on the checklist, giving them some benchmarks, empowering them to be able to say to whoever's running the scene, "Where did you want staging set up? Can you advise your command post location?" Those kind of key things.And I think the other one, and I want to hit on this, is that it's really important for the law enforcement dispatcher and the fire and/or EMS dispatcher if you've got three of them, they need to coordinate that back channel stuff a lot. So as information gets updated on the law enforcement channel, it needs to get passed over to the fire EMS side and vis versa. It's entirely possible that fire might get to the area and set up a staging location and if they do we can shortcut one of the other issues which is having more than one staging location, we can shortcut that by dispatchers passing that to the other discipline and kind of coordinating that. All right, so that's number one, dispatcher training.Number two, getting control of the incident early as part of that initial response. And this really involves the idea of the fifth man, of getting somebody in that tactical position early in the first few minutes. Robert, you want to talk to us a little bit about that?Robert McMahan:Sure. The biggest problem I think we have in law enforcement I think is getting our arms around the incident and having some control early on. And every one of them I've been to, there's always a whole bunch of cops running in to take care of the bad guy and they're trained to do that, but somebody's got to get control of that early on so that we can organize our response and be more effective at it. And I think one of the key issues I've seen is upper law enforcement command buying into and trusting this fifth man concept or the tactical operations group. And typically what I see is they don't trust a line level guy to be that fifth guy or to be that tactical supervisor early on in the incident. This position is not about who has SWAT experience or who is the best tactically minded person, this is about getting some control over the contact teams and at least tracking where they're going, what they're doing, so they don't run into each other and have a blue on blue and organizing effectively their response. So they're covering the campus and getting to the threat and starting to provide those security measures so that we can get other things done like get RTFs in there.I think part of what lends itself to that problem is unfortunately upper law enforcement command doesn't attend a lot of these trainings, and they don't have confidence in what's being trained or they simply don't understand it or don't know it. And I think as upper law enforcement command, if we would dedicate ourselves to this type of training so that we can understand the process and trust the process, I think it would help out to resolve that issue.Stephen Shaw:Robert's talking a lot about that fifth man, that tactical position. And that's one that's really key for something like this. There's a big gap between your incident command and your actual officers who are running contact teams or RTF or perimeter. There's a lot of stuff that happens in the meantime, and that tactical position really helps that incident commander to take a lot of stuff off his place to say, "Now I can deal with these higher level issues." Politicians or upper management or whatever the case may be, and let that tactical person deal with the boots on the ground. It's a tough balance because we're so programmed from an early stage, you to the academy, we talked about teamwork, you're working at a team but essentially you're expected to do this job by yourself. You ride around in a car by yourself, you show up to work by yourself, you go to calls by yourself, you stop cars by yourself. And then for this, we're asking you to say, "Look, just pull the reigns back a little bit and see if there's something else that needs to be done."And it's tough to balance because you want to get in there, you want to address the bad guy, you want to start treating people but at some point once yo

Episode 33: Emergency ManagementA discussion about the role of emergency management and the emergency manager in active shooter events.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, I'm your host of the podcast. Today we're going to be talking about the role of emergency management and the emergency manager in active shooter events. Something that doesn't always get a lot of coverage, but certainly an important topic. We're glad to have you with us today. I've got with me three of the instructors from C3 Pathway. Stephen Shaw out of North Carolina. Steve, it's good to see you again. Been awhile.Stephen Shaw:Good to see you, Bill. Thank you for having me.Bill Godfrey:Absolutely. And we've got back with us Robert McMahan. Retired out of Colorado, now living in Oklahoma.Robert McMahan:Yeah, it's a great place to be. Thanks for having me again.Bill Godfrey:And a familiar voice, we've got with us Bruce Scott out of Jacksonville, retired, but down here in the house. Bruce, how you doing?Bruce Scott:I'm doing well, Bill, and yourself?Bill Godfrey:Doing well, doing well. Guys, thanks for coming in to talk about this with us today. So as I said in the opening, the subject here is emergency management and the role it plays in an active shooter event, and I kind of want to set the stage here a little bit as we start to talk about this topic. Senior-ranking officials in law enforcement, fire, EMS certainly understand the role of emergency management. Usually have some sort of involvement with emergency management. But as you move down towards the line level, Bruce, would you say it's fair to say they're aware of emergency management but not necessarily real clear on what they can do for us and where we fit it?Bruce Scott:Absolutely, and I'll share with you, Bill, we're both from Florida and most of your folks in Florida, your typical first responders in Florida, they're going to tell you that emergency operation centers are for hurricanes. That's it.Bill Godfrey:And wildfires.Bruce Scott:Yeah.Bill