Hello everyone, thank you for joining us for the Active Shooter Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events Part 3 webinar. A few housekeeping notes to get us started. All attendees are in listen-only mode. We will be using the Q&A function today to gather questions for our speaker. We will not be using the raise hand function. Please submit questions through the Q&A and interact with other attendees by posting comments through the chat. When using chat, just be sure to select all panelists and attendees from the drop-down above the message box before submitting your chat so everyone can see it. This webinar is being recorded. Please know we will be sending all registrants to the webinar recording and PowerPoint slides via email in the next couple of days. Our speaker for today is Jason Grable with Greenwood Indiana Police Department. I'll turn it over to Jason to get us started. Good afternoon and welcome. I'm Jason Grable. I'm the public relations officer for Greenwood PD. A little background about my agency. We are a 75-man department and we are situated 10 miles south from downtown Indianapolis. I've been teaching active shooters since 2013 and in July of 2022, we actually had an active shooter event at the Greenwood Park Mall in my community. So this hits really close to home. We'll go ahead and get started with the program. Civilian Response to Active Shooter Event, or CRACE is the acronym, was developed, if you haven't figured out, this is the first time I've been presenting via Zoom. This is typically a live presentation with a live audience for the last nine years. Civilian Response to Active Shooter was developed by the ALERT group, which you can see in the bottom right-hand corner, is the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Agency. They are based out of Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. The program is funded by the U.S. Department of Justice. The topic we're about to cover is extremely violent in nature. All the video and audio excerpts in my presentation are unfiltered, uncut, and real. So I must warn everyone that at any time, if you feel uncomfortable by what you are hearing or seeing on the screen, please pause the audio, step away from your device until the clip is played out. Also, I will stick around after the presentation for Q&A. I know there's a Q&A option available, but I will not be able to monitor that through the presentation. But it's fine for you to go ahead and put your questions there so we don't forget them. Why are we here? This is January 9th of 2015. This is east side of Paris, a kosher supermarket after lunchtime. If you don't think about, if you don't plan for an active shooter event, how will you respond? You see the gentleman in the forefront did the best he could. And there's a young man in the back who will eventually just play dead. Now again that was Paris. This is a little close to home for me. This is the food court of the Greenwood Park Mall. I'm born and raised here in Greenwood and grew up in that mall. And here's the audio from that day. Listen, where in the mall are they? By the food court? Yes. Is it a male or a female? I need you to give me information. From what I can tell, from what I can see, it looks like a male. A male? Okay, where's the male? He's dead on the ground. Is the male the one that was shooting? Yes. So somebody shot him? Yes. Who shot him? I'm sorry, but the active shooter was a male. A white male with a white t-shirt. A white male with a white t-shirt? Yes. They're on the way, ma'am. Let me get this information. Okay, the best thing you can do right now is give me this information. Where are you? I'm in the food court. I'm behind a key machine. Okay, stay where you are safe, okay? Alert and Texas State University have come up with Avoid, Deny, Defend. I implore you to take any and all active shooter training you can get. So if you sit in on a training that uses Run, Hide, Fight, fine. They're similar. They're identical in meaning. Alert obviously is academically driven, so their wording's a little different. They like Avoid versus Run because it doesn't leave out handicapped persons or wheelchair-bound people. And Deny instead of Hide because it's more active. They don't want you to hide under a table. They want you to get behind a locked door and barricade yourself in. And then Defend is identical to Fight. You have the right to defend your life or fight for your life. We will see this again. Two important things that I hope if you get nothing else out of the training is situational awareness is key. And you will respond during any catastrophic event, any disaster, based on three things. Your life experience, your training, and your preparation. So please, please, these are the things we will stress and work on throughout the program. The outline for today is Disaster Response Psychology. So for the first 15-20 minutes, we'll talk about what occurs to the human body and the human brain during a disaster. We'll talk briefly about active shooter events. Mainly two important ones that shape this training and shaped how law enforcement trains for active shooter events and response. And then lastly, we'll learn civilian response to active shooter events. How can civilians stay alive? This first part comes a lot from Amanda Ripley's book, The Unthinkable, published in 2008. Who survives when disaster strikes and why? It's the background science of how people behave in high-stress events. And Amanda wanted to know why. Why did this group of people survive when everyone else died? And that's what she spent her time researching. And what Amanda found, she found that every human will go through three stages of disaster response. And she found that those that get through all three phases and get to decisive moment fastest and have the best response plan, have the highest chance of survival. So we're going to talk about denial, deliberation, decisive moment individually. Denial is the number one people killer. Humans are really good at getting caught up in denial. We're really good at mitigating, not believing our eyes, especially when it's a disaster event unfolding in front of us. For example, 9-11, while the tower was actually on fire, many survivors reported that they logged out of their computers. They packed up their briefcase. They called family members. They talked to supervisors before getting out of the building, before evacuating. The average stall time was about six minutes. So humans are really, really good at denying what's actually going on around them. Amanda's, one of her mantras in the book is what you can do to stay alive, skip denial, go straight to deliberation. So here's the problem with denial. We have normalcy bias. So the human brain is an amazing organ. However, maybe it's one shortfall is that it likes to take perceived information and categorize it as normal or routine. For example, many survivors reported