Episode 12: Policing Deaths during Active Shooter Events

Police officers are trained to use deadly physical force as a last resort.  They are also trained to reduce their own risk of death.  Active shooter events, however, require a different behavior formula.  Officers are trained to move toward danger, and there is an expectation that they should “kill the killer” (as stated by a Florida Sheriff after the active shooting incident at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School).  These behaviors may contribute to the deaths of police officers.  Dr. Pete Blair, from Texas State University, joins us to break down these events and what might increase the survivability of police officers who respond to an active shooter event.

Main Topics
•Dr. Blair will discuss Normal Accidents and Resilience Engineering and their relation to officer behavior during these events.
•He’ll examine the common conditions that lead to officer deaths.
•Finally, Dr. Blair will discuss the changes to training that may be needed for responding to an active shooter event.

If you are interested in discussion your agency's participation in the research project I mentioned in the leadup to the podcast episode, feel free to contact me at my Buffalo State email address: phillisw@buffalostate.edu

If you are interested in the data discussed by Dr. Blair, use the link below:

https://tacticalscience.substack.com/p/updated-data-on-the-most-dangerous

Chain Survival: Responding to an Active Attack, by Dr. Blair and Dr. Martaindale, is available at Amazon (check the link below): 

https://www.amazon.com/Chain-Survival-Responding-Active-Attack/dp/B0DFS3K8P8/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1

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Transcript

Hi everyone. We'll get to the podcast shortly,
but first I want to take a moment for a point of personal privilege.
When I retired from teaching at Buffalo State University,
I left with the title Emeritus Professor,
which simply means I'm old,
at least that's what others tell me.
But I'm still connected to the college and still researching a few topics
that are of great interest to me and the policing community.
I have developed a survey that I want to distribute to
police officers both street level and supervisors.
It focuses on two topics.
First, a police officer's views of hotspot policing.
Second, their opinion of the proper police response to an active shooter event.
The survey is online and completely anonymous,
and it should take about 10 to 12 minutes to complete.
I'm seeking police agencies that might want to distribute the survey throughout their department.
I know that many of the people who listen to this podcast
are working in law enforcement in different locations in the states,
but I also know that there are some listeners in Canada,
so I'm seeking your help.
If this research idea is something that sounds interesting to you,
I'll leave some additional contact information in the show notes.
Feel free to contact me and we can set up a time to talk so I can explain things more thoroughly.
Thanks for listening to the podcast.
Now back to the show.
Welcome to the Police in Service Training Podcast.
This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence
to street level police officers and command staff alike.
The program is intended to help the police and law enforcement community
create better programs, understand challenging policies,
and dispel myths of police officer behavior.
I'm your host, Scott Phillips.
When I say Uvalde, it's pretty easy to picture what we're going to discuss,
but we're not getting directly into how police officers respond to these events.
We're going to take a slightly different tack today.
If I said Kirkwood City Hall in Missouri,
Forza Coffee Shop in Lakewood, Washington,
Frankstown Township, Pennsylvania,
CC's Pizza and Walmart in Las Vegas,
Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs,
or Benny's Car Wash Oil Change in Bequick in Baton Rouge.
Now they may not sound familiar,
but in each of these cities and several others,
these were locations of active shooter events
where police officers were either killed or wounded.
A conversation about active shooter events
could take several different directions,
including why they occur in the first place,
how officers are trained to deal with these events,
how officers have responded during some of these incidents,
or the public's expectations about how officers have responded.
But today we're going to focus on why officers may die
when responding to active shooter events
and how maybe to prevent these from occurring.
So joining us to discuss this topic
and why the police response to active shooter events
is a lot more complicated than just running in a door
is Dr. Peter Blair.
Dr. Blair is the Executive Director
of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center
at Texas State University.
This is the alert training
some of you may already be aware of.
And Pete and some of his colleagues
have written several articles
on policing and active shooter events.
In fact, he has a new book available,
which I'll let him discuss later in the show.
