Ep 80: Adaptive Training
Episode 80
Published May 13, 2024
Last updated Feb 18, 2026
Duration: 34:47
Episode Summary
What if we responded to an Active Shooter Event and it was totally silent? How would first responders react? Trust their gut or trust the intelligence? In today’s episode, we take a look at adaptive training.
Episode Notes
Not every Active Shooter event unfolds in the same way. When there’s a deviation from the norm, the potential for something to go wrong increases. Our response training needs to be adaptable and inventive to address diverse scenarios. In today’s episode our panel discusses the need for training in various types of scenarios to meet the main objective – stop the killing and stop the dying.
View this episode on YouTube at https://youtu.be/7gAUGylWCX4
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:As responders, we often train active shooter events where there is loud screaming, chaos, people running around. It's just everybody losing their mind when we come through the door, but what happens when you come through the door and you're met with silence, deafening silence? That's today's episode, stick around.
Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey. Sitting next to me today is the inimitable Tom Billington, one of our other fire EMS instructors like myself. Tom, good to have you.
Tom Billington:
Thank you, Bill, glad to be here.
Bill Godfrey:
And across the table from us, I just realized we're actually in the law enforcement, fire department EMS sides of the table. I like it. We've got Kami Maertz, one of our law enforcement instructors. Kami, good to have you back.
Kami Maertz:
Thank you.
Bill Godfrey:
And Ron Otterbacher. I miss having you in, man, it's good to see you again.
Ron Otterbacher:
It's good to be here.
Bill Godfrey:
All right. So today's topic is, and we've talked about this before, the notion that sometimes our training is not creative enough, that sometimes we're creating training scars without realizing it because we're not varying the type of scenarios that we're going into.
So today we wanted to talk about when that response looks very different. You make entry into the building where there has been a reported active shooter event. You can smell the gunpowder. You may even be able to still see the smoke in the air and it's silent. There is nothing happen. How does that change things? And, obviously, we're gonna start from the law enforcement side. How does that change things to you? How do you think that our law enforcement officers across the country would react to that with the training that they've had?
Kami Maertz:
I think they're instantly going to, if they haven't trained to that perspective, I think they're instantly going to question if they're at the right location. They're gonna question the intel that they've received so far. And it's gonna delay their response. If they're not training to the fact that it could happen, or that whatever environment they're in, like if you're talking about a school, you're thinking you're gonna hear children screaming, you're thinking you're gonna hear teachers calling out, someone's pointing and saying, the bad guy went that way. And if those things aren't happening, then you're gonna start questioning the information you got is it accurate?
Bill Godfrey:
Ron, what do you think?
Ron Otterbacher:
I think, again, part of it is it all goes back to training, but do you train for your objective, or do you train for what noise you hear? And I go back to a situation where I'm going to our objective and I'm moving, I'm counting on the information being accurate. It's no different from, you know, a regular hostage barricade situation, or anything else. You may not hear anything, but you're moving to where they say, and your intelligence brings you to where the bad guy may be or where the victims may be, or survivors, or whatever wanna call 'em. And I can't just go by the sound, you know.
The sound is an indicator, you know. Again, we talk about driving force all the time. Driving force with gunfire, driving force with people saying he went this way, but if we don't have that, we still gotta move and try to get to the objective and figure out what's going on from there. So it may slow you a little bit, but I don't think it can stop you so you can figure out what the heck's happening.
Kami Maertz:
I think one of the big things when we talk about training as in law enforcement, and we've gotten to a point where we're training really well with fire rescue, we're training with different entities is to train in, if you're going to environments such as schools or churches, what are they training their people? What are they training the children? What are they training the teachers? What are they training the people in the churches? What are they telling them if an active shooter happens, what are you supposed to do?
So if we're trained together, we know when we walk in there, they've been told to go silent, or they've been told to go in this direction, or they've told here. And I think that that gap in training can create a real hesitation in response if you're not training to that standard of what they are teaching their own people what to do.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, it's kind of a crazy reality because we literally have been training for over a decade, even longer than that the idea of Run, Hide, Fight. Well, if you're hiding by the very nature of hiding, you're typically hiding in silence or in quiet. And in the case of school kids we're teaching them Locks, Lights, Out of Sight. And the out of sight is you're hiding.
