Few emotional flashpoints in policing match seeing a fellow officer go down from hostile fire in an active kill zone. Unchecked, the desperate urge at that awful moment to do something can easily backfire with more casualties…and still leave the original victim at the suspect’s mercy.
A creative trainer from South Carolina has devised a simple action plan that can help guide you through an organized, tactical response to that gut-wrenching challenge. It provides a calming, structured approach to the critical moment when emotions need to be put on hold to save lives.
Appropriately, his strategy is keyed to the mnemonic: R.E.S.C.U.E.
Sean McKay, a paramedic and co-founder of the independent training organization Asymmetric Combat Institute in Taylors, S.C., introduced his concept at the recent ILEETA training conference during a presentation called, “I’m Shot...Now What?” Afterward, he elaborated on each step in an exclusive interview with Police1.
Here’s what he says a well-managed R.E.S.C.U.E. entails when the assailant is still at large and an officer is down in a potential hot zone.
Remote Assessment
First, explains McKay, a former SWAT rescue-medic team leader, you need to objectively evaluate the status of the downed officer from a point of cover or concealment, enhancing your “eyes on” with monocular/binoculars or night vision goggles if available.
If it’s not immediately obvious he’s alive, “look for any signs of life — chest rise or any movement whatsoever.” The officer may be playing dead and breathing very shallowly to avoid drawing more fire. If so, he may be able to subtly and surreptitiously move his hand to where he can cue his mic a couple of times as an indication to you that he’s alive — without alerting the suspect.
“If you detect no movement, no sign of breathing, brain matter extruded from his skull — in other words, good reason to conclude he’s dead — bunker down and don’t attempt a rescue at this point,” McKay advises, as hard as that may be to do. “You have to be careful who you go after. You want to do the most good for the most people. If the officer has suffered a penetrating wound that has stopped his heart and respiration, his chance of survival is nil. The mission must become eliminating additional injuries.”
With signs of life, can the officer safely move to your position or to closer cover if you put down suppressive fire? Can he apply pressure or a tourniquet to his wounds?
“You may have to verbally remind him of what he can do, like how to use his belt to stop bleeding, for example,” McKay says. “Under stress, his thinking may be too disrupted to reason through these things on his own.”
Evaluation of Threat Location(s)
If you decide an immediate rescue is necessary, you need to identify where the suspect(s) can fire at you from during your action. When the attacker is barricaded in a house with the officer down in the yard, for example, his options for engagement are generally limited to doors and windows. Ideally, other officers can monitor these locations from triangulated positions while you (perhaps with a rescue team) concentrate on reaching the wounded officer with minimal time and exposure.
“It seems like rescuers usually want to advance to the casualty directly from the front, but in reality that may not be the smartest thing,” McKay observes. An angled approach from the side of the house or even from next door may reduce your time and distance in the kill zone, may provide more surprise to the assailant, and may force him to adjust his stance to target you, thereby exposing him more to your cover team.
Situational Awareness
This refers to cover consciousness: What is the last point of cover you can use before passing a point-of-no-return to reach the wounded officer and what is the first point of cover you can reach when extracting him?
“These do not have to be the same,” McKay says. “The cover you go to with the casualty should be the nearest or tactically best cover. Maybe it’s a big tree or a truck up on blocks in the yard, where you can get down behind the engine block to administer first aid. You don’t want to drag the downed officer all the way back to where you started if there’s something closer. From there, you may extract further to better cover.
“You need to make this evaluation before you leave your last point of cover, and ideally you need to communicate where you’re going to other officers before you start.”
Under stress you’ll probably have to fight getting locked in to a very narrow, tunneled focus, a tendency to “operate with horse blinders on,” in McKay’s words. “Try to see the scene from a 30,000-foot view,” he suggests, to broaden your scope to encompass all your cover options.
In range training, McKay works to improve officers’ observation skills by planting odd, out-of-context items — an alarm clock, a Russian flag — at scattered point across the areas they’re told to scan. “They have to call out everything their eyes sweep by, and this strengthens their ability to really see when they look.”
Cover Fire/Overwatch
If the offender’s location is known or suspected and manpower is available, sending suppressive fire in his direction can be an important protective measure during the rescue. At the very least, someone not involved in the actual extraction should be watching the potential threat locations for hostile activity.
“Not everyone at the scene needs to rush in to the casualty,” McKay cautions. “You need someone watching your 6 so you can focus on the rescue and don’t have to be looking for a threat all the time.
“Cover fire doesn’t necessarily mean blanket fire. Sporadic rounds to the suspect’s location may be enough to draw his attention away from the rescue.”
Utilization of Assets and Distraction
“One of the things you want to do immediately at the scene is assess what you have that you can deploy to assist the situation,” McKay says. “Maybe it’s portable cover, like a fire truck or garbage truck or even a patrol car that can be driven as a shield between the downed officer and the threat.”
Or maybe you can use equipment to distract the assailant for the few seconds necessary to accomplish the rescue. Again, assuming the suspect is barricaded inside a house, you might fire beanbag rounds against the siding to create noise or toss flashbangs through a window or smash a window with your baton or drive a patrol car through the backyard with siren wailing.
“The idea is to draw the suspect’s attention off the casualty to another stimulus, to make him react to something you’ve initiated,” McKay explains. “When you distract him, you reset his mind, and whatever plans he had go out the window. You now have the advantage.”
The distraction doesn’t have to last long. With well-practiced maneuvers, McKay says, a successful rescue can often be achieved in a matter of seconds.
Evacuation
“Everyone wants to do a head-first extraction,” McKay says, “but sometimes it’s faster and more effective to drag the downed officer to cover feet-first. Clip a hobble around his ankles or rig one up with a strip of webbing and a carabiner and pull him out. If he is so badly injured he can’t rescue himself, a little road rash on his butt is not going to be a big deal.”
McKay teaches other extraction options as well, including carries involving multiple officers. But any method needs extensive practice in advance. “The heat of battle is not the time to try to improvise a rescue technique,” he says.
“The objective is to move a heavy mass behind cover as quickly as possible so that medical attention can be given there. In practicing, you’ll learn how to use human weight to help you move faster while keeping a low profile. You’ll learn how to move steadily and not in a series of jerks and stops, to be a harder target.
“Think of the spot where the officer went down as ‘X.’ Ideally, you want to spend no more than 4-6 seconds on X. Knowing in advance what you’re going to do and how to do it will put you well ahead of most officers out there.”
High-threat rescue and extraction, incorporating the R.E.S.C.U.E. strategy, is one of a number of intense tactical courses taught by the Asymmetric Combat Institute, which McKay founded with Ted Westmoreland to provide survival training for law enforcement, firefighters, and the military. McKay will be teaching a course on extraction techniques at the annual IACP convention next October in Denver and is collaborating on a book about high-threat rescue during “non-linear” conflicts with Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.
For more information, visit the ACI website.