He has also been invited to speak on active shooter events
and police tactics by groups across the US
and internationally.
Welcome, Pete.
Thanks for having me on.
I'm glad you're here.
So what attracted you to this topic?
Was there something in your background
that drew your attention to studying police
and particularly active shooter events?
So I was, in my misspent youth,
I worked for John Reed and Associates,
and I went to grad school and was doing research
on interviewing, interrogation, policing-related work.
And when I started at Texas State,
the Alert Center was already there,
and my director of the school at the time said,
hey, you should go talk to these guys
about doing some research with them.
And I said, I don't know anything
about active shooter events.
I don't really think about tactical policing.
You know, I'm an investigations kind of guy.
It's not my thing.
And he said, well, just go over and talk to them
and see what they say.
So I went over and talked to the guys
who were with Alert at that time
and said basically what I said to you,
which is, I don't know anything about this topic area,
but I do know how to design research to answer questions.
So if you've got questions,
I can help you design research to answer those questions.
And so then we started doing,
first a couple of small research projects,
and then they were happy
that somebody was actually doing work with them
and helping them get better knowledge
to inform their training.
Right, sure.
And I saw that there was a real gap in this area,
and there was a need to do research in the area,
and that's kind of what drew me into it.
Now that's almost the definition of serendipity.
That's great.
Now, from a broader perspective,
why is this particular type of research
into policing in active shooter events
of value or relevance to policing?
Now, fortunately, they don't happen that often,
so that's kind of why I asked that question.
If it's something that doesn't happen often,
researching it might not have that much value.
In both of us, I think, no,
at least I do for my own personal work,
that from an academic perspective,
they don't get cited very frequently,
because again, only a small number of people are doing them.
So academically, it's not of great value.
That's my perspective.
But again, why is this research helpful for the police?
So I would say the,
when I first started doing research with ALERT,
the initial study we did is,
do these skills carry over to the rest of your policing job,
your task that you do?
That was really before active shooter became a hot topic.
And so we were always having to justify,
okay, these don't happen very often, like you said,
so why is it worth doing training in this?
And so the very first project we actually did
was with a master student,
and she did a follow-up survey on trainees
who had been through the class and saying,
are you using these skills in your everyday practice
and that sort of thing?
And we found that, in fact,
these skills do carry over to lots of things,
because there are lots of tactical habits
and things like that that you're learning
that apply to just general policing.
The other thing I would say is that these events
are low criticality, or sorry,
they're low frequency, but high criticality.
Right, right.
Which means that you can't get them wrong.
You absolutely have to respond correctly and appropriately
when they do occur.
Right, yeah.
And you can't mess it up.
And we've seen that in places like Ubali
where it doesn't go well,
and the negative impact has not only officers,
but the communities and the people who are killed
and all those sorts of things that are there.
So it's low frequency,
but it's absolutely something you have to get it right.
It's interesting in the private world,
this kind of thing they would just insure away.
You just take out an insurance policy,
hope it never happens, and that's it.
Law enforcement doesn't have that.
On the academic front, I would say that
my personal opinion on academia
is I think a lot of what's happening is really off base.
I think academics are worried about problems
they've created in their own philosophies and theories
about how the world works,
as opposed to talking to practitioners
about what are the problems they're having
and how can they do better on those problems.
And so I accepted that
when I started doing research in this area
that I was gonna go off into an area
that there isn't a lot of research in,
and I'm not gonna get a lot of academic acclaim
for what I'm doing.
What matters to me is that we're helping officers
do better and save lives out there.
Oh, I completely agree with that.
Some of my research has only been cited a handful of times,
but I always keep my fingers crossed
that police are gonna read this,
which is kind of what this podcast has been all about,
getting research out to the police officers
and command staff that are out there to listen to this,
have a conversation.
I've described these conversations
as having a beer at the conference bar afterwards,
and hopefully a few police officers are there
and they're listening in,
and they come over and start asking us about it.