Ron Otterbacher:
Right.
Kami Maertz:
Yes.
Bill Godfrey:
And you're being quiet, so that changes things.
Now, Ron, you mentioned something I think that I wanna go down this road a little bit and that is the idea of intelligence 'cause normally we are training law enforcement for that driving force, the sound of gunfire, what you're hearing, the intel, but if you come into a hallway, whether it's a school or a business campus, or whatever the case may be, you come into a hallway where you've had a reported active shooter event and there's nobody there, there's nobody meeting you, there's nobody saying it, but you smell it, you smell the gunpowder. You can see a haze in the air. You might even be able to see some bullet holes in the walls, and things like that.
How critical does the intelligence and the information that dispatch may have, that you may or may not know, how important is that? And how do we begin to synthesize that so that we can make sure that we continue to act in an appropriate way?
Ron Otterbacher:
It's absolutely critical. We don't profess clearing until we've taken care of, you know, stop the killing, stop the dying, then we clear. In certain situations, if we've got the smell of gunpowder and we got nothing else, then we may have to clear as we step because we don't wanna just walk past a room and have no idea if there's any people, if there's bad guys in there. So we may have to adapt and overcome just because the situation's different, you know.
We don't want to create a training scar and say we always clear first. No, that's not the case, but in certain situations we have to adapt to the situation and we may have to clear as we're moving through the hallway and we've got 20 rooms on each side, are we just gonna bypass those 20 rooms? We got an indication something's happened. We just don't know where it's at. We got no driving force. Are we gonna start looking and seeing, you know, have they done the Run, Hide, Fight? What has occurred?
Can we send someone in the office to start getting on the video cameras? What can we do to gather active intelligence that tells us, yes, this did happen. This is the last place they were seen. That gives us starting off point instead of having to start from the front door and try and clear as we move on.
Bill Godfrey:
So, Kami, I know we have talked for a long time about how dispatch gets all kinds of information, some of which gets relayed over the radio, and some of which doesn't. How important in that scenario is it for you to get out of dispatchers every little piece and to organize? How important is it and how hard is it to do in the unfolding minutes of an active shooter response?
Kami Maertz:
I think in a situation like this, I think it's us not listening to our dispatchers. I think likely your dispatchers are telling you this information and you're not trusting in the intel you're receiving because you're allowing that deception to happen in your mind where you're like, well, I'm not hearing it. The dispatcher is telling me they are getting this information. And so you have to trust in the intel that they're giving you that this is the information you know to be true. This is what we're getting in. This is what intel our dispatchers are.
And for dispatch side of it is to keep on telling them. If they're not listening to you and you're giving them intel and you have multiple callers coming in is to reinforce that. We're receiving information from this room that somebody is in there that's injured, and so maybe don't allow them to disregard it.
We've seen incidents happen where people have disregarded intel and dispatch has said, this is the intel that we're receiving. And they've kind of said, well, we're not seeing that on scene. Check it and verify. Don't just trust the intel that you're not seeing what you normally would see in a situation and just disregard it. Go and check it, verify that that incident hasn't occurred.
Ron Otterbacher:
And the dispatch have to be assertive enough to sit there and say, units stand by. Do you understand? I'm getting active intelligence in room three the bad guy's at. And, you know, be assertive with that. We're not asking you to take command of the situation, but sometimes you gotta take command of your channel and say, hey, y'all aren't catching what I'm saying, so.
Tom Billington:
Yeah, you're not picking up what I'm putting down.
Ron Otterbacher:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. So Tom, I think that raises a really interesting question for us. And you and I were talking about this just the other day was the safety priority scale that the National Tactical Officers Association puts out because it's a very interesting discussion. We have historically trained on active shooter events that it's the active killing.