during active shooter events, they heard the gunshot. Unfortunately, they all attributed it to fireworks. They believed it was fireworks. And that's because of this normalcy bias. The brain has a much easier time processing someone utilizing fireworks versus someone murdering people. That's the problem with normalcy bias. Amanda wants us to skip denial, go straight to deliberation, step two. And during deliberation, what we do is we come up with our response plan or our survival plan. The problem is we just left denial. And we accepted that the event is actually a life or death situation unfolding in front of us. So now we have to contend with stress. This is a stress response spectrum. You'll see the stages below. We'll call 60 BPM resting heart rate, you know, stage one or white. And what happens as an event unfolds and based on the human, the person's life experience, training and preparation, we will all escalate up this stress spectrum at different rates. So a military veteran with multiple tours of duty is going to escalate way slower than even a law enforcement professional with 25 years experience. Because I fortunately have never had to survive an active shooter event personally. But someone say it's never been a stressful situation, maybe grew up in a small town. They're going to escalate way faster than even maybe a law enforcement officer or fireman would. So here we are condition white 60 BPM. Everything physiologically and psychologically is going to work as well as it should. But you elevate your heart rate just 30 beats a minute. We get the condition yellow and we begin to lose fine motor skills. Many of the survivors reported to Amanda that they were amazed how difficult it was to dial 911 on a smartphone. So you have the adrenaline up, you have the respiration increased, and you have the loss of, you know, the fine motor skills in your digits and your fingers. Elevate your heart rate 30 beats again, go to condition red. Now we begin to lose complex motor skills. So now we have less control of, say, our arms, our wrists, our hands. The caveat to condition red is this is the optimal fight or flight zone. We bleed less, we are faster and stronger than any other position on the chart. So the key is we don't go above 120 BPM or condition red. If we elevate 30 beats again, we go to condition gray. This is when cognitive shutdown begins to occur. This is when we get memory lapse, tunnel vision, auditory exclusion occurs. This is problematic because we are in deliberation and we are coming up with our survival plan. And if we lose cognitive function, then that is going to impair our ability to move forward. Condition black at 175 BPM is considered complete cognitive shutdown. This is when people lose bowel and bladder control. They freeze into place. Amanda said we have two brains. We have a human brain that we operate with 95% of our life, 98% of the time. It's very slow, it's very thoughtful, it's very flexible. It's our thinking brain. However, we also have this lizard brain, which is very fixed, emotional, fast and reactive. And at some point during a disaster or an active shooter event, we are going to transition from human brain to lizard brain because of stress. And whatever life experience, training and preparation you have, that's what your lizard brain has. That's the tool ability. That's the ability lizard brain has. The beauty of it is that when human brain is engaged, we can train our lizard brain. Station nightclub fire. This is February 20, 2003. You can see the four red highlighted points of exit. Number one is the main entrance. It's a double door vestibule. This is where everyone enters. You pay your driver fee and head into the bar. Now, this is a special night because the owner was able to get a great wife to come play. Now, in 2003, they were a little past their prime, but still a pretty big draw for a small facility such as this. Exit three, a very useful exit. However, the proximity to exit one deems it not exceptional. Exit four was semi-blocked on this evening because the owner wanted to impress the band. He hired a large bouncer to block that doorway and told everybody band only because their bus was parked out behind the stage. So it was out of play. Exit two in the kitchen is not even in public view. Now, the bar by fire code is allowed to have 200, but because the owner spent so much money getting great white, he allowed 268 people in the bar. And we are fortunate because there was a media person in the bar videotaping because he was doing a special on nightclub safety. Safety. I know what we can do. In the beginning, the evacuation was slow and orderly. However, once one person trips and falls in the vestibule, now chaos ensues. And that's panic. And Amanda said, at no time during the disaster can we panic. If we panic, we're dead. Fire department arrived, they put out the fire, 31 bodies were removed from that vestibule. As you saw in the video, the people are only stacked about waist high or chest high. And that's because the temperature variation of a single door threshold during an active fire can be room temperature at the floor and 1800 degrees Fahrenheit at the top. So nobody could survive above chest high in the doorway and the smoke and the heat were too great. 100 people lost their lives and perished. And again, I'm going to reiterate situational awareness. If you are going to a venue that you've never been to before, one of the ways to eliminate this situation is to walk the perimeter of the building or the venue or the restaurant and find two exits that are not the main entrance or main exit. Law enforcement, fire, military, we are constantly trained from day one, situational awareness. And that's whether we're on duty or we are out to dinner with our family. And that's exactly what we do when we go someplace we've never been before. The fire, you know, fire personnel do their job. All the exits are clearly marked with red and yellow or red and green signs. All you have to do is invest the time, walk the perimeter, find two exits that are not the main entrance, and then sit down and have dinner or enjoy your evening with your family. Situational awareness can keep you alive in a situation that just occurred in the video. When I'm out with my family, I will locate the other two exits because everyone else is going to the main entrance. How can we stay calm during deliberation? We're trying to come up with a safety plan. What can we do? And Amanda spoke with survivors and found that, number one, just verbally calm yourself. You tell yourself, today's not my day. We are going to survive this. Several teachers that Amanda spoke to said that's all she did to the classroom. They spoke repetitively and telling the students, today we're going to be fine. We're going to make it through this. It's his day to die, not ours. Combat breathing, highly effective, theoretically simple, but if you don't