Ep 57: The Key to Success in Active Shooter Response
Episode 57
Published Oct 30, 2023
Last updated Feb 18, 2026
Duration: 39:49
Episode Summary
How long does it take us to get the injured off the scene to a hospital? That's our gold standard. The one key to success: we've got to be able to work together. We've got to get people assigned to the task we need done, where we need it done, and when we need it done. How to do that is today's topic!
Episode Notes
NEW! Watch this show on YouTube at https://youtube.com/live/EV0xRrmByK8
Podcast Host Bill Godfrey is joined by Mark Rhame, Adam Pendley, and Don Tuten to discuss "The Key to Success" in an active shooter event. Their answer may surprise many, but it centers around making sure every responder arriving at the scene has a task and purpose. Whether you're resource rich or resource poor, it's crucial that responders are assigned to the task you need done, where you need it done, and when you need it done.
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. I am joined today by three of our fantastic C3 Pathways instructors. Sitting next to me is Mark Rhame, like myself, on the Fire EMS side. By the way, Mark, did you know we got on the right side of the table this time?
Mark Rhame:
I see that. We're on the-
Bill Godfrey:
We're on fire side.
Mark Rhame:
The fire side.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. For those of you that are just listening to the audio in the new studio, we've got some pictures on the wall on one side, law enforcement on the other side fire, and there's some lovely decorative key lights, red and blue. I'll let you figure out which ones are which. Across the table from us, joining us on the law enforcement side, Don Tuten. Don, good to have you back in the studio again.
Don Tuten:
Hey, thanks, Bill. It's awesome. And I like the antiquated, the older photos. It brings back a little nostalgia. That's great.
Bill Godfrey:
Little nostalgia. Yeah, exactly. Last, but certainly not least, Adam Pendley. Adam, thanks for coming back in.
Adam Pendley:
Excellent. Thank you.
Bill Godfrey:
All right, so today's topic is the key to success. While there is certainly a lot of things that have to come together for an integrated response to an active shooter event to unfold with a good performance, and by that, we're measuring our time on the clock. How long does it take us to get the injured off the scene to a hospital? That's our gold standard. The one key to success, we've got to be able to work together. We've got to be able to get people on the assignments when we need them real quick, get them where we need them, work together as a team, do all of that. Adam, words, go ahead.
Adam Pendley:
So I think the key to success is going to be a surprise to many of our listeners. We all train across the country that we have to get in there fast. We have to address the active threat, we have to begin rescue. But to get the many jobs that need to get done, staging is the key to success.
Don Tuten:
Yeah, I agree. I agree.
Bill Godfrey:
It absolutely is.
Don Tuten:
Coming from two cops that, typically, we don't train that all the time or teach it as much. I agree a hundred percent with what Adam is saying.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, it is truly an important, important, important piece of the success that has to go together. Of course, as we've talked so many times culturally, the fire department has been doing staging for years, and if EMS is integrated with the fire department, then they're very familiar with it. Sometimes though, when EMS is a separate entity or another part of the county government or whatever their structure may be, they may or may not be as familiar with staging.
But from the law enforcement perspective, and I want to talk a little bit about some of this as we unfold this today for the guests. Adam and Don just kind of keep this in the back of your mind. We've had a number of events where they've used the ASIM process and the response and they had pretty good results except for one kind of key thing. They've had some challenges with getting the law enforcement officers to check in at staging to kind of get their assignments and figure out. I don't want to lose sight of that as we go through this, but let's talk, Mark at its basic thing. What is the purpose of staging? How would you unfold that?
Mark Rhame:
Staging allows us to be accountable for our teams or our units that are responding in. And once they come to that location that's been designated as a staging location, we can go ahead and start building out our teams and have them ready to respond once they're needed. That may be an integrated type of a team we build out, both Rescue Task Force or RTFs where we get law enforcement, fire, EMS marrying together where it may be contact teams where just law enforcement officers are built into a team. Staging should not be about slowing down. If people put that in their head, this is just going to slow everything down, no, you're not seeing the big picture. What we should be doing is building out teams. How many times have you been to a scene, a critical scene where you're trying to build teams out, but you can't figure out where people are. Putting these four officers together while they're already on a scene is probably very, very difficult.