It's interesting you mentioned that these are low frequency,
but they have to get them right.
I think that also helps explain why,
not the bulk, I shouldn't say the bulk,
but when people look at the police academy training,
the largest volume of training is handguns,
is weapons, deadly force,
because it's one of those things that officers rarely do,
but you can't screw it up, you have to get it right.
So, okay, let's get into your research.
In 2022, you and your colleague, Aaron Duran,
is that how you pronounce it?
Duran.
Duran, you wrote a paper that was titled
How Police Officers Are Shot and Killed
During Active Shooter Events,
Implications for Response and Training.
Now, I read your paper with great interest
because it was not just a recitation of facts and cases,
but it took, again, in my opinion,
a critical view of these events
using two different frameworks.
Now, first you discussed what are called normal accidents,
which sounds very weird, but in the academic world,
that's what it's called, normal accidents,
and as a general explanation
for an officer using deadly force,
or having it used against them,
we're not gonna get into active shooters just quite yet.
Now, can you explain a little bit more for the listeners
what normal accidents are?
Yeah, so Klinger was the first person
to bring that over to the law enforcement world
and policing research, but it's got a long history
in looking at industrial accidents,
nuclear accidents, that sort of thing,
and the researchers in that area
were really trying to discover what is the process
that produces these catastrophes when they happen.
And basically the conclusion was that these happen
when you have these complex operations,
but that are very tightly coupled with each other,
which means that they're connected deeply.
And so what happens in these situations is a problem,
one part of the system gets passed along to the next part,
gets passed along to the next part,
and causes a cascade that goes through the whole system.
And usually the cascade is getting worse as it goes along.
You can think about like a manufacturing machine,
say some item breaks in the machine at an early process,
but the parts from that item then get fired
through the rest of the machine,
it's kind of like a shotgun effect
as they go out through the rest of the machine
fouling everything up.
And once you start down that you're off the normal path,
things get much worse very rapidly.
And all these things that you say
they can't happen together,
all of a sudden they all cluster together
and they do happen together,
and then you have this catastrophe.
And so they were really trying to look at that
and explain that, and really their conclusion was
that anytime you have a highly complex process
and the parts of the process are tightly coupled,
these are unavoidable in the long term.
You just can't get around them.
So from a normal accident perspective,
police officers should, again, generally speaking,
avoid complex situations and keep their distance.
And this should theoretically reduce the need
for an officer to use some sort of physical force.
But an active shooter event is likely, again,
to be quite complicated.
And the officer is not expected to keep their distance.
They're expected to tightly couple,
get towards the situation as fast as they can.
This is a complete change
when we're talking about engaging in deadly force, isn't it?
It's exactly the opposite
of what we had been training for a long time,
which is contain it, control it, call the SWAT team,
let them deal with these types of situations.
And now we're trying to launch that officer
into a very complex, chaotic situation
and get them intentionally to tightly couple
with the attacker as quickly as they can to stop the attack.
Now, the second framework that you and Erin used
in your study, and again, I found this really interesting,
is what's called resilience engineering.
Now, rather than steal your thunder,
can you explain what this is?
Yeah, so again, this is another line of research
that really started in the industrial world
and manufacturing and looking at how do we deal with these.
And as a basic definition,
resilience means it's the ability of the system
to adjust its functioning prior to, during
or following changes and disturbances
so that it can sustain required operations
under both expected and unexpected conditions.
So what it's saying is resilience is really,
you're adjusting and adapting to what's happening
so that you can continue operations,
whether it's something you expected or was unexpected.
And the background research on that suggests
that there are four key components that have to be present
to have a resilient system.
The first is that people need to know how to respond
when they have a problem.
The second is they need to know what's important to monitor
or to pay attention to that tells them
that the problem is occurring or happening.
The third is that you anticipate the problem
before it occurs so that you're ready on that.
And then that's all reinforced by a learning process
that you're always trying to learn
from what's happening in your system and your process
so that you get a better understanding
of what's likely to occur
so you can better anticipate, monitor, and respond.