practice, very difficult to do during a stressful situation. Combat breathing is simply slow inhalation, three or four seconds, hold it for two. Slow exhalation, three or four seconds, hold it for two. You can control your breathing with combat breathing. You can lower your BPM by 30 beats a minute. That can keep you out of condition gray and condition black. Another helpful tip is shifting emotion. We learned this from some of the teachers that Amanda interviewed. And at the onset of the event, the number one emotion is fear. Everyone's going to feel fear. But as the event wears on, some of the teachers reported that they began to shift from fear to anger. And anger is a more useful emotion because it made their decision making and their actions to be more fitting in line with staying alive. So as quickly as you can shift your emotion from fear to anger, focusing that anger on the threat. Staying physically and mentally fit also improves your chance because obviously you can handle stress and combat panic. Deliberation, other things to do, mental scripting. This is huge. All my teachers, every school in my community has gone through craze. In fact, they get it every two years. And mental scripting is one that I really preach to my teachers to utilize during their prep period. And mental scripting is nothing more than mentally walking through a scenario in your head and how you would deal with it, how you would successfully deal with the scenario. It could be an angry student brings a gun into school. It could be an angry parent walking down the hallway. I tell them to change it up constantly, come up with as many different scenarios they can. And every time they mentally walk through how they would treat the scenario and successfully beat the scenario, they are adding ammunition, they're adding tools and options to their lizard brain. So when stress kicks in, they have all these scenarios already locked into their lizard brain. And to physically practice walking through different scenarios only reinforces it. Something else very important that practice alludes to is I don't know what venue you work in, if you're in a hospital setting or an office setting, but you are there 40 hours a week. It's your responsibility to know the location of every exit in your workplace. And I tell my teachers that at least once a semester, I want them to walk every exit in the building, open the door, scan what's outside, and then move on to the next one. Because under stress, they're not going to be able to think about which exits the next one, the next closest. But if you utilize those exits routinely and walk to them, you are training your lizard brain so that under stress, you won't have to think about it. Your brain has the capability of pulling that information up. You just have to take the time and the investment into training your lizard brain. Very important. Situational awareness and know all points of egress, points of exit in places that you are routinely spending long periods of time, work, home, et cetera. Decisive moment. This is the one, this is the coup de grace in which Amanda says the faster you get to the decisive moment and the better your action plan, the better your chance of survival. Amanda said the worst thing you can do is nothing at all, just wait to die. She also says that during, you know, there is no perfect response plan, there is no perfect survival plan. So don't put that kind of pressure on yourself. You are, you know, we're in a terrible disaster situation and you have to come up with the best response plan you can at that time and go for it. You have to act. You can't second guess yourself. You have to act and go with vengeance and don't look back. That'll increase your chance of survival as well. I'm going to play this audio clip here and I want you to listen to Captain Sullenberger's voice, his inflection, his tone. This man has 32 years of flight experience. Life experience matters. Staying calm matters. Cactus 1539. It's returning back towards LaGuardia. Okay. You need to return to LaGuardia. Turn left heading of 220. 220. Tower, stop your departure. It's got an emergency. Returning back to LaGuardia. Okay. you need to return to low, go ahead and turn left heading of, uh, two-two-zero. Two-two-zero. Tower, stop your departure, it's got an emergency returning. Who is it? It's fifteen-twenty-nine, he, uh, bird strike, he lost all engine, he lost the thrust in the engines, he's returning immediately. Tact, it's fifteen-twenty-nine which engines? He lost thrust in both engines, he said. Got it. Tact, it's fifteen-twenty-nine, if we can get it for you, do you want to try to land one-eighty-one-three? One-eighty-one, we may end up in the hot zone. All right, Tact, it's fifteen-forty-nine, it's going to be left traffic to runway three-one. Unable. Okay, what do you need to land? Tact, it's fifteen-forty-nine, runway four is available if you want to make left traffic to runway four. Eighty-eight, go ahead. I'm not sure we can make any runway, uh, what's over to our right, anything in New Jersey, maybe Teterboro? Okay, yeah, off your right side is Teterboro Airport. Do you want to try to go to Teterboro? Yes. Teterboro, uh, Empire, actually LaGuardia Departure, emergency inbound. Tact, it's fifteen-twenty-nine, turn right two-eight-zero, you can land runway one at Teterboro. We can't do it. Okay, which runway would you like at Teterboro? We're going to be in the hot zone. I'm sorry, say again, Tact? Tact, it's fifteen-forty-nine, radar contact is lost. You've also got Newark Airport off your two o'clock and about seven miles. Eagle five-forty-seven-eighteen, turn left heading two-one-zero. Two-one-zero, uh, forty-seven-eighteen. Uh, I think he said he was going in the hot zone. Pretty amazing. Life experience, training, and preparation are the three most important things. Also, before you get to decisive moment, um, you know, utilizing practice and going through scenarios in your head helps your lizard brain react during stressful events such as this. So just keep that in mind. Now we're going to talk about a couple of active shooter events, mainly, um, especially in the way that they affected training and why training had to change. Columbine, April 20th, 1999. At the time Columbine occurred, the term active shooter didn't even exist. Um, in 99, I had been on the department for two years, so the active shooter response in Greenwood would have been identical as it was in Columbine. Back then, law enforcement trained so that if, um, we showed up at a school and there was some shooting or violence occurring, the number one thing we would do is create a perimeter around the building so the threat could not escape. And then we'd call the SWAT team in because they had the training and the equipment to make entry. Well, it wasn't until Columbine occurred that we realized that's unacceptable and that's not going to work. And so the term