Godfrey:Yeah.Robert McMahan:Yeah, in Colorado that was for snow storms.Bill Godfrey:Oh, there you go. What'd you guys use them for in North Carolina, floods?Stephen Shaw:Hurricanes, floods.Bill Godfrey:Hurricanes? Okay. All right, fair enough. So what we're going to talk about today, gang, is the role of emergency management in an active shooter event. And it's actually very significant and very consequential and can make a pretty big difference in your incident, especially if you fail to think about it early on. Bruce, I'm going to go to you to start us off here a little bit and kind of set the stage for the audience on some of the challenges that will come up on nearly every active shooter event that go a whole lot better if you've got emergency management there with you.Bruce Scott:Well, Bill, you mentioned if we have this active shooter incident, and the role of emergency management will play, but let's talk about also the role that they might have, or should have, or could have prior to this incident ever happening in your community. Emergency management typically has mechanisms to bring trainings. All right? They're the ones working the grounds. They're the ones building these relationships and partnerships across organizational boundaries that can allow us to train and work together. So emergency management is actually a player long before that incident ever happens, and I think that's important.Bill Godfrey:I think that's a really good point, the pre-event involvement. What are some of the other places that jump out in your head for pre-event involvement? Resources-Bruce Scott:Yeah.Bill Godfrey:Relationships with NGOs?Bruce Scott:Absolutely. So you know, your faith-based organizations, your volunteer organizations, your other agencies that may live and work in your community. There's a really good chance that emergency management has previously established relationships with those organizations. They also have planned with them, right? They've worked and built those relationships. We talked years ago about the whole community approach to emergency management and the whole community approach brought in all these NGOs, all these faith-based organizations, into emergency management planning. As well as the individuals that live and work in our communities.Bill Godfrey:Schools?Bruce Scott:Absolutely. I know you're giving me the cross-eyed look like I missed that, right? I didn't grab the low-hanging fruit and I apologize. I will share with you, yeah, not only... I remember a story when I worked in emergency management where one of our school had a active shooter situation happen in that school, and so every school in our district basically started calling emergency management and asking us what are our plans for reunification of our students? Looking to emergency management not only to have a plan but already know what that plan is and already be able to give them a blueprint of what that plan was to reunify their studentsAnd so we realize we missed the bus, really, on building those relationships with our schools and letting them know, "Hey this is your plan. We'll help you develop, give you some templates. We can give you some best practices, but this has got to be tailor-made to your own school." And we were really successful with that over the next two years and building those relationships with our schools. Long before it became the soup du jour, or active shooters became the soup du jour, was building those relationships with the schools to help them develop their plans, working with our law enforcement partners to talk about security. It might happen... Some of the security practices they can put in place in their schools to make them safer. But then drilling, and working, and exercising with those schools to make sure that the school board, law enforcement, fire, EMS, emergency management, we were all on the same page.Bill Godfrey:I think that's a great list of stuff, and I want to come back and pick up on a couple of those. But before we do, I think I want to go back to the very beginning of this thing. So, Steve, Robert, I'm going to come to you guys to talk a little bit about those operational actions that are going to go on for pretty much any active shooter event. And I'm not talking about the first 15 minutes, 20 minutes of neutralizing the threat and the initial response and taking care of the injured. In most cases, that's going to happen, for better or worse, fairly quickly, we hope. Talk to me a little bit about what happens. So you've got... Your threat's either neutralized or not a factor, and you've got your last of your injured transported. What are the things that's going to happen at that point moving forward? Take me through the operations of that.Robert McMahan:Well, you're going to have impact on the local area as far as transportation, effects on businesses, and you're going to have to have some of those relationships ironed out beforehand. As I'm sitting here talking about it, I'm thinking about Las Vegas. You look at that shooting that occurred there, and if emergency management hadn't had some working relationship with the casinos and businesses that were impacted by that shooting, I think it would've been a lot bigger disaster than what it was. There's crime scenes to be investigated, and there's just a lot of logistics that go on supporting that crime scene investigation and managing that incident in the aftermath of the shooter and rescuing victims. And puts law enforcement on post to manage crime scene, to take care of victims, to move people around, and it just consumes a lot of resources that puts those people out there for a long time, and that takes support. It takes food, and shelter, and all kinds of things that help make that successful and support those first responders and community while they're out there dealing with that aftermath.Stephen Shaw:I think that's one thing that gets taken for granted, he mentioned the crime scene. This is an active crime scene that has to be processed. We have people there, there's going to be bags laying around that we have