Experts say the training and security measures focused on school shootings are flawed and overshadow more common types of violence on campus.
School shootings have captured the attention of the American public and certainly school administrators, who feel compelled to do something to prevent or mitigate the effects of a similar incident taking place on their grounds.
Solutions — in the form of cameras, metal detectors, buzzers, bulletproof white boards and the like — are coming out of the woodwork and are being foisted upon administrators. There is a lot of training available too, such as the Run, Hide, Fightvideo that demonstrates what to do in the event of an active shooter, including taking down an armed gunman.
But there are problems with these approaches and educators are missing key elements of managing these scenarios by relying on some of the technology fixes and the active shooter training, some experts say.
The Run, Hide, Fight training is an alternative to waiting for law enforcement to arrive, which is ineffective since most violent acts are usually over in minutes, before law enforcement arrives. The objective of the training videos is to condition students and administrators, anyone faced with the potentially deadly situation of an active shooter, to recognize the best avenues for avoiding bloodshed.
Running is the first option. If you can get away from danger, do it, the video teaches. If not, find a place to hide quietly. And last, if in close quarters with a gunman, with no place to hide and no avenue for escape, become offensive by throwing objects at him to distract him or even resort to physical combat.
Proponents, and there are many school campuses taking part in such training, say this is better than becoming a sitting duck.
But there are those who say the training is flawed, asks too much of school administrators and students, and misses key components like threat assessments, all-hazards training and collaboration.
Solutions — in the form of cameras, metal detectors, buzzers, bulletproof white boards and the like — are coming out of the woodwork and are being foisted upon administrators. There is a lot of training available too, such as the Run, Hide, Fightvideo that demonstrates what to do in the event of an active shooter, including taking down an armed gunman.
But there are problems with these approaches and educators are missing key elements of managing these scenarios by relying on some of the technology fixes and the active shooter training, some experts say.
The Run, Hide, Fight training is an alternative to waiting for law enforcement to arrive, which is ineffective since most violent acts are usually over in minutes, before law enforcement arrives. The objective of the training videos is to condition students and administrators, anyone faced with the potentially deadly situation of an active shooter, to recognize the best avenues for avoiding bloodshed.
Running is the first option. If you can get away from danger, do it, the video teaches. If not, find a place to hide quietly. And last, if in close quarters with a gunman, with no place to hide and no avenue for escape, become offensive by throwing objects at him to distract him or even resort to physical combat.
Proponents, and there are many school campuses taking part in such training, say this is better than becoming a sitting duck.
But there are those who say the training is flawed, asks too much of school administrators and students, and misses key components like threat assessments, all-hazards training and collaboration.
Are Schools Less Safe?
“We’re very concerned that a lot of schools are less safe today than they were before Sandy Hook,” said Michael Dorn, a former law enforcement officer and now executive director of Safe Havens International, a nonprofit campus safety organization.
One of the reasons, Dorn said, is the heavy emphasis on the active shooter scenario, which ignores other threats, and that some of the training is not evidence-based and not proven to work, such as the Run, Hide, Fight video, created by the city of Houston with U.S. Department of Homeland Security funds.
That thinking is in line with that of Curt Lavarello, executive director of the School Safety Advocacy Council, as well. He knows of no instances where a classroom has been trained to disarm a gunman and has actually done so successfully. He was speaking of the “fight” component of some of the trainings being offered to school districts, which instruct teachers and even elementary school students how to disarm a gunman.
Asking teachers or students to have the wherewithal to attack an armed gunman and hold him down “gets way, way off base,” Lavarello said. “We’re doing something that is not only inherently dangerous but it’s untested.”
Dorn likened the “Fight” part of the video to close quarters combat taught in the military. “When you’re training people to disarm somebody, it’s the highest level of close quarters combat. It’s harder to teach that than to teach them to shoot somebody or stab them with a bayonet.” And yet it’s being done with a 10-minute video or two-hour class, he said.
Dorn’s organization conducts assessments for schools to see how prepared or unprepared they are, putting them in a scenario and observing the reaction. Often the reaction is counter to what is safe and effective, and oftentimes those who’ve watched theRun, Hide, Fight video perform worse than those with no training at all.