Bill Godfrey:
If you can get them on the radio.
Mark Rhame:
Exactly. The same thing with fire EMS. If you just let them come into the scene to say, "No, I need to get engine two to get with these two officers." But they're nowhere near each other. They're on two separate sides of a campus at a school shooting, then you're going to have problems. The way to solve that is create a staging location, create staging managers, have people come in, check them in and have them build out teams very, very quickly.
Don Tuten:
And it gives them, they know where they're going, they know what their job assignment is, and ultimately it makes it more efficient.
Adam Pendley:
Who they're working for.
Don Tuten:
And who they're working for.
Bill Godfrey:
On the law enforcement side, you guys have, or at least I've heard a lot of the SWAT guys say some variation of slow is smooth and-
Don Tuten:
Smooth is fast.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I about butchered that there. In a lot of ways that's staging. It really is because you've, as Mark said, you've got to put the teams together. You've got to get them assigned to a task and get them reporting to somebody so that we can close the loop. That few seconds on the front side invested in getting them together as a team so that they move up as a team, go in as a team, work as a team, giving them a specific assignment. That part of going to staging is the slow part of that slow, smooth, fast thing. Then the smooth is you're in a team, you're assigned a task and purpose, and the fast is that team goes down and takes care of business. You think that's fair? Is that a fair application of that?
Don Tuten:
Yeah, I think that's fair and I think that's something that law enforcement does, but they do it without calling it staging a lot of times. In fact, I'm going to turn over-
Bill Godfrey:
Talk a little bit about that.
Don Tuten:
Yeah. I'll turn it over to Adam. I'll let him explain it because we've talked about this in the past and it's something that's overlooked quite honestly by a lot of law enforcement. If you take the classes that we provide here, you understand the importance of it on the integration piece, but law enforcement's been doing staging for a long time, and Adam, I'm going to turn it over to you and let you kind of elaborate on that.
Adam Pendley:
Sure. Actually, I can visualize our listeners right now, especially our law enforcement listeners shaking their head going, "Nope, nope, nope, don't agree."
Bill Godfrey:
Oh, you assume they're still listening.
Adam Pendley:
Yep, exactly-
Bill Godfrey:
They've already shut us off.
Adam Pendley:
Exactly. Nope. But the reality is that I think the only experience law enforcement has with staging is something for a special event or maybe for a storm or something, some sort of natural disaster where they go and it's a long elongated process where they're signing in forms and things along those lines. That's not what we're talking about. This is more of a tactical gear up and go staging. We do that a lot. We do that every day in law enforcement. Here's my example. When a couple of officers are dispatched to maybe a burglary in progress or maybe a violent call of some sort, they will often call-
Bill Godfrey:
You mean like a domestic or something?
Adam Pendley:
A domestic violence call, something along those lines. They will often call each other on the radio and say, Hey, meet me at the corner of third and Maine and we'll go in together. Neither one is slowing down. They're just coordinating their arrival. They're making sure that they're geared up and they're ready to go. They know how they're going to work together and get down range. I want to be perfectly clear, especially when you follow the checklist process, we're not talking about robbing the initial response. We're not talking about taking away the initial response. That first arriving officer in an active threat situation may have to do a solo response, but quickly those follow-on units are going to link up and become contact team one. Then that-
Bill Godfrey:
And Adam, I'm just going to expound upon that just because I think this is a very, very important point for clarity, that when you look at the process, we're recommending those first four officers go straight in. They don't go to staging, they go straight in. The fifth officer, what we call our fifth man grabs the tactical position and starts coordinating it. Then your next 2, 3, 4 officers who would meet at the staging location that's called out by tactical, they meet up and they quickly push in.
Mark Rhame:
To support the mission.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah.
Mark Rhame:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
We got two contact teams downrange very quickly. I just want to make that abundantly clear as you're going through this example.
