ALERRT Prepares San Marcos, Other Texans And National Law Enforcement For Active Shooter

“People must also understand just how difficult clear, rational thought is going to be once the incredible stress and chaos of an attack begins.”

By, Undria Wilson

After the recent Parkland, Florida, High School massacre on Feb. 14, 2018, students around the country have staged walkouts in protest of gun control and mental health illness.

According to Assistant Director of Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT), John Curnutt, the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Program was created in 2002 as a partnership between Texas State University, the San Marcos Police Department and the Hays County Sheriff’s Office.

It was formed to provide dynamic training for the first responding officers to an active shooter situation, such as Columbine High School.

Seeing a critical need in preparing citizens caught up in the event to help themselves before the arrival of law enforcement, a Civilian Response course was created.

In recent years, ALERRT has expanded the training to include fire departments, emergency medical service providers and emergency communications operators.

The curriculum has also shifted from “Active Shooter” to “Active Attack” response to reflect other attack modalities that are on the rise, such as knives, vehicles and explosives being used to inflict mass casualties.

According to Curnutt, there are procedures in place for an active shooter on campus. Texas State University Police Department has been trained in both response to active attacks as well as teaching Civilian Response classes to the campus community. Interagency cooperation among all local and state agencies is very strong.

The success of the procedures depends on proximity, level of stress as well as being able to follow protocol amid an active shooter. There are response options, according to ALERRT, which helps aid people in situations when the location and status of a shooter are unknown.

Like many other things, the procedures taught in the Civilian Response course are very effective the more they are rehearsed or considered during one’s daily routine. The training is considered a type of insurance policy: “you’ll get out of it what you invest in it.”

“The response options of Avoid/Deny/Defend are options in that many times one’s location or proximity to a known threat can limit these options,” says Curnutt.

 The closer one is to a threat, the fewer options that person may have. Conversely, the farther away one is to a threat, the more options that person may have.

“People must also understand just how difficult clear, rational thought is going to be once the incredible stress and chaos of an attack begins.”

Therefore, constant training is conducted, so that a person can program themselves to act quickly and appropriately under many types of circumstances off instinct. Cognitive processing will be severely and negatively impacted when thrust into a life/death situation.

The first stage is to “avoid.” Many events have been prevented by others hearing and seeing warning signs and reporting their findings to the authorities. Situational awareness is a key item that would alleviate stress for hostages caught in a situation.

Knowing the ways in and out of where you are at any moment could prove very helpful when an attack is in progress.

According to ALERRT, if an attack or disaster begins and you can get out and away from the affected area safely, you should do so as quickly as possible.

Given the circumstances, some people may find themselves in a “fight, flight or freeze,” which are natural reactions with any person faced with an intense situation.

Research has shown that people who were able to successfully flee the location of an attack fared much better than those who didn’t or couldn’t.

“It only becomes complicated when someone isn’t sure where to safely run,” stated Curnutt.

The next stage is “Deny,” which is the situation in when getting out or getting away isn’t possible, and a person needs to quickly find somewhere close to barricade themselves if an attacker is blocking the only exit. Denying the attacker easy access to where you and others are located can dramatically improve the chances of survival.

At the very least, it will slow them down if they try to breach the obstructions between you and them. This delay allows more time for law enforcement to show up and access the location.

The final stage is “Defend” where everyone has a right to defend themselves or someone else. In so many of the attacks studied, there have been large groups of people who easily outnumbered and could have overpowered their attacker…but didn’t. In a small percentage of attacks, ALERRT has seen unarmed people try and overpower the attacker successfully.

Anyone who has studied the use of force and the psychological and physiological impacts of stress on human performance understands why this is. When faced with imminent death or serious injury, it is incredibly difficult to fight the survival instinct within us all. Fight, Flight or Freeze.

Shock and disbelief are common due to most people not every truly believing anything like this happens or will happen to them. Shock and disbelief typically lead to paralysis or “freeze.”

ALERRT trains its staff members by providing opportunities to participate in training and research projects. Expert instructors are consistently training and staying current on emerging trends and following the best practices for different situations.

But teachers and staff aren’t the only ones who benefit from training.

The training provided to students across the country is a result of all the research and analysis done on case studies and effect methods that address big issues.

