Many of you may have heard about the recent school shooting in Northeast Ohio (Chardon).
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2012/02/at_least_4_students_hurt_in_sh.htmlI live within an hour of Chardon, and I wanted to address the strategy of the school lockdown as a one-size-fits all response to an active shooter.
I have a friend who's a Kent State University police officer, and last fall I sat in on a class he teaches to incoming freshmen. The acronym is ALICE, which stands for (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate).
As they say in the class, rather than a cookie cutter lockdown response, they try to teach things that are common sense, but not common knowledge.
There were several things I came away with from the class that really struck me. At one point, the instructor asked by show of hands how many people had practiced classroom lockdown drills in their school career. Every student in attendance raised their hands. There's an entire generation of people who have had it drilled in and repeated to them since their first school experience that in the situation of an active shooter, their job is to sit very quietly. That was disturbing to me.
Another eye-opening thing to me was the time he spent breaking down the results of the Virginia Tech shooting. I thought I'd read a lot of the coverage about what happened there, but I've never heard it explained step by step how things went down. Once the shooting started, some rooms just closed the door and people stayed glued in position. Those were the rooms where the deaths and injuries were highest. In other rooms, people actively resisted - in one room, several young men laid down on the floor and braced their feet against the door to prevent him from being able to enter the room. I forget all of the specifics, but the takeaway message for me was this - active resistance caused the shooter to be thwarted and to move on, while passive inaction allowed the maximum number of people to be shot.
I'm one for analogies, and to me, it makes me think of 9/11. Some of the rooms were more like the first plane to crash into the WTC - people did exactly what was the conventional wisdom for dealing with terrorists up until that point - they sat still and did as they were told. But on United Flight 93, the passengers assessed the situation, gathered the information they could, thought for themselves and came up with an active defense strategy that they put into action. It stopped the plane from crashing into its intended target and came close to allowing them to overwhelm all the terrorists. At Virginia Tech, some rooms sat still, and others went against everything that was the conventional wisdom they'd been trained to do since they began their school careers. They came up with a plan on the fly - perfect plan? No. But effective, and life-saving.
The class was about an hour and a half, I think - but I didn't see any bored or fidgeting teens or 20-somethings. One of the things I liked a lot about it was that it wasn't black-and-white, here's the appropriate response to any situation. He laid out what your priorities are if there's a shooting nearby: Are you secure where you are? Can you secure the room and make it so no one can enter? How could you do that? What could you improvise to make it impossible - or at least difficult - for someone to enter? He gave ideas, suggestions on how to improvise locking the door, and left it open-ended - people could come up with other ways that could be done.
If you think the shooting's nearby but far enough away that you're not in immediate danger, maybe your best move is to leave the area. Do you have a door that leads outside? Great. Windows that face a safe direction? That's workable - figure out how to open it. Doesn't open? He has suggestions for breaking it safely, then gets people thinking about how to safely get past the glass. Are you low enough in the building that you could safely jump out the window? Think before you jump.
What if someone's shot? How do you stop bleeding? What's something you could improvise as a bandage? (sanitary napkins, paper towels, gym clothes you might have in a backpack). What are some things you could use as a tourniquet if the bleeding won't stop with direct pressure? (belt, shoelaces). How could you barricade the door if you can't lock it? (move heavy furniture in front of it, or make a huge pile of all the chairs, tables and desks right in front of it). What if a gunman is trying to enter the room you're in despite locking/barricading? (get everyone in the room to start making a huge noise - yell, scream - sound like he's walking into a fight). What if he comes in anyway? (Throw whatever you have at his face - difficult to keep a good sight picture on someone if you have 15-40 people throwing a nonstop barrage of random items at your head).
Another incident in the news that he talked about was the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, and how it wasn't a team of SWAT officers who stopped the gunman, but a retiree and another guy who tackled him, and a grandmother who reached into the fray and pulled a magazine away from him as he tried to make a magazine change.
He showed how the two smallest women in the room could take someone down, and how a determined man can get up with three people sitting rather haphazardly on his back, but a little bit of the right leverage makes it nearly impossible for him to get up.
I think the word empowering is overused, but I think that's what the class was. It got people thinking...it's the kind of thing that will get people to put their heads up and look around a bit more. Where's another exit out of this room? Why am I suspicious of that guy?
The lockdown only mentality is teaching our kids to sit quietly and wait to be shot. My friend says ask a cop what they tell their own kids to do if there's an active shooter in their school -- it's not to sit and wait.
As I said earlier, the particular protocol taught at KSU is called ALICE, and the company that trains that method is at this website.
http://www.roseminars.com/However, I'm pretty sure the good ideas and proactive methods are not exclusively found there. In an article in response to the shooting, the Otterbein University police chief laid out a similar strategy in this Fox news story about the shooting:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/02/ ... -shooting/
The Otterbein officer didn't mention the program by name, and it's quite likely that he teaches something with a different acronym. What seems vital to me is not the name of the program, but the elements that are in it.
Some of the resistance I've seen and heard brought up is that we can't teach and expect young children to suddenly become Navy SEALs and take down armed men with their bare hands. As it's been explained to me, the training is tailored to be age appropriate to the audience - there won't be video of the Columbine killers taunting their victims shown in preschools, and no one's expecting little kids to bodyslam a gunman. But in fire drills, we don't train kids to sit quietly in their seats and wait to be carried out of the room to safety individually by firemen when they arrive - we have taught kids how to play an active role in their own safety. I think effective response to an active shooter also requires students to be active participants in their own safety - run if necessary, hide if they're in a safe location, etc.
I wonder how much of schools' insistence on clinging to the lockdown-only protocol has more to do with inertia and keeping an orderly drill procedure in place.
After attending the class last fall, I meant to call my local school district and recommend that they adopt ALICE training. Shame on me for letting it just remain a good intention. The day after the Chardon shooting I called our school's superintendent to talk to him about this, and to his credit, he said they had already several weeks before the Chardon shooting set up a meeting to be briefed on adopting the ALICE training. I think it's a really powerful step in the right direction. I think that training like this can and will be way more effective than metal detectors ever could be. And it's something that each person who undergoes the training will take with them wherever they go - because while active shooter incidents are still as rare as (or rarer than) lightning strikes, they can happen anywhere - the training will go with you to the mall, the BMV, wherever -- the metal detectors won't.
I would urge you to make contact with your local school system, find out what their plans and procedures are for active shooter incidents, and if it's a lockdown only response, to suggest/urge/demand that they look into ALICE training - or training by any other name that follows the same basic strategy of getting people to think and act instead of just sit.
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