Over the past decade, organizations across industry sectors have needed to prepare for the growing trend of active shooter situations. As the number of mass shootings in the U.S. for 2021 is on track to surpass any recent year on record, the dreadful truth today is that violence threatens every organization.
Unlike preparing for natural disasters, active shooting incidents are hard to predict and escalate rapidly within moments of the shooter entering the space. Preparing for something which almost always happens without warning and ends before police arrive requires organizations to have a greater focus on preparedness to ensure employees are involved and as ready as possible to respond safely and appropriately to the incident in real time.
Improving Efficiency by Standardizing Emergency Response Protocols
Despite the challenge of knowing when an active shooter situation may occur, preparation and planning are possible. When faced with an emergency, panic is often the first natural response. For the most part, this comes from fear of the unknown, unpreparedness, and not knowing what to do. Training and conducting drills go hand in hand. Both equip and empower its people with knowledge, so any unknowns aren’t quite so scary. Through preparation and exercises, employees will be prepared for the possibility of an emergency, making their ability to react to the crisis at hand second nature.
In order to respond quickly and effectively to a critical incident, detailed plans and procedures have to be created proactively to lay out concrete actions for response and recovery to save lives, minimize damage or loss of property, and maintain business continuity. But with the unpredictability of active shooter situations, emergency managers also have to be flexible, adaptable, and prepared for any unexpected turn – which is helped by having a full grasp of the details.
An effective response requires an ongoing cycle of reports including action plans, checklists, response guides and processes, situational reports (SitReps), and after-action reports (AARs) detailing actions taken before, during, and after a critical incident and that are tailored to the unique needs of each organization. These physical and detailed planning reports help give emergency managers the capability to respond to the conceptual and changeable aspects of a critical incident.
Whether in the private or public sector, all organizations can benefit from a few proven emergency preparedness strategies – as the question isn’t if but when there is an active shooter situation.
How Organizations Can Prepare for the Unknown
Here are five best practices for prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery for an active shooter situation.
Prevent critical events before they strike
Prevention is the least glamorous and yet, most valuable strategy for protection. After all, an effective prevention strategy is designed to be invisible, stopping threats before they appear.
Active shooter preparedness manifests itself in the training and tools that bolster employee safety and wellbeing. During a crisis, quick and coordinated communications are needed, and there is little to no time for planning. This urgency demands staff already have proper training through education and drills. Thorough preparation also means an organization has defined reporting methods, and an emergency manager has tools in place for a tactical response.
Reports are vital for effective analysis and response. Common types include checklists, action plans, response playbooks, SitReps, and AARs. Each of these forms needs to be thoroughly vetted to ensure the organization is recording and reporting value data. No innovative technology can compensate for poor or missing data.
Instead, digital systems are designed to enhance critical data during and after an active shooting event. Organizations should have a digital reporting method to handle reporting, communications, and assessment. The bundled set of tasks is vital to prevent delayed responses, communication gaps, and inaccurate data. The system should have robust features that can connect easily with first responders, incorporate an intuitive user interface, and have the capacity to manage workflows easily.
Protect staff through emergency action planning
The next strategic step to protect an organization is to create an emergency action plan (EAP). This plan is an emergency response playbook for staff. EAPs help staff react quickly, improve decision-making, reduce panic, and help organizations spot potential emergency management obstacles before potentially becoming more significant problems.
A few critical components in EAPs for active shooter situations include
- Reporting: Staff must know how to report an active shooter to first responders and colleagues.
- Evacuation: All exit routes and procedures should be outlined.
- Emergency managers: Specific staff should be assigned emergency management roles to facilitate an efficient response.
- Hospital information: Details of local hospital accessibility, resources, and contact information should be included.
- Emergency notification system: Companies must have a system to alert staff and monitor the situation.
Together, EAP and training exercises can prepare the staff on how to respond, resulting in effectively minimizing loss of life properly.
Emergency response platforms aid in collaboration and communication between the private, public, and healthcare sectors. Organizations often leverage a crisis and emergency management platform to put an EAP into action. This work is done through a dashboard with real-time data, providing a resource hub and communications for a proactive, coordinated response.
Leveraging a critical incident management platform improves an organization's ability to provide consistent situational awareness and centralize key data and information to create action plans, incident reports or SitReps, and AARs, all of which can be made available to all stakeholders and enhance collaboration.
Each of these reports from all phases of the emergency management lifecycle (planning, response, recovery, mitigation) assists with filling in necessary data and information to create a common operating picture, enhance perspective, and enable better planning and decision making.
Making this data and information available in a technology platform also allows fuller capabilities for incident command.
Create a threat assessment team to mitigate damage
When confronting the threat of an active shooter, organizations can benefit from the insight and diverse skill set of professionals in different sectors, geographies, and industries. For these reasons, the FBI recommends creating a threat assessment team (TAT), a group of professionals to work with law enforcement to forecast risk and provide recommendations.
For an active shooter situation, this calls for building a team comprised of paid experts or experienced community volunteers that analyzes an organization, its staff and stakeholders, and provides an objective, data-driven risk analysis. TAT members conduct interviews, gather information, evaluate threats, aid in decision-making, and follow up to re-assess strategies and impacts.
Centralize systems for a rapid response
For the fastest response, it’s imperative to reduce unnecessary decision-making and unneeded tasks. Organizations respond with speed when there is an emergency plan in place, regular employee training through education and drills, and an effective emergency response management system.
A centralized crisis and emergency management system has the power to accelerate and simplify processes. These systems do this by eliminating the need for multiple software applications and manual work. Further, they quicken emergency response by automating reporting tasks and communicating in real-time with first responders for additional support. All key stakeholders during an active shooting – whether they’re law enforcement, medical teams, or leadership – can be apprised of critical events as they develop.
When an organization has a clear picture and a fast response to an active shooter, it can provide law enforcement with vital details that save lives.
Review data for a resilient recovery
Recovering from an active shooting event is one of the most challenging things an organization can go through. As employees cope with the event, there will be pressure from authorities (and the media) to get an accurate account of what happened.
To effectively plan for the future, DHS recommends organizations analyze the incident in-depth and create a report that assesses how critical events transpired. The report recommends organizations look at the successes and failures for improvements. It also suggests that leadership re-examine its EAP and look at data to make improvement recommendations. Digitizing this effort can alleviate some of the stress and work tied to this “after-action” report. For example, emergency response software breaks down when authorities were contacted, details how updates were delivered, notes losses, and identifies impacted facilities.
Considering the increasing chances of an active shooter incident occurring at organizations, it is wise to thoroughly assess current emergency action plans and consider using an emergency management platform to help with all aspects of the emergency management cycle. Emergency management is an unending cycle requiring organizations to constantly reevaluate and revise preparedness plans, update response procedures, train personnel, and perform exercises for both natural disasters and active shooter incidents.
Takeaways
- Seek input on the plan from all stakeholders, including law enforcement, fire, medical/hospital, public health, and emergency management
- Identify key personnel and stakeholders who will be involved in emergency response and their roles
- Conduct effective emergency response drill:
- Keep SOP emergency management protocol current
- Define objectives, roles, and responsibilities
- Review emergency software and plans with employees
- Simulate the crisis as close to reality as possible
- Use a platform that allows a centralized, single source of tracking information before, during, and after the event:
- Provides the ability for many people to work in the platform at the same time
- Gives access to a system for managing tasks, assignments, forms, and reports