Adam Pendley:
And so to get law enforcement to embrace this, we have to understand that those first initial officers are definitely going directly toward the active threat, but as soon as tactical is established, he calls out a staging location so those additional follow-on units can then pair up. And if the next job that's needed is more contact teams, because tactical is applying a strategy to the response, "Hey, we need somebody to cover the south entrance, we need somebody to cover the second floor. We need somebody to cover the stairwells." He's able to call out assignments. Some years ago in my home jurisdiction, we had a sergeant that was in charge of the initial response to an active shooter event. And he did great with the first five or six seven officers that responded because he knew their unit numbers, he knew who he was working with. But all of the follow-on responders, he started losing track of individual unit numbers.
I coached him later. I was like, "Hey, if you had established just a quick staging area, you could have called out tasks that needed to be done. You could have said, 'hey, I need an inner perimeter on the west side of the location', and your staging manager would've put two or three officers together and he would know who those unit numbers are and put them together as the contact team or the inner perimeter for the west side." It allows that initial tactical group supervisor to think more in terms of tasks that need to get done as opposed to trying to manage a bunch of individual units.
Don Tuten:
I want to step back just a little bit too. Adam's absolutely correct everything he said, but expounding on how law enforcement is using staging, without calling it staging, he gave several examples that are really good. You're going to a robbery in progress where there may be guns involved. You're going to a domestic violence where there's a violent event taking place. When those officers link up per se, either on the side of the road via another radio channel, what they're doing is the exact same thing that staging does. I'm going to go to the front, you're going to go to the back, I'm going to do this, you're going to do that. We are going to be on this channel, not that channel. If this person runs, this is the chase person, this is the other person. They're basically defining their assignments on the side of the road, ad hoc on the way to that critical incident once again or via radio on the way there. We're doing it every day is what I'm getting at.
The next piece of that, building into it, and let me bring up the SWAT team stuff, as you had mentioned earlier. Team-wise is a little bit different obviously. They plan, even if it's a hot call-out, they get together real quick. They have a tactical, they have a person in charge of saying, okay, each team, this is your assignment, this is what you're going to do. We do this all the time. Now, building upon what Adam said and moving into it, discipline on the cop side is a big piece of it. Knowing that that is a position that we need to send somebody to link up with our fire brothers and sisters and saying, "Okay, you're in charge of running that police side of that staging area and it's your job to ensure that we have enough resources to not only support what the fire department's doing, but also to make this critical incident go away."
That's a different change for us because we're used to doing it on the fly. And it's not something, quite honestly, the lot of law enforcement officers, they don't want that job. They want to go down and lights and siren and get to the scene and block up whatever road. Why do you do that? Because I can. I'm in a police car. That is kind of what's in there.
Bill Godfrey:
Usually in front of a fire hydrant.
Don Tuten:
Absolutely. And not consciously, but subconsciously, look, we all watch the news. We all know that, hey, I don't want to be that person on the news. I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. The challenge is this though, without any type of coordination on what are you doing, who's in charge, where are you going? You're creating part of that problem. I think we've seen it in our classes. We've seen the pictures of people parking everywhere. We're not efficient and are we really doing good? At the end of the day, what good can come from this? And if we do not have a solid answer on that, then we need to step back and go, okay, fire department's been doing this for a long time. We do it daily. How do we modify to ensure the best possible response and the best possible usage of our resources coming in and not even talking about outside resources coming in. That's just internally.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, I think that's true. In fairness, Don, the way that we teach staging in the active shooter incident management class is sometimes a little bit difficult for the fire side to accept. Historically on a fire ground, most departments, when you need an extra team, you call to the incident commander and you say, "I need somebody to do this." And then they'll call to staging and say, "I need somebody to do this." And you're kind of playing this tag in relay, and there's some reasons that it gets done that way on the fire ground. Frankly because people have been doing it that way for a long time, it usually goes okay. It's usually not terribly difficult. But in an active shooter event, you also typically don't have so many units that coming in on you that you lose track of it.