to check and search. What do we do with these people? If this is an active business or a school, what about the people that were there? We have to interview all those people, and now we have to follow up with them. We talk about reunification a lot for schools, but what if this happens in a business where people are... And one of the things that we have locally is a lot of people work at the university, and they park off-site and they ride a shuttle.So how are we going to get these people back there? So a lot of that, just the logistics of working a crime scene that large with that many people involved, I think, is taken for granted. That's where emergency management, like Robert was saying, you're going to have police officers that are going to be on post for a long time, and I think a lot of times people don't understand that. And I think that's where emergency management comes in to get these people food, relief, shelter, water, things like that that a lot of times, just on the patrol level, you don't think about. Or even at the first line supervisor level, you don't think about that kind of stuff.Robert McMahan:And the civilians, too, you know? I already mentioned Las Vegas, but think of a mall or anything else like that that's a business where people flee the scene or they go shelter and their transportation or belongings, or whatever it is becomes part of that crime scene and they can't get to it. Those people are going to need support to get reestablished somewhere else or in a shelter until they can get back to normal.Bill Godfrey:I think these are all really great examples of the kinds of things that emergency management can and needs to be involved in. It's interesting, Steve and Robert, you guys are talking mostly about the impacts at the site. And Bruce mentioned the community impact, and that's one of the things that I don't know that always gets really well-considered or thought out of. Yes, we have all these responders at the scene. We're going to have needs at the scene. We're going to have logistic

Episode 32: Command Post vs Tactical, Triage and TransportAn important discussion on the fundamental difference between the work that gets done at the tactical, triage, and transport area versus the work that gets done at the command post.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, I'm the host of the podcast and I'm here today with three of the C3 Pathways instructors I got with me on the law enforcement side, Ron Otterbacher. Ron, thanks for coming in.Ron Otterbacher:Thanks for having me.Bill Godfrey:Absolutely. We also got Don Tuten, coming in from Jacksonville. Don, how you doing?Don Tuten:Hey Bill, doing great. Thank you.Bill Godfrey:And a familiar voice to many of you Mark Rhame, like myself on the fire EMS side. Mark, how's it going?Mark Rhame:Very good. Thanks Bill.Bill Godfrey:Okay. So, let's start off talking about what is the fundamental difference between the work that gets done at the tactical, triage, and transport area versus the work that gets done at the command post? Ron, why don't you start us off.Ron Otterbacher:Tactical operations, which I include triage, transport and tactical, they are focused on the tip of the spear, they're going after whatever the situation they face at that time, whether it be to provide Rescue Tack Force support, whether it be to stop address the driving force where in fact the command operation has got a broader perspective and they're looking at things well beyond that, how it may affect the community, how we communicate, what we want people to do, how we notify our political oversight group, which is so important in these situations. So, just their perspective is a little different, we all want the same end but how we go about it and we also understand that we don't just say, okay, tactical you go do what you want because there has to be some oversight.Don Tuten:Yeah. And I agree with that. And tactical, triage and transport is utilizing those resources that are currently on duty. They're utilizing what they have to make that problem go away. They're not looking at the command side of that broader cold zone answers to questions on political payment, how much of this is going to cost? What additional resources you're going to need that the tactical triage and transport is how do we fix this now, utilizing the resources that we have while operating in this hot and warm zone.Mark Rhame:In addition to that, the command post keeps the heat off of that tactical, triage and transport group because you do not want the police chief, the fire chief, the mayor, elected officials, their supervisors, coming to the scene and wanting to interact with those tactical, triage and transport individuals because they've got a right now, right now, problem, they're dealing with everything in that hot and warm zone and that's what that command post is going to do. They're going to deflect all that stuff and take care of it in addition to what Don and Otter said.Bill Godfrey:So Mark, why not just have the command post deal with all of it and just add some people to the command post? Why do we need to put some layers in here?Mark Rhame:Because it needs to be a true separation between the two. I mean, as I said before, tactical, triage and transport are dealing with all that stuff in that hot and warm zone. They are dealing with things that are right in their face and if they don't deal with them right now, right now, people will die. I mean, that's the bottom line. They've got to take care of those issues right now. The command posts can reevaluate stuff, they can look at it as Ron said as a broader picture, broader view if you will, and they can maybe make more calculated decisions based upon, what's going to happen an hour from now? What's going to happen 12 hours from now? And what do we need to accomplish those goals? But again, we've got that tactical, triage and transport, they're dealing with the things that are right in their face right now, which is that threat and all those people who have been injured.Bill Godfrey:So Ron, talk to us a little bit