Those four things go together.
And as you're saying that,
just like when I was reading it,
it occurs to me those things take time.
So again, we're dealing with an active shooter event
where time's not a luxury.
And again, so I'm clear,
police officers are usually trained
to avoid natural accidents as we talked
by avoiding complexity and keeping their distance.
And again, it's no shame to take cover or find concealment.
That's how police officers are trained.
I remember training in Hogan's Alley in Houston,
and they even talked about, you can't find them now,
but mailboxes that, a mailbox would stop a big round.
So you're trying to cover, you hide from these things.
Further, the resilience engineering requires,
and again, if that's the right word requires,
adjusting to the conditions.
Now in both of these cases,
this would likely lead an officer to go slower.
And this is what most police training is all about,
avoiding deadly force.
And again, how does this jive with the public's expectations,
particularly after Uvalde?
How does this jive with their expectations
about how an officer should respond?
So part of it is,
we address with this concept of priority of life, right?
So at the top of the priority of life scale,
we have innocent victims.
Underneath that, we have law enforcement officers,
and then at the bottom, we have the suspects.
And the idea is that if you're gonna take risk,
you ought to be taking risks
because you're trying to save life in this case.
And so what we're asking during an active shooter situation
is for an officer to assume more risk,
because really the safest thing to do would be to,
like you said, hunker down somewhere and not do anything.
But in the meantime, we have innocent civilians
that are in there that are being murdered.
And so you're expecting officers to take some risk
when they're going in there,
and you're trying to help them conceptualize that
and understand what the risks are that they're taking
in order to help them right-size their actions and do that.
So in any event, really the first thing
you're asking officers to do when they get on scene
is to confirm that there's actually violence occurring,
because we all know about swatting
or just bad information calls that go out.
After they've confirmed it's occurring,
they have to kind of localize.
And by that, we mean not necessarily precisely locate
where the attack's happening,
but a direction to move
where the violence seems to be occurring.
So obvious signs are gunfire, that sort of thing,
or you see people running out of a building,
or you're getting better information
about a particular location in the structure
that the bad guy might be in.
And then they have to close that distance
to get close to the person
so they can apply whatever level of force is necessary
to really affect an arrest, right?
And that's the end result of this.
Now, in active shooter events,
that arrest is almost always, not almost always,
but frequently a kinetic arrest, right?
So they're using deadly force
in order to stop the attacker from killing anybody else.
Okay, so let's jump into your research, then.
In your study, you and Aaron identified cases
from the active shooter reports
that are published by the FBI
where officers are shot, injured, or killed.
Can you give us some rough numbers
on what your research found?
Sure, and the data I'm gonna share with you
is actually updated from that article,
so on my tactical science substack,
which I'll give you the information you can put a link up to.
The article stopped in 2019 with the data,
and this particular data is updated through 2023,
so another five years with the data.
It's also a time where we had a drastic increase
in the number of events,
so they're roughly double the number of events in this data
that there were prior to that.
So going from 2000 to 2023, we have 567 events.
In those 567 events, there were 69 events
that had an officer shot, and during those 69 events,
there were 136 officers that were shot.
And then looking at that data, you start to break down,
okay, what are the circumstances under which
the shootings occurred, that the officers were injured?
And we found the first major cut to make is
whether it's a shooting at the outset of the event,
which is oftentimes an ambush-type situation.
The person goes to the location to commit the attack.
They keep their weapons concealed
until they encounter the first law enforcement officer.
They then attack that law enforcement officer,
and that's the beginning of the event.
But it really is kind of an ambush.
Imagine a police officer standing,
a duty post at a courthouse for security,
and then the guy comes in and all of a sudden
they attack the guy, and that's the start of the attack.
So those ambush-types of attacks,
those happened in 37 of the officers that were shot,
and in those ambush attacks, it was about a 50-50 chance
for the police officer being killed when they were shot.
The other 99 attacks that we see in there
are officers who were shot when they were responding.