In an active shooter event, it is moving very fast. The information that you've got is ambiguous as it possibly can be. You've got just unimaginable numbers of resources that are going to land at the staging location. If staging was trying to keep command updated about every unit that arrived, there'd be nonstop radio traffic from them. In that case, we teach two things that sometimes are difficult for the fireside to swallow, which is number one, if you're tactical or you're triage or transport and you need a resource, you call to staging and you tell them what you need. Staging's going to figure out how to make that happen. They're like, "No, wait a minute. That has to go through the incident commander." It's like, okay, you could do it that way. What's the penalty? What's the cost? The cost is time. It's radio traffic. It's confusion in terms of getting the resource delayed.
The second part is delegating what you were saying, delegating to the staging manager the par level. Once you go below three engines or three ambulances, I want you to get more, maintain three engines, three ambulances, or it might be maintain 10 cops available or something like that, and giving them the authority to then go to dispatch or go to the communications and request additional units as they come in. I don't know, Mark, how often does that become a discussion point as I do my air quotes with my fingers?
Mark Rhame:
Well, we get into discussion in classes on a regular basis in regard to who has that authority. If you're the incident commander, and especially if you got an event, especially in the very beginning of that event that is so overwhelming, how many times have we got done and we do our debriefing after we do a scenario that they said, "I was overwhelmed. There was so much coming at me." That's when you get into your span of control. You give that responsibility over to someone else. In this particular topic we're talking about staging. If you're the incident commander and you tell your staging managers, "Keep this level of units." Whether it's law enforcement or fire EMS, you don't have to worry about that anymore. You've given that responsibility to someone else. You know that person should carry out that task that you gave them that assignment. It's something you don't have to worry about anymore.
In my perspective, in big events I've been on where we have assigned that out and said, keep a first alarm assignment. We know what the definition of first alarm assignment for our department. Keep that first alarm assignment there. You use something, you replace it. I don't worry about that anymore. Now I know I have assets sitting there ready to go. They're building out the teams that I've told them to build out as the ends of the commander and as a tactical officer in triage and transport. All I have to do is call them up and say, "Send them."
Bill Godfrey:
I think I want to hit on this and then Adam, I'll let you take it. Mark, you mentioned span of control. And so often in incident management training, span of control gets talked about in terms of the numbers of people reporting to you. Yes, that's a component of it, but that also has to do with how many people were on the radio. More importantly here, going exactly to what you're saying span of control is also about delegating. Delegating the responsibility. You can't be the single person that has to be a part of every single conversation on the radio. Well, I guess you can, but you're going to pay for it on the clock.
Mark Rhame:
We've all seen that.
Bill Godfrey:
We've seen it. We've seen it. Adam?
Adam Pendley:
Well, I was just going to say before we get too far, one of the keys to success to getting to this point of where you're actually managing staging is making sure that it's integrated. Oftentimes for these active shooter events, law enforcement and fire EMS are all going to be toned out at the same time. So it is very likely that some of the first arriving officers are going to go directly to the scene to deal with that active threat. You're going to establish tactical. Tactical is going to call out a staging location. Fire EMS may have already selected a staging location, but we've got to get them together. Some of this comes back to dispatch as well, and we talk about dispatch having to modify what they're saying. Maybe they're no longer dispatching follow-on units to the original address. They're dispatching follow-on units to that called out staging location. That modification that dispatch has to make has to be trained and has to be recognized.
Bill Godfrey:
And should be part of policy.
Adam Pendley:
And should absolutely be part of policy.
Don Tuten:
And it should be something that's known by the supervisors, right? Because you're going to get those officers, unfortunately, when they hear that other address, they're going to think, "No, they made a mistake. I need to go here." The discipline for the supervisors and the training that needs to obviously happen prior to that, it needs to be part of the culture. And it's changing that culture of law enforcement to say, okay, we have enough bodies at this time, and once again, that's a supervision aspect of it, but we have enough bodies at this time going down range to do that work. I need to set up my reserve unit to go in and handle specific problems.
It's changing the culture of law enforcement to some extent. Like I said, we do this every day now, but it's how we respond and making it ... Look, we're always, it's crawl, walk, run. I think we in the past 20 years have both sides of us has really adopted and modified how we respond to active shooters. It's tweaking. We're at that point now we're trying to tweak it a little bit to make it better.