about what goes into deciding or what should go into deciding, I guess I should say where tactical, triage and transport should establish themselves and position themselves versus where we parked the command post.Ron Otterbacher:Again, as you look things out, I'll answer it probably in a different way though. The hardest transition I ever had professionally was going from being a tactical operator to being an incident commander because it was entirely different. I was used to being right there, taking care of the right now, right now, stuff and then I had to focus beyond the right now, right now stuff. It's a situation where the tactical operations whether it be triage, transport, whether it be the tactical group, they're using the tactics that are down there. Your command post representative may not be familiar with all the tactics so he has to count on the people that are downrange and say, these are our options and the commander weighs out those options say, okay, I agree with this house safe, can we do this? And they simply make a logical decision or at least the most logical decision they can make with the information that they're provided.Bill Godfrey:Don, you got any insights you want to add on that?Don Tuten:Yeah. I just want to say that the tactical, triage and transport and like Otter and both Mark said, is there downrange handling the right now, right now problem. They're not thinking about the little things like, is there a school in session? What am I going to do with the kids getting off the school bus that is two blocks away? What am I going to do about the library that's around the corner that's open 24, whatever the case may be. They're worried about that threat, that threat going mobilized or continuing, diminishing that threat as soon as possible. And then transporting those victims, if there is victims on scene, out of there as soon as possible and not the impact that it's having on the community. That is the command responsibility is diminishing that impact on the community, as well as supporting this incident and the first responders there, if this is an elongated event.Mark Rhame:But also think about it, if you didn't have two different groups dealing with this incident and you have a school administrator or that owner of the mall or that airport official administrator who comes to the scene and you've got this person, who's the tactical director or the tactical person and they're dealing with the right now, right now problem and now all of a sudden they got this person in their face asking them questions and saying, Hey, when are you going to reopen the mall? When are you going to allow me to bring planes back to the airport, all that stuff. They don't have time for that, they got to deal with that threat and all those people who are injured and clear in that building, that's why the command post can separate it and deal with those other issues in a more sterile environment, if you will in that cold zone.Bill Godfrey:Okay. So, tactical, triage and transport are handling that downrange piece, the hot zone and the warm zone. How close should they be? Because they're obviously, want to be close to the problem not in the problem but close to the problem and tactical is going to be the first one there, right? They're going to tactical is going to stand up a for triage and transport does, what goes into picking a spot?Don Tuten:I think tactical, triage and transport number one, they all work together. They have to be in a position where they can evaluate the scene whether it be visually, whether it can be within close proximity but they have to get a common operating picture that is clear to them. They can't be miles and miles away because then they're operating off communication and we all know what happens with communication. So, they have to have that visual, they have to see what's going on, they have to make determinations based upon their experience and the resources that they have. So, they do need to be in that warm zone area, they need to be in an area to where they can obviously, they can redirect if possible but they have to be close enough to actually make those tactical sound decisions on like I said, doing tactical work, as well as removing patients.Mark Rhame:Plus you got to give them the option if they choose to do so of doing a face to face direction on the contact teams or RTFs or any of the teams that come into that location. Have them come to their location and say, this is where I want you. Here's a map, here's where you need to go and go forth and conquer. If you're a mile away, you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to give them that face to face direction.Bill Godfrey:So, we're talking about them being edge of the warm zone?Don Tuten:Yeah. I think depending on your location of your incident would dictate a lot of how far away that edge of warm zone is, but I think that's a fair valuation.Ron Otterbacher:I think, where you can say fairly safely ensure that your triage and transport can be there with you and doing a relatively safe fashion because we surely don't want to put them in a kill zone and because we want to be close and maybe we should be, then we put everyone in harms way. We've got to weigh the two out and make the best decision for the operation.Mark Rhame:Consider that if you neutralize that initial threat, you don't know because you haven't cleared the rest of the building out. Is there another threat? Is there something else right around the corner? Is there a secondary device? So, obviously you don't want to stick that triage and transport person so close that they are in harm's way. Obviously, we don't want to send anyone into that area let them be in harm's way, but obviously that tactical officer has that advantage in the very beginning. So, whatever place you decide, you've got to have that ability to hunker down, hide behind something large but it's close enough that you can get that visual and give direction.Don Tuten:And be fluid based upon the intelligence coming back out of that incident, be fluid. Be fluid to make adjustmen