Editor’s Note: In PoliceOne “First Person” essays, our Members and Columnists candidly share their own unique view of the world. This is a platform from which individual officers can share their own personal insights on issues confronting cops today, as well as opinions, observations, and advice on living life behind the thin blue line. This week’s essay, in recognition of National Police Week, comes from PoliceOne Member Detective Robert Tirollo of the Lee County Sheriff’s Office in Fort Myers, Florida, who wrote an essay about active killer response while attending this year’s ILEETA conference last month. Do you want to share your own perspective with other P1 Members? Send us an e-mail with your story.
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By Detective Robert Tirollo
Criminal Investigations Division
Lee County Sheriff’s Office
It seems that every week more tragic news hits us like a ton of bricks, and it so common that sometimes it doesn’t even make the headlines… another active killer on the loose. I picked up a little something from Lt. Dave Grossman who said “Let’s get one thing straight, they’re not active shooters — shooting is a legal sport. They’re active killers.” Violence has reached unheard of proportions and what are we doing about it?
Let’s start off by posing a question. If there was a situation involving a deranged killer, determined to hurt innocent kids at your child’s school, are you confident that the situation could be ended swiftly and with very few casualties? “Of course,” you say. “My agency just had ‘active shooter’ training to deal with this type of incident...”
But are we giving them the correct training?
I wrote this while attending one of the largest law enforcement training conferences in the country. While participating in a training class, the subject of ‘active shooter’ training came up — I couldn’t believe the training that departments were receiving. It didn’t matter if it was a twenty person agency or a fourteen-hundred person agency, when asked about their ‘active shooter’ training — the responses were shocking to me.
This is the year 2010 and everyone is up to date with what does and what doesn’t work…right? Then someone please tell me why our front line officers are being trained to wait for three or four officers to arrive on scene of a homicide in progress, and then enter a building in some sort of formation. It doesn’t work and has never worked, so why are the so-called experts still providing this training to officers.
Let me give an analogy that I heard at ILEETA. There’s a lifeguard on the beach who sees someone drowning. His supervisor doesn’t want him to get injured by going out in the water alone, because there’s a chance that the drowning person might pull the lifeguard down under. So the lifeguard has to wait for three other lifeguards to get to the beach before he enters the water. After all four lifeguards get to the edge of the water; they have to decide what order they should be in when they enter. When they finally enter the water, they swim in perfect formation out to the drowning person.
Since this new policy has taken effect, no lifeguards have been injured — no one has been saved either.
I would expect that it’s well known by now that the only way to stop an active killer is for the first officer on scene to go find the killer and stop him. If a second or third officer arrives on scene, the killer can be located twice or three times as fast if the officers act as individual hunters on the same mission.
The average active killer incident lasts approximately eight minutes. The average time it takes for the incident to get dispatched to patrol is five to seven minutes. So, the remaining time to arrive, locate, and stop the killer is one to three minutes (these are statistics from SEALE Academy).
After the incident at Columbine, several law enforcement agencies decided that patrol officers should no longer do what they had been trained to do in the past, which was, in the case of an active shooter, to sit on perimeter and wait for S.W.A.T. We evolved into small teams of officers who could enter in formation and aggressively seek out and stop the killer. This was a step in the right direction for law enforcement. However, it’s time once again to evolve. We need to update the training officers are receiving on the proper techniques to win. And the training needs to be uniform and mandatory taught by qualified professionals; it needs to include classroom instruction, static drills, and intense reality-based training scenarios.
Trainer Ron Borsch, a 30-year law enforcement veteran says “our country’s tactical community at large has failed to do its homework and to evolve strategies that accurately reflect the known methods of operation and patterns of active killers; law enforcement has already proved many times over that we can arrive ‘too late with too many’ and spend too much time gathering pre-entry intelligence. Now we need to fix what is obviously a broken strategy.”
So, what are we waiting for? The clock is ticking, and when the next active killer strikes, will we let him kill the unarmed, defenseless innocents who are begging for their lives, or will we use action rather than reaction, and to bring the fight directly to these killers with swift aggression.
About The Author
Detective Robert Tirollo works for the Lee County Sheriff’s Office in Fort Myers, Florida. He is assigned to the Criminal Investigations Division and the Field Force Team. He also works as an instructor for the Southwest Florida Criminal Justice Academy and Advanced Reality Tactical Training. Rob holds several instructor certifications including: Firearms, Defensive Tactics, Edged Weapons, Reality Based Training, First Aid, Vehicle Operations, Active Shooter, and Response to Lethal Threats. You may contact him by e-mail at rob69t@hotmail.com or at www.arttinc.com.
