Safety Considerations During Active Shooter Incidents

By Dean Guccione - December 20, 2018

As you prepare for your Lieutenant or Captain’s promotional exam, there is a good chance you may face an Active Shooter simulation or discussion problem in the tactical portion of your exam, similar to what we saw in Santa Fe, Texas yesterday.

And I want you to be ready.

Or, if you don’t have a tactical situational problem, you may be asked in your interview about your department’s policy regarding active shooter incidents.

And again, I want you to be ready.

There are a couple of areas I want you to think about, as you not only train on active shooter incidents in your department, but also as you’re preparing for your promotional exam.

Those two areas are - Situational Awareness and Haz-Mat.

Situational Awareness

I want you to always be thinking about situational awareness in active shooter incidents because these types of incidents are fluid and are constantly moving until the shooter is either killed or taken into custody.

As a Battalion Chief with Beverly Hills FD, we assisted Santa Monica FD with an active shooter incident that spanned over a 7 mile area.

The last thing you want to happen, as a new or acting company officer, is having you or your crew to become victims within the incident.

If there is more than one shooter, then the incident becomes twice as fluid and even more dangerous for you, as you enter the warm zone searching for victims.

What this means is that, as the company officer, you and your crew members must always be thinking about your surroundings, what you hear, what you see, and what’s reported over the radio.

The last thing you need, when entering the warm zone, is to go face to face with the shooter.

While your department’s policy should require you to have force protection by law enforcement when entering the warm zone, that doesn’t mean you don’t need to be hyper-focused on your surroundings when searching for victims.

The Contact Team (usually the first two arriving law enforcement officers) should immediately begin hunting down the shooter/suspect for the sole purpose of neutralization, whether that be to kill the suspect or take him into custody.

As the company officer, you are in charge of the medical function within your RTF (Rescue Task Force), and the police officers shall give your cover (force protection) while you are quickly treating and removing victims to the triage area.

The victims, once triaged, will be moved from triage to the treatment area, and the incident then starts to shift into an MCI (Mass Casualty Incident), once the shooter(s) has either been killed or taken into custody.

So, every member of your company must be a safety officer and must advise you if they see something that isn’t quite right or just doesn’t make sense.

Usually, your first instinct is the correct one, and your training, experience, and common sense are what’s going to help you go home safe at the end of your shift.

Be smart and listen to your crew members. It’s difficult to see and hear everything that is going on around you when the incident is still fluid and chaotic, while you're trying to listen to the radio, assess how many victims you have and their conditions, and then report back to the IC.

Eight pairs of eyes are better than two, especially with all the information you are gathering, so you can make good and informed decisions in the chaos.

Haz-Mat

The second area I want you to think about and consider is that an active shooter incident is a terrorist incident.

This means there is always the possibility of secondary devices or explosives placed in or around the incident scene, just as we saw yesterday at Santa Fe High School in Texas.

The suspect placed numerous pipe bombs around the high school, and I don’t even know if the fire personnel were aware of, or thought that there could be secondary devices when they arrived on scene.

Always consider the placement of your fire apparatus when responding to a reported active shooter.

You must protect yourself and your crew as you arrive on scene, and part of that protection is the consideration that there may be secondary devices placed by the suspect to injure or kill emergency responders.

If you pull up and see a backpack by itself, sitting on the ground, with nobody around, that may be a clue to stage your engine in another place that’s protected by buildings or other natural or man-made shielding.

Again, you cannot be effective in doing your job and saving lives if you become part of the incident.

These types of incidents require quick action and quick thinking, so you can save the most lives, while at the same time, protecting your and your crew from seen and unforeseen hazards within a fluid incident.

So, as a future or acting company officer, you must empower your crew to be safety officers and encourage them to say something if they see something out of the ordinary, or if something doesn’t look quite right, either while arriving on scene, or as you enter the warm zone in your RTF group.

I hope these tips have helped you think about Active Shooter incidents in a way that will help keep you and your crew safe, so you can not only save as many lives as possible, but also so you can all go home safely to your families at the end of your shift.