So in these particular cases,
they know that a shooting is going on,
that there's an attack occurring,
and they're responding to that.
So that's a different mind frame
versus standing at duty post
and going to an event you know is occurring.
When we look at those, it's only 12% of the officers
that are shot that die.
And in the last five years, it's actually only 7%
of the officers that are shot
during that response phase die.
Other interesting information you see
is that 78% of the officers are shot outside,
and it's interesting that officers are more likely to die
when they're shot outside as well.
How many was it?
78%.
78?
Oh, okay, almost four out of five.
Yeah, most of the officers are shot or shot outside
and are also more likely to die.
And as a matter of fact,
if you look just at the last five years,
it's actually three times more likely to die
where the officers are shot inside
only died in 3% of the events when they were shot
and 9% when they were shot outside.
So if we take that and we plug that all really kind of back
into the resilience engineering framework
and how you approach it,
you know, what we're saying is
we got to learn from past events, right?
So you get the data, you pull the data in
and you start to look at it.
And you start to say, okay, what does this tell us
about how we right-size our thinking
or how these things play out?
And I think the first thing it tells you
is that outside is extremely dangerous.
And so if we know that it's extremely dangerous
when we're showing up to the scene,
we should be paying attention
that as soon as we can see that attack site,
we are on the X, right?
That we are now in the free fire zone.
Right.
Which means that's the monitor phase now.
I've anticipated outside is gonna be dangerous.
I'm now monitoring, I'm looking actively for threats.
I'm thinking about the approaches that I'm making
in order to provide cover for myself
as I'm approaching the vehicle in both my vehicle
and then when I'm moving.
And then, you know, responding is
about choosing better approaches, better parking spaces,
getting out as quickly as you can,
moving to the structure as quickly as you can
so that you're providing less of a target.
So it's kind of taking that resilience engineering framework
and looking at this data.
The other thing I think you see in the data is
a lot of that resilience is about being aware
that there could be a problem.
And if you look at the data and you see the ambush data
where 50% of officers are killed,
suggests they're not ready for it, right?
They're just standing opposed.
They're not prepared.
They're not taking preventative action.
They're not right.
Right, why would they be?
Yeah, sure.
Exactly, exactly.
And so boom, they're hit and there you go.
Whereas we see it during the event,
it's a much lower rate of injury
because you know you're going into something that's bad.
And I think what the outside data may show is that
because of how we've done training for so long,
where we spend a lot more time on the interior parts
of the active shooter response
and very little on the exterior.
As a matter of fact, it's pretty rare to see
in any scenario based training for active shooter
that the shooter engages people outside of the structure
before they get in.
It's rather you're in the structure when you start
or you do that sort of thing.
And so if you think about that
as kind of a potential training scar
where you're giving them the wrong impression
about where the danger is in these events.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's carrying over.
So they're not as cautious outside
as they are once they get inside.
And then that could be explaining
why you see the higher injury rate and fatality rate
on the outside versus the inside
using that resilience engineering framework.
That's what I made a note here to ask you about that
when you said that so many people are being shot outside
is that we're, because I know we've talked online
in the past about the, but there are like eight different,
I think it was like eight different steps
to training the officer to stop the killing.
You know, you show up, approach the building,
those kinds of things.
And so if so many people are getting shot outside,
so many officers are getting shot outside,
it might be better to revamp the training
even if whether it's alert training
or any training across the nation
that the agencies are giving to their own officers
that the bulk of you, if you approach these things
are gonna get popped outside.
So that's where you really gotta pay attention
to these kinds of things.
Well, that's quite interesting.
And as we're talking, I'm reminded of one of the things
that your other research, not this particular article,
your other research points out that there are efforts
to again train officers to avoid getting killed.
Even in the active shooter events.
And this has always been a standard kind of response.
What's the phrase from the movie Speed
with Keanu Reeves, don't get dead.
So rushing into an unknown situation
is simply not the best approach, active shooter or otherwise.