active shooter was coined, and there's somebody actively shooting in the building. We have to respond immediately and rapidly. So I want you to listen to Patty Nielsen's, uh, 911 call. She does a great job. However, we have to keep in mind that she never had active shooter training. She had never seen an active shooter. Same thing with the dispatcher. She never had any active shooter training. Things are changing. After every event, we get just a little better, and we learn from our mistakes, and we get better. But also pay attention to her voice and flexion and tone. You know, because of her lack of experience with an active shooter, it's quite different. Jefferson County 911. Yes, I am a teacher at Columbine High School. There is a student here with a gun. He was shot out a window. I believe once. Columbine High School. I don't know what's in my shoulder. If it was just some glass beads, I don't know what. Okay, has anybody been injured, ma'am? Yes. Okay. And the school is in a panic, and I'm in the library. I've got students down. I'm on the table, kid. Hands under the table. Teachers screaming. Some of the teachers are trying to take control. We need police here. Okay, we're getting them there. Who is the student, ma'am? I do not know who the student is. Okay. I saw a student outside. I was in Halligan. Oh, dear God. Okay, I was on Halligan. I saw a gun. I said, what's going on out there? And he said, oh, it's probably for video production. It's probably a joke. I said, well, I don't think that's a good idea. And I went walking outside. I think he was down. To see what was going on. He turned the gun straight at us and shot. And, my God, the window went out. And the kid standing there with me, I think he got hit. Okay. Something on my shoulder. Okay. We've got help on the way, ma'am. Okay. Okay. Oh, God. Stay in the line of fire. Oh, God. Just stay down. Do we know where he's at? I'm sorry? Do we know where he's at? Okay. I'm in the library. He's upstairs. He's right outside of here. He's outside? He's outside of this hall. Outside of a hall? Outside of a hall. Okay. a smoke. I got smoke is l this room. I've got the k here. I don't know what's the rest of the building. the building. I don't kno be calling 911. Somebody' of people on. Okay. I jus in the line with me. We n going on. Okay. Okay. I a you've got the kids there student in the library on stay on the floor. Is ther the doors? Um, smoke is c and I'm okay. Okay. The g the library door. Okay. I to go out there. Okay. Yo I got three Children. Oka gonna go to the door to s Okay. I've got the kids o I got all the kids in lib paramedics, we have fire on route. Okay, sir. Okay mean, he's, I don't know, not out of the woods. He shooting. Okay. Yeah, we' him. I thought it was. Oka the kids in the library c you can block the door so I do. I do not. Okay. Yeah try to go. I mean, I can' I'm afraid to go to the d where he is. Okay. Okay. told the kids to get on t to get into the creek. Al on the floor under the ta under the tables. Okay. A to just try and keep no o as long as we can keep ev as we can. My hair's been going on. Yeah, we've got now as well. Yeah, there' filled with smoke. Okay. Stay on the floor! Stay on the floor! Stay under the table! I mean, they also did a great job. The shooters eventually made their way into the library where they were there for six minutes. And that's where they killed themselves in 2013. The FBI decided that, you know, since Columbine in 1999 started this epidemic of active shooter, and it just continued to grow and the frequency continued to grow that they probably ought to. And research and study active shooter events. So, in 2013, the FBI came up with this definition active shooter event involves one or more persons engaged in killing or attempt to kill multiple people in an area occupied by multiple unrelated individuals. Very wordy, yes, but they had to use such a definition in order to root out. Gang violence and domestic violence, so it doesn't skew the data. The definition that alert likes for you to remember is active shooter event equals attempted mass murder. And what you have to remember is that lots of the shooters study shooters that came before them. And they all try to improve on 1 another. So, if I mentioned, I may say something about body count. Because to them, it's almost like a claim to fame or an award that they're attempting. They are always going for body count in this graphic, you're going to see geographically what the FBI studied starting from 2000 and then the original study only went to 2013, but I believe this graphic is updated to go through 19. And it just gives you a geographical sense of what the country has dealt with the last 20 years. You also notice that we've added knife and car. Because active shooter is actually melding into active attacker. Because people are using knives and cars to kill people, and that may be the term that we use that we use in the future is active attacker. Firearms still are the most efficient means of creating damage and killing people. You also notice that as we roll through the years, that frequency is, you know, the graphics will be much faster. So the frequency is picking up in the early 2000s. We only average seven events a year in the United States, I say only because one's too many, but seven is nothing compared to what we just dealt with in 2021. So to keep it in perspective, in a 20 year period with 347 active attacker events, these are the most violent, deadly events that a human civilian might have to encounter. But at the same time, there are other events that are way more likely to occur. For example, fire, tornado, hurricane, depending on where you're at. And I want you to keep that in perspective. The great thing about craze and avoid, deny, defend is that it can be used for multiple types of disaster. It doesn't just have to be active shooter. You know, the number one response for a fire is evacuate. And we'll talk about here in a little bit. That's the same here for an active shooter event. So that's why I love this program so much, because it can be utilized for a multitude of disaster types. Here's some more accurate and more updated information that I pulled from the FBI's web page. Active shooter incidents between 2008 and 2018. So there's the numbers you see that one, six, four, eleven, four for early. Now we're in the 20s and 30s. 2021 was a record breaker at 61. I can remember telling my wife during COVID that I thought COVID had cured the United States of active shooters because we weren't hearing anything about it. Everybody, all the talk was about COVID. And then when the numbers came out, I was sadly disappointed. Casualties per year, you'll see 2017 kind of skews the data. And as you can read at the bottom, the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting is the reason for that, because it's 489 wounded, 56 killed. That is the current body count. We don't