“The video is very frightening to educators,” Dorn said. “They freak out and do the most bizarre things. We ask them why they did what they did and they say, ‘I saw the video and that’s what the video told me to do.’”
One elderly man got so panicked during a drill that he jumped through a plate-glass window. And that’s just one case. Dorn said one state has had nearly a quarter of a million dollars in emergency medical bills in the last 18 months just from training. In addition, he said about one-fourth of all participants in the assessment drills will attack the gunman, whether the gunman is suicidal, down the hall, waving the gun or not.
There have been real shooting scenarios where citizens unsuccessfully tried to stop a gunman and Dorn acknowledged that it has gone both ways, where citizens were successful. For instance at Thurston High School in Oregon, students disarmed a gunman after he opened fire. But, as in the case of a Wisconsin high school principal, people have been killed by becoming aggressive with an individual brandishing a gun. At the assessments, people are going out of their way to attack the gunman.
As for having guns for protection in the classroom, Lavarello said it’s asking for trouble. For one thing, police arriving on a scene would have the daunting task of identifying a “good shooter” versus a “bad shooter.” He said that from his 25 years as a law enforcement officer (18 in schools) he understands that in a high-stress situation like an active shooter scenario, even a trained shooter will hit the target about 30 percent of the time.
“The school teacher who may qualify at the pistol range once a year is not going to hit the target in a high-stress situation like an active shooter,” Lavarello said. “And in a school, the backdrop of missing rounds is other kids.”
Physical security, in the form of police officers or security officers has increased since Sandy Hook, and that’s a good thing and advocated by most security professionals. These can be multi-hazard professionals, trained in all-hazards response and, perhaps, shared with the local law enforcement office.
Other Violent Acts
In Run, Hide, Fight, students and teachers are taught to run if it’s safe and hide if it’s not, but they don’t remember that part correctly or misidentify the situation in simulation. Assessments reveal that when given scenarios where there is someone with a gun walking 75 yards away, they do unthinkable things like leaving second-graders exposed.
There are more common types of violence on campus that are being overshadowed by the active shooter hype, such as suicides and other incidents: “The guy who pulls out a buck knife on a teacher or the guy who’s emotionally unstable and comes in and starts beating up the secretary with the wooden nameplate on her desk,” Dorn said. He cited a study that listed 63 homicides in the last 15 years with twice as many suicides. Kids are shooting themselves in front of classes or in the principal’s office, and those instances are twice as common in terms of the number of deaths and five times as common as shootings.
Proponents of the fight and countermeasures say those are meant to be last resorts; when everything else is off the table and the subjects are in close quarters with a gunman. And it’s an alternative to the “lockdown” procedure, which produces easy targets.
But teaching students to hide under a desk or lie down on the floor is counterproductive when it comes to survival, they say, and recent shootings such as Sandy Hook prove that. At Sandy Hook 39 rounds were fired into a room of about 17 square feet where kids were hunkered down. “That was somebody’s strategy,” said Lt. Joe Hendry with the Kent State University Police Department. “That’s not a great idea for this circumstance.”
Same thing at Virginia Tech and the movie theater in Colorado, where a number of people were shot lying on the ground. “Those are not survival tactics,” Hendry said. He’s a proponent of the counter aspect and teaches students to become harder targets, to distract the shooter with noise and movement.
Janice Evans, chief policy officer and director of communications for Houston Mayor Annise Parker’s office, where the Run, Hide, Fight video was produced, stated that the “fight” portion of the video is not transferable to a school situation. “However, the ‘run’ and ‘hide’ segments can be applied to schools.” She said the video has been viewed by nearly 3 million people on YouTube and her office continues to get requests for it from corporations and public agencies around the country. For the entire article visit: http://www.emergencymgmt.com/
Jim McKay is the editor of Emergency Management. He lives in Orangevale, Calif., with his wife, Christie, daughter, Ellie, and son, Ronan. He relaxes by fly fishing on the Truckee River for big, wild trout. Jim can be reached at jmckay@emergencymgmt.com
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