With the increase in school shootings and access to guns in recent times, there are questions as to why school shootings are becoming a norm today.

Although attacks like these have seen an increase outside of the school environment, a common theme between all the attacks are in reprisal or seeking revenge for perceived injustice such as being bullied.

A history of mental health issues also appears to be a common trend in many of the cases. Perhaps another issue that plays in all the traumatic school shootings is the association of media attention and notoriety given to the attackers after the event has been shown such as motivating factor to many of them.

San Marcos ISD and Hays County CISD have prepared professional staff regarding the safety of their students. The training based off the Civilian Response training as well as a program called Standard Response Protocol (SRP) has been applied to enhance the capabilities of employees and schools across the area in dealing with an attack.

SRP was created by the family of Emily Keyes, a 16-year-old who was killed in her school in Bailey, Colorado in 2006. Because of the tragedy, the Keyes family saw the need for a more uniform campus response to an incident such as bad weather, fire, accidents, intruders and a school attack.

All local Hays County and San Marcos schools have SRP training and drills conducted.

Thinking back to Columbine in Littleton, Colorado in 1999, Coach Dave Sanders was the only school teacher to be killed during the massacre by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.

Sanders, who was the first to respond to the shooting, guided over 100 students to safety and was shot in the head, neck and torso by Eric Harris as he was running to safely secure students in classrooms. Sanders eventually bled to death after waiting for 9-1-1 to arrive, a call students made three hours prior.

With the flaws of Columbine and the immediate assistance to those injured during an active attack, ALERRT states that their initial reaction was to train the first officers on scene to quickly find, confront and stop the attacker. Once this happens, all other time-sensitive tasks can be accomplished much easier and more effectively.

“As time went on, we noticed a need for law enforcement to be trained in Tactical Emergency Casualty Care (TECC) based medicine. Law Enforcement is usually the first on the scene, at the point of injury, whether it is the officer being injured, an innocent person or a suspect. Knowing how to perform these life-saving skills became a clear priority in training law enforcement so the right interventions applied sooner would enhance survivability,” John Curnutt states.

ALERRT also began working more closely with fire departments and EMS systems to get their medically trained personnel and systems into play much earlier in the event then was being seen at that point.

As quickly as law enforcement is getting on the scene of these attacks today, they still can’t get to the injured fast enough to save people with severe injuries.

ALERRT saw that citizens not only needed to know steps they could take to prevent harm from coming to them, but they also needed to know some of the same medical interventions being taught to law enforcement to save their own life or the life of another.

The federal government started the “Stop the Bleed” campaign in 2015 to bring awareness to the training and equipment that anyone can use to help prevent critically injured people from bleeding to death before help arrives.

In a new era of social media accessibility, most students of the Parkland High School shooting used social media such as Facebook to give insight into the attack. In these events, the need for accurate information is critical. Knowing exactly where an attack is occurring and where injured are located is vital in focusing scarce resources to maximize their efforts.

“Unfortunately, lots of information comes into emergency communications and to responders on the scene to one of these events,” Curnutt said. “Information that was accurate 5 minutes before it was reported may now be inaccurate due to the rapidly changing and evolving event. Frightened, panicked people have given errant information or mixed up details as they report. All of this will create more confusion than clarity on exactly what is happening. For example, in nearly every single event, there have been multiple reports from different locations of various descriptions of suspects or location where shots have been fired. These different accounts from all the different locations, describing different suspects have usually led to extensive searches for additional suspects. Research has shown that approximately 98% of the time the attacker is by themselves. It just takes a while to confirm this to be true.”

Curnutt says that although school shootings have increased over the past 18 years, they are still rare occurrences. Each community needs to evaluate its own risk tolerance when designing a system that requires time and money.

Each location will need to customize their conversation and plan based on age and the construction of the location.

A conversation with elementary and middle school students will be very different from a conversation with high school and college students. More emphasis on security needs to be put into the planning and designing stages of a school or public building, both inside and out.

“See Something, Say Something” needs to be encouraged and then adequately followed up with. Avoid/Deny/Defend and SRP protocols should be trained and rehearsed, involving community first responders.

“Stop the Bleed” kits should accompany every AED in a commercial building, and more people should be trained in how to perform those medical interventions.