Adam Pendley:
Don is normally much more direct than this, so I'm going to be direct for him. If there becomes a point where you have too many officers downrange that are wandering around without a task and a purpose, you get on the radio and you say, "Command all units, do not come to my scene without going to staging." You make that clear because one of the things I've worked with you guys a lot on the fire EMS side, obviously on a typical fire ground, some of those first arriving units already, by procedure, have some additional jobs that get done, right? They lay a line or-
Bill Godfrey:
This ought to be interesting.
Don Tuten:
I did not stay at Holiday Inn Express.
Mark Rhame:
Engineers do engineer work.
Adam Pendley:
They do what they do. But the reality is that fire EMS is eager to get inside, but if they're standing there by themselves with no law enforcement to either integrate what's going on or build those RTFs, they're stuck without a paddle. We have to integrate and we have to make sure that our law enforcement folks understand that unless we have some additional resources to do the follow on jobs that are necessary, we're going to slow down our response.
Bill Godfrey:
Mark, I want you to kind of comment on a little bit of this from a practical point of view and putting the staging together. But Adam, I want to come back to something you said, not just integrated but in the same staging area. It's interesting to me that that still comes up from time to time. "Oh no, no, I've got to have this discipline staged over here and law enforcement needs to be over here and fire needs to be over here." It's crazy. The whole purpose of having them together is to be able to assign those teams and quickly pull the resources. But here's another practical reason. Every once in a while things go wrong.
Mark Rhame:
Exactly.
Bill Godfrey:
If, Don, it's your incident and you're calling for the RTFs and for whatever reason the message is not getting through and the RTFs aren't moving, the engine companies aren't moving, or Adam, you're ready for the ambulances to move up and they're not moving. You've got half a dozen law enforcement officers standing and staging that are listening to the incident commander called three times. It ain't going to be very long before one of them walks over to one of the fire guys or gals and says, "What the hell are you doing? They're calling for you." Because sometimes things just go wrong.
Adam Pendley:
Well, even on top of that too, you're going to need, depending on how many resources are coming at one time, you're going to need traffic control. You're going to need potentially some type of security there. Depends on once, again, how much is coming in. You're going to need some coordination. You know what cops do? So they block off streets, they help people get out to go to those things. It just makes sense to integrate both of them around. You know what, that's an assignment. That's a job. They work for that staging manager.
Bill Godfrey:
Speaking of, Mark, talk a little bit about some of the practical roles in the initial staging standup and then how that's going to need to expand as the incident continues to unfold.
Mark Rhame:
Obviously just designated a location or saying that this is where the staging location's going to be, doesn't solve your problem. You've got to have someone managing that site. I mean managing both from the fire EMS side and from the law enforcement side and they need an aid or a scribe. Because again, if that manager is writing on a whiteboard, whether it's a command vehicle that came up, they can pull those things out of the back or writing on the side of a vehicle or on a piece of paper if they don't have someone doing that for them, writing that information down. If their nose as the manager is stuck on a piece of paper, they're not paying attention to what's going on around them and things are getting disorganized. The first thing you want to do is stand up a staging manager both on the fire EMS side and the law enforcement side.
Then you really should put that in policy. It should be part of your training and policy. It says the first engine company that arrives is an example. First engine company that arrives at staging becomes a staging manager. That company officer has people with them who can be their aid and scribe. That solves a problem right there. Maybe that first law enforcement officer gets there that's not a specialty unit, becomes a staging manager on law enforcement and hopefully we have shared scribes there so we're getting that information documented very, very quickly and getting organized. Once you get that, you need to figure out how you're going to manage that environment. If you have everybody just piling up around the staging manager to say, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. That ain't going to work. The easiest thing to do is create a line that says right here, people coming at me, these people right here need to check in.
Once they check in, you push them off to one side. Once you build a team out, push them off to another side. I can clearly look at these people in front of me are checking in these people to my left as an example, have checked in but haven't gotten an assignment. People to my right have an assignment and they're ready to go and they've got a name. They're contact two, contact three, contact four, RTF, one, two, three, four, whatever. I just call them out and say, now you guys, here's your assignment. Here's who you're working for, here's where your location, here's your radio channel. Also in staging is where we organize our teams from a RTF perspective or rescue task force perspective. That's when law enforcement and fire EMS start talking about what you can and can't do, what their roles are going to be, how law enforcement wants the Fire EMS to progress in that figure as they walk up to-
Bill Godfrey:
As their introduction to each other. Yeah.