So resilience engineering seems to be that same wheelhouse.
With resilience engineering,
you're adjusting your approach to these situations.
So I'm kind of curious, is your thoughts on training
for the future, whether it's alert or anywhere else?
Yeah, so I think this circles back to
if you're looking at saying that you're evidence-based,
which is basically what almost every department
across the country has been saying for decades now.
Yeah, that's big now, yeah.
Then it means you have to engage in an effort
to one, get good data.
So you have a good evidence base to draw from.
And then you have to let that evidence kind of take you
where it says you should go.
And if you look at active shooter training,
the initial active shooter training was really taking
what SWAT guys did and teaching that to patrol officers.
So it was kind of a mini SWAT school.
That made sense at the time.
We didn't know much about these events.
SWAT guys were the experts in these kinds of events
where there's violence that's happening.
And so you look to them and say, how do we do this?
And so they bring their kind of SWAT sensibilities.
So that's when you see the original responses
to these events where teams of four or five were entering
rather than having a solo officer enter.
Why do they do that?
Because that's what SWAT teams do.
They have a team of four or five and they go work inside
and that's how they train and that's how they prepare.
And so that crosses over.
And I think what's happened in a lot of the training
for active shooter is that SWAT,
initial SWAT influence has carried on
because SWAT guys are the tactical experts.
But the context of an active shooter is different
than a SWAT call out.
And so we're having to look and say, look, these events,
now we have two decades of data
and we have more than 500 events that we can look at.
And we can say, here are the patterns and trends
that we see in those.
And maybe it's time to reconfigure this.
In the old, the SWAT world and I've had many, many discussions
with SWAT guys about room entries over time.
And as you've probably seen, every SWAT guy
has their favorite room entry system and that's it.
Nobody can convince them otherwise
and can turn the blows over beers
and all that kind of stuff, right?
I mean, it can really go that bad.
And that's cool and it's important
and room entry is part of this.
But when we look at these events,
we see exactly, exactly out of 500 events,
one event where an officer was shot on a room entry,
that's Yuvali, that's the only one.
And that was really kind of a graze hit on a hat
and some hits on a shield that they had.
So that's it.
But we spend a lot of time arguing about room entries,
what's the optimal room entry, all those sorts of things.
And again, it's not that that's unimportant,
but the risk is much greater outside,
much greater outside.
And so if we're gonna change training
to do more focus on outside,
then you also have the data drive saying,
what are we doing inside
that we maybe don't need to spend as much time on?
And you have to borrow from one to the other.
Yeah, that's interesting.
You mentioned Yuvali as the only incident of all of them
that an officer's actually shot
as they're trying to enter their room,
they're getting shot in other conditions.
And again, I wasn't there,
so I'm really loathe to judge with those kinds of situations.
When an officer is involved in such a dangerous situation,
judging them is, you gotta be very careful about that.
But my thinking was, if somebody took a shot at me,
grazed my head, whether it was a helmet or not,
I'm backing off.
Now, again, I understand the rest of it.
I am not blind to all these little kids.
It was a week and a half before we had one in Buffalo.
And as I talked to a colleague who taught me years ago,
he lives now in Lewiston, Maine,
and last year they had one up there.
And I described it as a gut punch,
and we talked and he says,
that's exactly what it feels like.
When I saw that on the news,
you're in Buffalo, an active shooter event,
it's like, what the fuck?
And this was devastating.
So I don't wanna get off that track too much,
but these things are important.
So to understand that,
cops aren't getting killed in the room entries,
they're getting shot and wounded and killed
in other situations, and a lot of them are ambushes.
This is fairly illuminating.
So I wanna, you've covered a lot.
Are there any specific implications for your research,
whether it's this study or any others
for police practice or policy
that we haven't talked about already,
because we talked about training,
but if you wanna hit that again, that's fine.
Yeah, so I think if we talk about the easy adjustments,
as I've said before, more emphasis on training
in the outside environment,
training on encountering the bad guy outside,
making sure that officers have that right size understanding
of where they're likely to take risks.