know what the lack of a better term. That's the highest body count incident we have so far, put it that way. Wounded versus killed. Again, 17 skews the data, because other than that, it stays pretty similar. Location attacks. This is pretty interesting. When I first started teaching in the early, in 2014, educational facilities accounted for almost 26% of active shooter events. However, we've done a great job of hardening our schools, making them more difficult. Unfortunately, what that does is that pushes the active shooter to go to commerce. Commerce has grown quite a bit. That's any place that sells product, creates product, or warehouses a product to be sold. Another interesting fact, active shooter events, or active shooters, are only connected to the venue in which they carry out the attack 55% of the time. Something to keep in mind, though, we're not always sure where the primary target was. For example, everybody remembers the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. The FBI was processing the suspect vehicle after the shooting, and they found a stroller and a rubber doll in the backseat of the van. The shooter had no children, so the FBI began investigating, start checking video and surrounding areas. It was something like two weeks prior to the Pulse nightclub shooting. They located video footage of the suspect pushing the stroller, pacing back and forth outside the entrance of the ESPN zone at Disney World. Luckily, there were four deputies working part-time security for the ESPN zone, and they were out front of the bar talking. And the shooter finally got irritated enough that he walked off and left. So we never really know where the primary target could be, and that could be a reason that this is not that statistically significant. And we also know that the Las Vegas shooter had reservations in Detroit, in a Detroit hotel that overlooked another outdoor music venue two weeks prior to the Las Vegas shooting. And he just never showed up. They don't know why. So the FBI compiles all this information from 14 years, at least on the original research, was 14 years, and the greatest profiling agency in the world, no profile. There is no profile for an active shooter. Religion is equally representative based on population. Race, equal representation based on population. Gender, however, we do have significance. Ninety-six percent of active shooters are male, ninety-six percent. And number of shooters is even more unique. Over 98 percent of time, there is only one shooter. And that's really significant and good for us to know, because, for example, in Aurora, Colorado, at the theater shooting, the opening to, I think it was Batman. The shooter utilized a AR-15, a 223 round, and it's a high-powered round, so it could travel through drywall. Well, when law enforcement arrived on the scene, there were victims streaming out of three separate theaters, so their initial response was, we have three shooters. Because the shooter was taken down and arrested peacefully within the first few minutes outside. He went out to, he ran out of ammo, went back to his car to reload, and two SWAT team members didn't recognize him in his SWAT gear, and they arrested him. But because there was this indication that there might be more than one shooter, fire and EMS personnel are not allowed to come on the scene of a hot, or a hot scene, so they never made it onto the scene, which we lost countless people because of that. So it's imperative that we know it's typically only one shooter, and once the shooter is apprehended or neutralized, we can move in with our fire and EMS personnel to render aid. Number of deaths hinges on two variables. How quickly the police arrive, and target availability. Now, law enforcement trains every year, it's called emergency vehicle operations, it's one of the funnest training that we do, because we get to drive at high speeds on a protected course. But target availability is what we're working on today. We train our civilians to not be targets, to take themselves out of harm's way, we can save lives. The national average response time to an active shooter event is three minutes, and if you think about the rural areas out in Colorado and the West and out West, or you think about the traffic areas of New York City, three minutes, 180 seconds is pretty, pretty outstanding. At our mall shooting, we actually had an officer in the mall, he was working part-time when the shooting started, he was on the opposite side of the mall, but road units were there in about two minutes. 180 seconds, it's pretty unrealistic to think that we can improve on that, so that's a good standard to think about. So when I teach this class, I tell people, think about, you need to stay alive for 180 seconds. What can we do to stay alive for 180 seconds? Because almost 70% of the time when law enforcement arrive on the scene, the shooter does one of three things. He kills himself, he flees the scene, or he turns his aggressive behavior on law enforcement. So everyone in that building, once law enforcement arrives, becomes safe. So what can we do for 180 seconds to stay alive till law enforcement arrives? We can do a gun shot. Don't delay. Commander Ripley says, you hear gunshots, they are not fireworks, you go immediately to deliberation and come up with your survival plan. She's inspirational, she's dedicated her life to school safety. As part of the ALERT program, one of the benefits is I get to go to the annual conference every year, the active shooter conference. This year it's going to be in Grapevine, Texas. And Christina is there routinely. We're going to listen to her event and how it played out for her, and then we'll talk about it. So this is pretty important. This day, I ended up sitting in exactly the same seat I always did, in the back right-hand corner on the right side of the class. What we don't know is at this time, someone is downstairs and he's chaining all three doors shut. There's supposed to be desks there, all you guys can see. We heard the first gunshots outside in the hallway and my teacher, she opened the door, she immediately slammed it and she said, call 911. And the second that door closed, he walks in. He walks in shooting. There's absolutely no time. He goes to the other side of the classroom by the windows, he's holding two guns, he doesn't say anything. He just starts going down the rows of people. It's very quick, it's very loud, it's very scary. We had these very shitty desks. I get on the floor, I put my knees under the chair, my stomach on the seat, hands over head, eyes are closed. As the shots keep going, and it's, like I said, very loud, I can tell it's getting closer and closer. And I'm telling myself, brace yourself, your turn is going to come. Now, I didn't know what that meant. Like, I didn't think I was going to get shot, but I knew that something really serious was going on. And I knew for whatever reason