Tom Billington:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
Which we've in some cases said out loud, but more it's been implied that that means that somebody's actively shooting. And so if there's no gunfire then we're not actively killing, but as you and I were talking the other day, if someone has already shot people and they're hurt and they're bleeding, and then they're denying access for those people to get medical care, is that still active killing? And I think the conclusion we came to was...
Tom Billington:
Without a doubt.
Bill Godfrey:
It is.
Tom Billington:
Even if the shooter's left, or the shooter's down, or not available anymore, the dying is happening and the clock is ticking. And I can only imagine going to a classroom as a paramedic and saying, hey, I'm here to help, and nobody responds back to the door. It would confuse me, looking back at my younger years, but, like, Kami just said, people are being trained to not talk, to be quiet.
Well, that would definitely be something to think about, you know. Take it to an analogy you hear pilots say all the time, pilots say "Trust your instruments." And that's sort of what Ron's talking about with dispatch. You're flying through the clouds, you can't see anything, you can't taste anything, but you're being told by your instruments, this is what's going on. You have to trust them. And I think that's so important. We have to think about the intelligence dispatch and other avenues.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, and I don't wanna go too far down the rabbit hole on the NTOA's safety priority scale, though that probably would be a really good topic for a podcast to just go down that, but the notion here is that let's not get confused about our priorities.
Ron, you mentioned this earlier. We talk about active threat is number one. Rescue is number two. Clearing is number three. And if you get into the hall and you don't have any information from intel, and you have no idea what's going on and nobody's feeding you anything and it's not making sense, we might need to do some clearing until we get access to some information.
Ron Otterbacher:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
But I've gotta believe that that first room we go into and you say to people, what is going on? Somebody was shooting down the hallway.
Kami Maertz:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
Do you know how far down the hall? Do you know what, you know? And then you can begin to piece it from there, but I don't wanna lose sight of this very challenging issue where if you've got people that have been shot and the bad actor, the suspect, the bad guy is denying you access to rescue and provide medical care for those people, then they are still engaged in attempting to actively kill them. And I don't wanna lose sight of that because I think it's a really, really important piece of this in terms of laying out priorities.
So how does that unfold then? Let's take my hypothetical here and kinda run with it a little bit. You make entry into the first room and it's a room of kids and a teacher and they're all okay, but they're saying, yes, there was loud gunfire and a lot of it. How do you piece that together and turn it into something you can do, you can act with?
Kami Maertz:
Well, I think that's all part of threat management. So when you're going through, and, you know, you're assessing the threat and they're telling you that there's an active threat there and you're getting to say a location and that you believe that somebody is in an area where they're holding people in there, that's part of that threat priority and saying people are dying. So, you know, even if you're going to attempt something like negotiations that's not really a negotiation. That's a stay or go kind of situation, but if that person is not engaging you to where their negotiations are very quick, that's a threat assessment of saying, I can't wait on this. I can't wait on this to be successful. I'm going to have to make entry because I have people dying. I have people bleeding. They're actively killing those people by denying me access.
And so that goes to that threat assessment of saying that that threat is too high to wait on that deescalation of that you have to make entry.
Bill Godfrey:
So, Ron, Kami makes a really interesting point there. Let's say that you figured out, you're pretty sure you know which room the bad guy's in, but you're not sure that there's injured people in there with him. What are some of the things that in your mind would be enough to go, yeah, we're going in?
Ron Otterbacher:
Again, you're trying to gather as much intelligence as you can. Putting people, can people see through the back windows? Are there any windows they can see? Do you have the capability to slide a camera up underneath the doorframe? And, you know, those are things that you may look at, but again, SWAT may have those capabilities, but patrol doesn't so now you gotta figure out. Now you gotta make a command decision. And in that situation I'm probably more likely to be heading that way.
Kami Maertz:
And that's also based on the resources that you have and the information you have. You have a great resource in the person down the hallway, right? Is there supposed to be people in there? Are there normally people in there at this time? That's building that threat and saying there's potentially this is information that we know to be true. There's supposed to be people in there, you know, what do they train y'all to do? They train us to be quiet. We're not supposed to say anything. Okay, well then there's a high probability that they're in there but they're just quiet.