Mark Rhame:
And especially the first one's got to be those lean and mean teams, those rescue task force that initially go in. You can't carry backboards and stretchers and scoops and stuff like this because you got to have the capability of retreating as quick as you're going forward. You got to be able to back up if another threat pops up. Staging allows us to get those teams together and have that communication process right there. Everybody establish the rules, what we're going to do, what we're going to do if things go sideways. And that's where you build out those teams and get everybody on the same page.
Don Tuten:
I think the key word Mark said when he started that everything he said is correct is policy. And same on the law enforcement side. We have policies for critical incidents, we have policies for active shooter, we have policies for insert here. There's a policy. Nowhere in there does it talk about assigning a staging manager or putting that piece in there. It may say depending on what agency you work with in developing and assigning, but it doesn't specifically say that is one of the things you will do. Granted every incident's different, so you don't want to put something in that may not be needed. But at the same token, you have to train to know, okay, we're going to put in a staging manager on the law enforcement side. Number one, contact your fire department, find out where they're at. Let's link up. Let's make this a co-located location and then start managing those resources coming in.
Bill Godfrey:
Well, Don, let me put something on top of that is that how many times has an agency that you worked for that you've set up a training environment or a drill and you know that you're going to build these teams out, but did you put in the component of training with that staging concept in your training? If you're not training, you can put it in policy all day long.
Don Tuten:
You're right.
Bill Godfrey:
But if you don't train on it, it doesn't work.
Don Tuten:
I even take it a step further. How many times have we talked about what we're going to do, put staging in there and say, "Okay," we even cheat, "you're going to be the staging manager on this next training scenario that we're doing." And then they still don't do it because we haven't integrated and set that modality in their head from day one. This is something that is a specialized training that comes in. Once again, Adam and I, we've talked about this in the past, but throughout the United States to some level of active shooter is in most basic recruit training. Nowhere in there is staging unfortunately. I don't want to say nowhere, that I'm familiar with, there's nowhere in there that does a basic class and how to go about doing it. Especially what would be really good is if they could integrate both fire and police during that one module.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, that's a huge gap in the training. Since we're on that topic, Don, Adam, let's talk a little bit about culturally, historically, law enforcement hasn't done staging by name. As you guys provided some very good examples, they do it all the time. That may be, but how do we get from where we are in law enforcement today to where we want to be tomorrow, that when the staging location is declared, law enforcement officers know they need to go there, not be the 15th or 16th gun that went down range when the suspect's been in custody for 10 minutes?
Adam Pendley:
Yeah, well, I would say two things. Clearly you have to do functional exercises and exercise is even too strong of a word, a drill, call it a staging area manager class. You can probably have it done in four hours. Definitely invite someone from your first do in territory, an engine company or a chief to come to kind of talk about some of the ways to manage a staging area and then have officers arrive, quickly check in with a law enforcement officer that is the staging manager and get an assignment and figure out how they would maybe even load up into one car so they can get their gear down without clogging up the scene even further. Maybe how, crazy thought, maybe they would ride even in the firetruck if they're part of an RTF. Some things along those lines that ... Although I think there's many cops that would want to ride on the tailboard like you-
Mark Rhame:
Or want to drive.
Adam Pendley:
Right, exactly.
Don Tuten:
Include dispatch as a big piece of that also. That's one thing a lot of times when we talk about training that we overlook where the reality is this, dispatchers a lot of times will help cops keep on task and that is their job. I didn't mean to interrupt.
Adam Pendley:
No-
Mark Rhame:
Same in Fire EMS.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. That's true too.