that I should just play dead. He shoots me, the first time's in the back. And you'd be surprised, getting shot doesn't hurt that much because shock overtakes you, but it starts to, like, burn and really kind of seep in, and that's when it gets really uncomfortable. It's not pleasant. He leaves the first time, he goes across the hall, and while he's gone, cell phones are ringing, people are coughing, and the smell of gunpowder has, like, completely filled the room. Gunpowder is, like, this really sticky, pungent, warm smell, and it just makes you very, very thirsty. He comes back. Now, this time, the shooting is more intermittent. It's slower because he's looking to see who's alive. I remember telling myself to stop breathing because I can feel my stomach hitting that chair, and I'm saying, stop, like, he can see that you're alive. The third and final time, he killed himself in front of our classroom. When the police broke in, the first thing the guy said was, we have a lot of blacks in here. I didn't know what that meant, but when police sweep a crime scene, they have 30 seconds. If you're red, you're critically injured. If you're yellow, you'll live. Black means you're dead. In nine minutes, he killed 11 of my classmates and my teacher. 32 people lost their lives that day. We learned a lot from Virginia Tech. Number one, he was the first one, the shooter was the first one to chain the doors. And to me, I would have thought that would have allowed a lot more time for him. But nine minutes was the total time of that shooting event. You have to realize that the average active shooter event is six minutes, with multiple, multiple shooting events less than two. But average, all the shooting events that have ever occurred, it's around six minutes, from the first shot to the shooter being neutralized or leaving the scene. So he added three minutes by chaining the doors. I think that's really respectable. One of the responding officers just happened to have a breaching tool and was able to breach the door. The other thing we learned was, this is 2007. At the time, we were, law enforcement and the community, active shooter community, was kind of just teaching everybody, shelter in place, shelter in place, wait for law enforcement to arrive. It's still a viable option, but it can't be the option for every active shooter event. And which here, it didn't work. And the other thing I find interesting is, Christina explains how she got down on the floor and covered her head. She's much younger than me, but when I was in elementary school, I can remember we used to do tornado drills. And we would do that same type of similar situation. And I find it, not surprising, but it's daunting that whatever training you have during a stressful event, that's all you have. That's her reaction. She couldn't figure out why she thought she should do that. But to me, that was the only training she had ever done for an active shooter, was a tornado drill probably in elementary school. So that's what she was left with. If you don't plan, if you don't prepare, then that's all you have. So we're going to look at the building here. 206 is the first classroom he entered. 211 is where Christina was. We'll talk about each room and survival rates. Again, 206, first room the shooter entered, 91% shot, almost 80% killed. They didn't have a chance. He started in that room. There was no warning. 211 is Christina's room. And at the conference, she spoke about they don't know why he took the time to put a bullet in everyone in her classroom. And she lost almost 70% of the students in her room. 207, the shooter entered the room and left. And the students that were capable got up, slammed the door closed, and threw their bodies at the bottom of the door. Now, what you need to know about Norris Hall in 2007 is that the Norris Hall is a giant limestone building, much like we have at Indiana University down here. And it had giant, the large oak doors with the picture window in the door, and the old brass doorknobs with the skeleton key. So there was no way for any of the teachers or students to lock these doors. They were just old buildings that hadn't been updated. So the kids had to throw their bodies at the base of the door. The good news is the doors are substantial enough that it would stop handgun rounds from penetrating. And so that's why you see the discrepancy there between shot and killed in room 207, because the shooter could not come back in the room. The shooter was going for body count. And he knew that if there's only 15 to 20 kids in each room, he's not going to break the record if he stays in one room. So he bounced around. 204, this is very interesting. Remember I said life experience matters? Professor Labriskew was a Holocaust survivor, described as a really old, crusty gentleman. And when he heard the gunshots in the hallway, he slammed his door, went up to that brass doorknob I talked about earlier, grabbed it with both hands, and just held it in place, and screamed at his students to jump out of the window. Only Professor Labriskew and one other student perished in this room. He saved everyone else's life. 205, not a single shot and not a single fatality. The students in the room heard the gunfire. They didn't deny. They went straight to deliberation. They slammed the door shut. Or they pushed the big oak table in the front of the classroom up against the inward opening door. And the students laid under the table and behind the table legs so the shooter could not make entry into the room. Now, he shot through the glass, but they were protected by the table and the door, and no one was hit. So this is the response. This is the response we're trying to get to. When it comes to deliberation, come up with the best plan as quickly as you can and act. Social proof phenomenon. Christine has talked about this before. Virginia Tech is a college university with a football team and wrestling team and all types of athletes. The shooter was a 5 foot 2, and he carried two handguns. And no one ever at any time tried to take him down. Granted, this is 2007. Hopefully in today's era, that would not occur again. But here's one of the problems, the social proof phenomenon, the tendency for people to look to other people for cues about how to behave in a novel or ambiguous situation. Similar to going to a fancy restaurant. Maybe you've never been to one before. They have all that silverware laid out in front of you. And if you don't know which fork to use for your salad, you just wait and watch everyone else. And that's the problem. Amanda talked about in the classroom, everybody got down on their floor and waited their turn. But what if just one or two people in that classroom came up with a different response plan during deliberation and they got up and ran out of the classroom and just create moving chaos? How many people would have followed and how many people would have survived? So