By Chuck Remsberg
Senior Police1 Contributor
Sponsored by Blauer
[Editor’s note:In Part 1 we followed Denver officers as they tracked an active shooter, bent on killing as many people as he could before being stopped, through a nightmarishly complex warehouse setting. In this final installment of the series, the officers involved share the lessons they learned through the experience.]
Reflecting on the event, Frank Conner, the lieutenant in charge of SWAT at the scene, acknowledges that any high-tension call-out will have its tactical shortcomings. But at Safeway, he believes, the positives strongly outweighed the negatives. In a group interview with Police1, he and three other SWAT responders, Sgt. Brad Johnson and Techs. Craig Moen and George Gray, shared their perceptions of the lessons learned.
Active Shooter Demographics If an active shooter starts gunning down victims in your community, what kind of suspect and circumstances are you most likely to face? Richard Fairburn, critical incident training coordinator at the Illinois State Police, has analyzed active shooting incidents and reports that this is the statistical profile: • Day shift is virtually guaranteed to draw the call. 95% of active shooting incidents occur during daylight hours. • Two-thirds happen indoors and another 18% take place both indoors and outside. • Schools are the most common setting (41%), followed by a workplace (32%). The suspect is usually familiar with the location. At first, he generally targets specific people, but is very likely to fire randomly before he stops. • The shooter typically is a single, white male, ranging in age from preteen into his 70s. More than half the workplace shooters are over 40. A significant minority have a known history of mental illness. • He’s armed with only a handgun 56% of the time, a rifle 16%, a shotgun 5% and some combination of firearms 23%. On average he fires about 25 rounds, kills 3-4 victims and wounds 5 more. • His last “victim” is likely to be himself. The active shooter usually ends up dead, most often by committing suicide. [NOTE: An article by Richard Fairburn and Lt. Col. Dave Grossman on student/terrorist active shooter attacks on schools, with prevention and response recommendations, titled Preparing for school attacks currently appears as a pre-release special on Police1.com and will appear in the Nov./Dec. issue of The Police Marksman magazine.] |
1. First and foremost, the time and money spent to train the PD’s entire street force, plus some EMS personnel, in active-shooter response tactics proved to be a valuable investment. The current prevailing philosophy of making immediate entry into a shooter’s terrain with whatever forces are available is essential to protect innocent civilian lives, even though officers and medics may be placed at heightened risk. If they aren’t trained for this kind of urgent emergency, the risk will be even greater and the probability of success less.
Trained immediate entry will likely put the offender on the defensive as quickly as possible, in some cases causing him to seek a barricade position and stop shooting. In addition, Conner points out, in the Safeway instance at least two victims who had already suffered potentially mortal injuries before officers and paramedics arrived at the scene were rescued as a result of prompt entry before their wounds became fatal. Now discussion is underway regarding possibly extending at least three days of tactical training to all EMS personnel, Conner says.
Ron Borsch, an Ohio trainer who teaches immediate entry tactics, has calculated that in active-shooter situations where reliable times have been documented, murders and attempted murders typically occur at a rate ranging from 1.4 to 2.3 per minute once the shooting starts. You’re racing against what Borsch calls “the Stopwatch of Death.” Any delay, he says, “can mean more casualties and a higher death toll.”
Lt. Dan Marcou, who teaches active-shooter tactics for the state of Wisconsin, symbolically puts it this way: When that stopwatch is ticking, you need to “ride toward the sound of guns, using chaos for cover"-essentially the strategy employed at Safeway.
2. “You can’t wait for optimal circumstances,” says Gray. Smoke was a great hindrance to breathing and vision inside the warehouse. As is common in such circumstances, the fire department would not enter to fight the fires set by the suspect because the scene was unsafe for its personnel. That left an untenable environment for the cops. But the police, knowing that the lives of scores of employees unaccounted for inside the building were at stake, weighed the environmental dangers against the need for speed and moved in anyway, managing as best they could. “You start with what you have,” Gray says.
At the moment, the fire-police dichotomy, by no means unique to Denver, remains “a Catch-22,” Moen laments. Creative strategizing is needed between agencies from both sides to devise a workable solution for dealing with scenes where fire is impeding the efficient capture of an active criminal.