Adam Pendley:
Do that as a drill. But the second thing is, and I don't want to go into an elongated story other than to say that I had a crowd situation one time where we had some units that were already inside the scene. They were okay, they were safe. I used the staging concept to set up a rapid intervention team if those officers called for help inside and then two strike teams that were going to go in and clear the park if anything happened. Just setting up the staging area provided a visual to those that were kind of coming into the area. We set up an outbound traffic area and through staging we cleared the incident with no further incidents because we had resources that were set up in teams that were ready to respond to something. Just the visual of that kind of helped clear the incident.
Don Tuten:
Yeah, like I said-
Adam Pendley:
There's other opportunities to use it, I guess is my point.
Don Tuten:
And I think once again, I think we use it, we just don't think of it as staging. You brought up SWAT call-outs before. I can't tell you just about every SWAT call-out that I ever was in charge of. We staged with us Fire EMS so if something did happen and went the wrong way, we were prepared for that. We didn't think of it as staging. We brought in additional traffic officers, we brought in the school board, we brought in people that were affected by that one SWAT call out to say, okay, what time do kids get off school? Where's our city buses coming? Where's our bus stop? We did all that, but we never called it staging.
It's building off of what Adam says is changing. We're doing something now. Maybe we just change our mindset on how do we integrate that. Again, I know there are some places around the country that do not call it staging. They call it something else and whatever works for them is great. But it all goes back to setting that mindset from day one is this is how we respond. We're all doing it anyway. This whole class and everything that we do based around active shooter incident management is based off time and the clock.
Mark Rhame:
The only other thing I would add is every level of the organization up into including chiefs and senior leadership and your communications and your public information folks need to understand what staging is because they have to tell the media what staging is. In other words, if you have additional units prepositioned for tactical response, you have units that are downrange already doing the critical work that's happening right now. But staging is about pre-positioning additional units for an additional tactical response. Getting the public to understand that is going to be critically important as well because no police chief wants to take a black eye that some video of officers waiting, when in reality they're not waiting. We already have other teams doing important jobs. These teams are waiting to do rescue, they're waiting to do additional perimeters. They're waiting to potentially respond to a second attack site. All of that communication and understanding and using these terms correctly is vitally important.
Bill Godfrey:
I think the thing that I want to come back to on that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. When you watch this in practice, you see for a minute or two that you get a bunch of resources that start to pile up. While that's happening, this goes back to something we said in one of our other, the last time we were all together talking, I made the comment that more than one job has to happen at the same time. Well, tactical needs a minute or two to figure out what he or she needs next. While that's happening, we're burning that same minute or two to get those resources piled up in staging so that when tactical calls and says, "I need a contact team to this building to do this." "I need a contact team over here to secure a casualty collection point." "I need a contact team to move to an ambulance exchange point." "I need two RTFs set up on deck." Or, "I need whatever." What you see in practice is the visual slow part of the units beginning to pile up in staging.
The smooth part of, okay, command needs this, command needs this, command needs this and the teams start pumping out. Then the fast part is they're going down as a team organized with a mission, with a task and purpose, and they're part of the solution instead of part of the problem. I want to kind of sum that up this way. There was an organization that had an event that we had done training with uses the process that we teach and they had kind of taught it countywide and had done it very effectively. I've talked about this before. They called out their staging location and Fire EMS all went to that staging location and did it.
They got the suspects accounted for very quickly. The problem they had is that their officers, after the first couple of contact teams, the remaining officers also continued. They didn't go to staging, they went on in down range. Now they managed to coordinate that because they all kind of knew the plan. They knew what they were supposed to be doing. They self-organized themselves into additional contact teams. They were talking to Tacticals. So it went by the numbers. Here's where the rub came, suspects are accounted for. People are down. Let's bring up the RTFs fire department's going, "We got no cops here in staging." The group that was managing that event recognized immediately what had happened. Everybody knew the plan and the person that was running tactical called down on the radio and basically said some version of "Listen up, we don't have any law enforcement in staging to do the RTFs. You guys bring the patients to this location and the fire department is going to meet you there." It was an on the deck off the cuff call to be able to solve that problem.