that's what this training is about, giving people the option, giving them the information so they can come up with the best response plan for them. So if we can get more people reacting faster, then we can save more lives. Deliberation. Avoid the night offense, just like we talked about in the beginning. Avoid the threat at all costs or get out of the venue. This is the number one way to stay alive during an active shooter event. Same way as a fire. The number one way to stay alive in a building fire is to get out of the building. There's no difference. So I tell all my schools, we are actually doing active shooter training every time we do a fire drill because we are teaching kids to get out of the building as quickly as possible. Number two, the next best chance of survival, deny the threat access to you. If you can get into a locked room, a locked closet, and barricade the door, your chance of survival increases greatly. We still have not lost a person, has not been killed behind a locked door during an active shooter event. So getting locked down, out of sight, turning the lights off still works. And then the worst case scenario would be defend you. But you do have the right to fight for your life. You don't have to, like they did at Virginia Tech, get on the floor and wait your turn. So let's talk about each step individually. Leave as soon as possible. Know your exits. We've talked about that. Call 911. I'm not super concerned about calling 911. If you are actively avoiding a threat, I don't want you to worry about getting your phone out calling 911. That is to be done when you are at a safe location. The other thing is, I train my dispatchers in my county that they only ask one question during an active shooter event. Where's the shooter? So if you're trying, if you are running or fleeing the scene or you are outside the scene, you're not going to know the exact location of the shooter. So the information is not as helpful. We know that an untrained shooter can kill a human being every six seconds. So that's why in my community, we train to get the officers there as quickly as possible. And the dispatcher's responsibility is to keep tabs on the location of the shooter so that once we arrive, we can neutralize the shooter immediately. So calling 911 is only if you're in a safe location and you really know the location of the shooter at the time. Other things to consider, secondary exits, jumping out of the building. This is a student jumping out of the second story window at Columbine. Going through drywall. If you have to bust a hole in one room to get to another room that maybe has an exit door, that's something to consider. I've had people ask about going up through ceiling tiles. That's something that you would have to consider, something you would have to make that decision at the time based on the information you have. But avoiding is the number one way to stay alive during an active shooter, getting out of the building. Deny. Next best, lock the door, lights out, out of sight, silence your cell phones. We don't want the shooter to know that anyone's behind that locked door. Shooters know they only have 180 seconds till law enforcement arrives. They know that they don't have the time to breach a locked door if they're going for a body count especially. So with that in mind, they are going to find the path of least resistance. They're going to move on to the next door. Barricade the door. Put as much stuff in front of the door if you can. Rubber door stops for inward opening doors are very effective. Door locks on heavy wooden doors are amazing. Metal doors are amazing. Again, we haven't lost anyone during an active shooter event who was behind a locked and barricaded door. Outward opening door. So every school in my community has outward opening doors and all the locks are key locked from outside so the students can't lock the teacher out of the room. Not very effective during an active shooter event. So luckily now, we have the night lock system that you see there in the picture, very helpful. Because in the old days, back in the early 2000s, we teach people to wrap belts around the door and stay off to the right out of the way. Barriers. During an active shooter, you want to create as many barriers between you and the shooter as possible. There are two types of barriers, physical and psychological. Physical barriers is cover and concealment. That's nothing more than police talk for bulletproof. Cover is bulletproof or bullet resistant. Concealment just does that. Conceals you from the shooter. Psychological barriers would be that darkened room with no noise coming from it and the doors locked. So the shooter assumes there's no one in there. He will move on to the next door. Defend. This is the worst case scenario, but it's something you must prepare for and consider. Positioning is important. And the positioning is opposite of both, avoid and deny. And avoid and deny, I want you to create as much distance and as many barriers between you and the shooter as possible. During defend, unless you are carrying a firearm, you're going to have to be up close and personal. You're going to have to physically disarm this person. And that could be breaking the forearm, breaking the gun from his hand, grabbing the gun. It is the fight of your life. So it has to be the most violent and deadly two, three minutes of your life. And you don't stop until the shooter stops moving. There's a flow chart that explains how the avoid, deny, defend works. And then it's somewhat fluid and flexible. So the attack starts. Primary exits, right? Everybody is well aware of their exits because we talked about it. And it's very important to stay alive. But say primary exits are blocked. What do you do if the primary exits are blocked and you can't get out right away? Then you move into deny, right? You start fortifying your location. You lock the door. You keep the people that are with you calm. So everybody's quiet and the room is dark. However, what about other exits? Now, keeping in mind that an active shooter averages six minutes with multiple, lots of them are less than two minutes. Our attack at the mall was stopped by a good Samaritan who was armed. And it lasted 15.4 seconds until the shooter was killed. So keeping that in mind, if you've taken the time to deny and to fortify your location, is it really worth leaving to try and find other exits? That's for you to make that decision. But I just tell you that with the event only lasting six minutes and officer arrival times averaging three minutes, if you have a fortified location, you probably should stay there, barring fire or something else going on. If you can find exits and you know the shooters at the other end of the building, for example, and you have an opportunity to get out, maybe OK. Otherwise, stay where you're at and be prepared to defend yourself. Once you have fortified your location in