3. Consider compiling maps of major business/industrial facilities in your jurisdiction. Many departments, including Denver PD, now have on file the interior layouts of all schools in their community, in light of active-shooter incidents that continue to erupt there with disturbing frequency. But commercial premises are often overlooked, even though an estimated one-third of active shooters launch their carnage in workplace settings.
Also consider this training tip from A.L.E.R.R.T., the Texas organization that provides training on active-shooter tactics nationwide: Measure the longest hallway in any business establishment or school in your jurisdiction. Practice moving as well as shooting at that distance, ideally with a patrol rifle. When entry teams encounter active shooters it’s often in a hallway, and you need to be ready for the outer limits of that setting.
4. Be prepared to work around communication problems. Outside Safeway’s enormous warehouse, standard radio communication worked fine. Indeed, Denver police could even talk readily to cops, fire and medical responders from neighboring towns, thanks to a $2 million project completed last year to integrate public-safety networks in a 10-county metro region.
But inside the thick concrete walls, where extensive refrigeration equipment added to signal blockage, police radio functionality was dicey to nonexistent. Apart from the Safeway incident, Denver police regularly run into situations where their radios won’t work inside big buildings, such as some schools and high-rises. “When communication breaks down, things tend to go bad,” Johnson says.
That problem is “typical of the state of wireless communication among emergency responders today,” writes Carolyn Duffy Marsan of Network World. “Many jurisdictions don’t have such state-of-the-art capabilities as in-building coverage and broadband speeds for text messaging and streaming video. These gaps become glaringly evident when a disaster occurs.”
Denver is hoping to address its problem of in-building coverage by spending $11 million to upgrade its wireless network. But overall, Marsan reports, the communications systems used by first responders throughout most of the nation are “only marginally better” than they were before 9/11, even though noticeably better technology is available. With current budgets and priorities, don’t expect much improvement for another 10 years.
5. “Expect a certain amount of confusion and chaos,” Conner advises, but watch for opportunities to minimize it. With scads of personnel pouring into an active-shooter scene from multiple agencies and jurisdictions, the atmosphere is ripe for a clusterfuck, but some problems can be anticipated and averted with proper planning and watchfulness.
At one point, an ambulance that was needed to extract victims from the Safeway warehouse was found to be blocked from access to the building by patrol cars that had been hastily abandoned by excited arriving officers. “It took a two full minutes at least” to move the cars so the ambulance had a clear path in and out, Johnson recalls.
On the other hand, after the shooter was neutralized, an officer was posted near his body to protect the crime scene. This left everything intact and undisturbed for investigators and forensics personnel, in contrast to scenes we’ve all seen or heard about that have been tromped through and contaminated to the point of hopelessness.
6. “Recognize that there are times to break policy,” Johnson suggests. Officers Sewald and Grothe, who took down the shooter but were themselves uninjured, “normally would have been taken off line immediately and sent downtown,” he says. But in that exigent circumstance “they were put back in to search the building, then taken downtown.”
At the time there was still concern that other offenders, perhaps as many as three to five, might be involved. Many employees were still unlocated inside the building, and their condition unknown. In all there were 22 SWAT unit members on hand, but given the size of the place, manpower was still at a premium. A thorough sweep that included the roof and secured areas that had to be breached was conducted. More frightened employees were discovered in hiding, but no accomplices or physically injured parties were found. The search took close to three hours.
7. Plan to the Nth degree but keep your fingers crossed for some lucky breaks. “The suspect was shooting blindly at the three officers he ambushed,” says Gray. Yet only one of his rounds hit the thin center portion of the step riser where penetration was possible. “Bad enough, that’s for sure, but it could have been so much worse.”
Conner agrees that in their exposed position all three of the SWAT technicians could easily have been gunned down. “I’ve said for years that God loves Denver police officers. Especially Denver SWAT officers.” According to Conner, Derick Dominguez was only the second SWAT officer shot in the history of the department.
[Thanks to Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman; Patrol Div. Chief Steve Cooper; Capt. Pat Carver, commander of Metro-SWAT; and Lt. Ronald Saunier, PIO commander, for their cooperation in the preparation of this report.]
Related: 5 phases of the active shooter