They still turned in what I think may be a record time in getting patients, all of their injured transported off the scene. They did a phenomenal job even with things going wrong. But then the problem continued because that was everybody in their county understood the process and had been part of the training. They had not extended the training outside of their county to their mutual aid partners. When the law enforcement officers from the other agencies came in, this is about 20 minutes in, so suspects are in custody, every patient was off the scene. It was time to take a breath and do a systematic clearing. Those officers who were told by the perimeter units report to staging didn't go to staging and went directly into the scene. That may have seemed fast, but all it was was slow because it was not smooth.
Adam Pendley:
I would look any of those officers in the eyes and say, why weren't you a professional? Why didn't you do what you've been trained to do? You're trying to help. You're trying to do the right thing but what you thought was a good thing was actually slowing the response down.
Bill Godfrey:
I actually had a conversation with their leadership about that and said, "What do you think happened?" And they go, "We think we had a training gap. We went through the training and we talked about it notionally, but with the number of scenarios we did, there were only a handful of people that got that experience of being the staging manager. We missed some opportunities to reinforce it in basic contact team training." Their basic active shooter training where they're teaching them how to move and work as a team and all that kind of stuff. We didn't incorporate it in. When the adrenaline went up, there wasn't enough of a training memory impression to overcome.
Don Tuten:
Yeah, like any training, it's not a one and done. All of the training that we do should be the start of a conversation, not the end of the conversation. It should be ongoing. Some of these individual pieces can be trained over and over again. And it comes back to what I was saying earlier. In two hours you can do a staging area drill and it doesn't have to be documented on any FEMA forms. Just do a staging area drill with some of your on-duty sergeants for that day and see the value of how quickly you can-
Adam Pendley:
Or maybe this podcast can lead to that training.
Don Tuten:
There you go.
Adam Pendley:
That would be nice.
Mark Rhame:
But someone said it earlier too, is that we need to engage our dispatchers in this environment too, because I don't know if it's Don or Adam said that at a certain point in time, we expect the tactical officer to say that staging set up a staging location and then units from that point forward is going to staging but dispatch has got to be involved in that because they got to make that announcement on the radio saying units from this point forward go to the big box parking lot.
Bill Godfrey:
Oh yeah, well in some cases-
Mark Rhame:
Because if you're not doing that, they're going to go to the scene. That's what they're going to do. That's inherent.
Bill Godfrey:
In some cases, Mark, it's not just on the radio, they got to get back on the phone to the mutual aid agencies that they've called and say, "Hey, update them. Tell them to go to this address, report to staging." And then to your point, hope that they have the professionalism to go to where they've been instructed to go. Well, so Carla gave me the 30 minutes sign about 10 minutes ago, so let's go around and wrap this one up. Adam, last thoughts?
Adam Pendley:
Again, make sure that everyone understands the definition of staging, that it's not a slow down, it is a gear up and go and that the officers that are there are pre-positioned for additional tactical response. That's an understanding you need to have agency-wide.
Bill Godfrey:
Don?
Don Tuten:
It should be paramount in all active shooter training that is done usually annually with most agencies and it needs to be at the forefront of that continuing response.
Bill Godfrey:
Mark?
Mark Rhame:
And it has to be integrated. We have to have staging managers on both disciplines, Fire EMS and law enforcement. Make sure you have an aid or scribe because if those staging managers got a radio to their ear or their face is against a board writing stuff, they're not paying attention. They're in the weeds.
Bill Godfrey:
For me, I'm going to attack it in to say integrated training. Every time we're doing training, even basic law enforcement, active shooter training, buddy a training, things like that, Fire EMS should be there, dispatch should be involved, whether it's onsite on the radio, whatever every single training opportunity should include all the disciplines, not be done in silos. I think we are missing golden opportunities when we train in silos.
Adam Pendley:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
All right, well gentlemen, thank you very, very much. This was a fun conversation to have and I hope we didn't lose our law enforcement audience 30 seconds in when we told him staging was the key to success. I want to thank Carla Torres, our producer, for making us look good and sound good as much as that's humanly possible. If you have not subscribed to the podcast, please click that subscribe button and let your people know that you work with. Get them listening. The more that we share this information with other people, the more good we can all do together. With that, until next time, stay safe.
Mark Rhame:
Thanks.