Part of that's also, I think,
if we're asking officers to go in and assume this risk,
like you said, it's we're expecting you to go in
and get tightly coupled with this person.
And if we expect that of the officers,
we should also provide them with the equipment they need
to do that in the safest way possible.
Not that it'll ever be safe, but safest.
And so we talk about,
departments should be giving you a patrol rifle.
They should be giving you upgraded body armor
to use during active shooter event.
It's a plate carrier that least level three plates
that'll stop the typical two, two, three rounds
or seven, six, two short rounds
that are the most common that we see in these events.
They should be giving you the medical equipment
that's necessary to try to stave off leading tourniquets
and those sorts of things that's available there.
Helmets are also a good idea.
We have some good three level three and three A helmets now
that we actually in this data,
you can see a couple officers who were shot in the head
and the helmet stopped the round.
So having that kind of equipment is absolutely critical.
And again, if the most likely area to be shot is outside
and the original data,
the actual most likely time to be shot
is immediately on arrival,
meaning that you're at your car or immediately next to it.
That shifted now to be that arrival still very common,
but we also see a lot of officers who were shot
when they're moving and they're in between their car
and the building in some way, shape or form.
But the fact that you can be engaged as soon as you arrive
means that you can't show up on scene
and then decide it's time to get your equipment on.
You have to stop your car as soon as you get that call
and put your stuff on and then go
because you'd never know what you're going to encounter
when you actually get to the scene.
And there's certainly some cases,
the sick temple shooting in Wisconsin is example of that
where the lieutenant's first on scene,
his rifle's in the spinnaker,
rifle holder in his car.
He fights with the first second to try to get it out.
He can't get it out and decides, you know what?
I'm just going to go.
And so he just goes with his pistol
and he's immediately engaged by the bad guy in a gunfight.
And he gets hit on the first exchange of rounds.
He misses the bad guy.
The bad guy then shoots him a lot of times after that,
closes in and then his partner show up and save him.
But if he'd had a rifle,
that might've been a different story,
but he wasn't going to waste the 10 seconds
that was going to take him to fight out of the rifle holder
to get the rifle out.
So he's just going to go.
So if you had done that before you get there,
then you're better prepared, right?
Yeah, I'm reminded of, what was it,
Nashville a couple of years ago at the grade school
where they showed the body camera video of the officer
arriving at the door and somebody had to open the door
for him, but before he goes in the door,
he has to get to the back of the trunk.
He gets out the gun.
I don't recall if he put on his vest or not,
that's telling us something maybe a block or so before,
almost like when officers are trained,
when I arrive on the scene,
I tell the dispatcher I'm arriving a block before
so that I can put my microphone down
and assess the situation before I even get out of the car.
It's really good stuff.
So Pete, I want to give you an opportunity
to sell some product.
Can you give us an elevator pitch for your new book?
Yeah, sure.
It's a book with Hunter Martindale and myself.
It's called The Chain of Survival
and it's about active attack response.
So we go beyond just active shooter,
but include things like knives and vehicle attacks
and those sorts of things.
And it walks us through what we call the five links
of the chain of survival about civilian response,
law enforcement response, stabilizing the injured,
transporting the injured to definitive care
and then definitive care to lay those out for people
as well as bringing in the major research findings
that we think can form those things.
So the first part of the book has a bunch of data
on the events and then we go into the particular links
of the chain and talk about how that data plugs
into the links of the chain
as well as other individual studies.
Some of the other studies you mentioned about rementary
and the writing chair and those sorts of things
are also mentioned in the law enforcement response
part of that.
Yeah, so I appreciate you sending me an advanced copy.
I was able to read it and I can just tell listeners
it's an easy read and you could probably get through it
in a day sitting at a desk.
So again, Pete Blair from down in Texas
in the Alert Center, I appreciate your time
in discussing this topic.
Thanks for having me on.
You have a great day, take care.
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