the office, you're not done. At that point, that's when you start looking around and look for improvised weapons in case the shooter does try to make entry into the room. And I tell my schoolteachers, especially when you live in that room for 40, 50, 60 hours a week, you should know every item in that room that could possibly be used as an improvised weapon. And the time to start looking around the room is not when you need it. The time to do it is now. And that goes for all of you in the office. What do you have that could be used as a possible improvised weapon? At the time you need it is not the time to start looking for that. You are not helpless, and what you do does matter. Again, back to the 911. The most helpful information is, where is the shooter? And during our incident, I pulled the 911 tapes, and they did an amazing job. One of the dispatchers would answer the phone. And her first question, she didn't even say 911. She said, do you have eyes on the shooter? And it was awesome. Because if they started talking about something other than the location of the shooter, they were going to be able to figure out about something other than the location of the shooter, she would hang up on them and go to the next call. So we had eight channels, 200 calls within the first 12 minutes. So where's the shooter? If you know that location, and you're in a safe location, fine, call 911, help out, give them the information. The little girl that we heard in the 911 tape in the beginning, she was behind the ATM machine in the food court area. So yes, she had good information. Number of shooters, we're always going to assume it's one. But if somebody were to actually see two shooters, then that would be helpful information. The great thing about that is, when we have multiple shooters, almost every time they stay together. So when we neutralize one, we neutralize the other shortly thereafter. Physical description, description of the weapon might be helpful, but we really are just wanting location. When police arrive, it's very important that you follow their commands. So officers are arriving on the scene, they haven't been in the active shooter, but they are arriving to an active shooter. So they are just as charged up as everybody inside the building. This is what they've trained for their entire career, to respond as quickly and as aggressively as possible. So they are going to be in the same psychological and physiological level. Show your hands, please have empty hands, no cell phones in your hand, keep that kind of stuff in your pockets. The hands are the most dangerous part of the human body for police officers. It's the first thing that our eyes always, always scan. The way you hear in all the videos, show me your hands, show me your hands, get your hands out of your pockets, because it's the most deadly part of the human body for a police officer. So please have empty hands, keep them up in the air, follow commands. Our priority of work when we show up after an active shooter event, or during, I apologize, during an active shooter event, we have to stop the killing first. Our number one priority, neutralize the shooter. And that means stepping over wounded, dying people that need help. But we have to do so, this is the order of operations. We have to stop the killing before we can stop the dying. Because once we neutralize the shooter, then we can get our EMS and fire personnel in the building to stop the dying. We can start triaging, we can evacuate the area. So very important. Because of that, there is always this kind of EMS delay in the building. Aurora was a terrible scenario. There were 23 victims from Aurora, Colorado shooting that were transported to the hospital via police car. Ambulances didn't make it onto the scene until the building was almost empty. So people need help. There's a big push to get as much medical training inside these facilities as possible, to get tourniquets in the buildings and classrooms to keep them there for penetrating trauma wounds. So we can have that kind of immediate help prior to law enforcement arrival, while law enforcement is neutralizing the threat. This is Stop the Bleed. You guys may have heard about this, may know something about it. It's free. It's paid for by Homeland Security. It's a one-hour program. And it literally talks about applying pressure and dressings and applying tourniquets. It just speaks to penetrating trauma wounds. And it's an amazing program. These are some follow-up videos that you guys can pull up and look. Run, Hide, Fight is kind of a DHS, the Department of Homeland Security's version of Avoid, Deny, Defend. These are on YouTube. You can go to avoiddenydefend.org and go to the Alert website, watch their video. It's about a 12, 13-minute follow-up to this training. It's filmed at a Walmart facility. It's a little cheesy. But it's pretty well done in the fact that it shows you an example of what avoiding looks like, what denying looks like, and what defending looks like. Also pretty well done, good video. And now we can move on to any questions. Duyong, can you help me here? Yeah, I'm looking up the Q&A. And those don't look like they're saying questions at the moment. That's a typical response after this. When it's live, you get a lot of stares. And again, there's my email up there. If you want to email me privately and ask me a question or scenario, again, just let me reiterate that situational awareness is huge. You don't have to act like police officers, but we don't live in the 1950s anymore either. So we need to be a little more aware of our surroundings. Whether we're at the mall or a parking lot, in the dark, in the daylight, it doesn't matter. Most shootings occur in broad daylight. The other thing is, if you don't have the life experience in the training of post-military, law enforcement, whatever, then you can make up for it with training and preparation. So get as much active shooter training as you possibly can. I don't badmouth any other active shooter training because I feel that all the active shooter training you can get is beneficial. Indiana is an open carry state. So everybody in Indiana is allowed to carry a firearm. We'll see how that plays out. But so far, about 25% of active shooter events are quelled rapidly by civilians carrying. And in our situation, he saved a lot of lives here at the Greenwood Park Mall. Well, if we don't have any more questions, we'll go ahead and conclude. Thank you so much to Jason for hosting this wonderful presentation today. And thank you to all of our attendees for joining us. Thank you again. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you.

Active Shooter Civilian Response

CRACE acronym

Avoid Deny Defend

Greenwood Indiana Police Department

Situational awareness training

Disaster response stages

Active shooter statistics trends

Survival strategies

Training and preparedness

Vigilance in critical situations