And so those are all things that you're making those decisions on very quickly and saying there's a possibility that somebody's in there, they're injured, especially in situations if you're getting intel back from dispatch, text messages, anything, saying somebody's in here. That's the information you know to be true at that time and you just can't delay on it. No action is gonna cause, you know, people to die.
Ron Otterbacher:
The other thing is get someone to the office. The office has the capability to listen on the PA system. They can listen as well as talk. A lot of schools have cameras now. I wanna know what the cameras are telling me.
Kami Maertz:
Yes.
Ron Otterbacher:
I want someone there to get me the most accurate information I can right now because I'm getting ready to put lives in danger, which we understand that that's part of what we do, but I wanna make sure I make that decision with the best information available.
And if I have a camera seeing him go in that room and I've got, you know, although we're on silence in the room, but I can still hear someone, you know, muttering, they're just shut up, shut up. Then I know that that bad guy's probably in there and it's probably time to go, so, you know, we'll have to make that determination from what we got.
Bill Godfrey:
So, Tom, Ron mentioned a minute ago about the command presence and just, you know, buckling down and making a decision. Everything that you guys are describing makes sense to me, but I'm wondering how long before this turns into a polyester dog pile cluster if we don't get some incident management on it?
I mean, 'cause we still have presumably a whole bunch of cops coming. We've got fire and EMS coming. I mean, Tom, what do you think? Is that a critical function that while this is going on in the hallway, we need to get that incident command presence stood up?
Tom Billington:
This is of the highest priority because now's the time to start getting things organized to make sure we don't have over convergence of resources. Getting things set up to where we have a command system. Knowing who's in charge who's gonna make the decision, making sure we have staging set up. What about all these police cars and fire trucks and ambulances that are coming to the scene? We need to do something with them.
Somebody needs to stop at this point and say, okay, my teams inside are dealing with this. It's time to put a stop and start setting up the Incident Command System and start controlling and operating correctly.
Bill Godfrey:
What do the two of you think? Does that become something different than the way that we typically approach this? Or does it still fit the same template?
I mean, the circumstances change a little bit. You may not have a known active threat. You may not have known injured to rescue, which leads you to priority three of clearing, which presumably at some point is gonna disclose the fact that you've got these other things going on, but how critical in your mind is it that those, you know, about the time the eighth or ninth cop has shown up, you're starting to get some structure put together and get 'em organized into teams?
Ron Otterbacher:
I think the situation didn't change anything. You gotta get that structure, you know. We're not saying go against the structure at all. We're saying you've got people in here and what's presented to them needs to be conveyed outside to whoever's assuming command and whoever's got those command responsibilities. But, it doesn't negate the fact that you've got your command structure set up outside. You got triage, tactical and transport set up. And, yeah, you're still making these decisions. Someone's gotta make these calls, but it just says that when the initial contact team moved down the hall, they weren't getting what they were expecting to be getting. So now we've gotta figure out why. And it doesn't change things. It just may mean that it takes us a little longer to move.
And like you said, if you got, you know, several contact teams in there, I'm moving those contact teams rather quickly. So I'm not passing up every room, I'm checking each room. If they're locked, stay here, you know. I'm going to the next, stay here, stay here. We're still moving because, you know, we don't want the stagnation to be what kills people that are downrange.
So we just gotta do it a little differently than we're used to and then we train for, and that's why training is so important 'cause we should change up how each evolution goes because we're always used to, okay, we go down, we stop the killing, we provide first aid, get the rescue task force, you know, AEPs, and get 'em out of there, but what do we do if something's a little different? Have we ever trained for that?
Kami Maertz:
And I think one of the biggest things that could come from this is if you end up in a situation where there's any kind of delay while you're building information on one, is to not lose focus on the rest of the entire incident, right?
Is that you might even have to at some point might have to get a tactical that's supervising the rest of the incident, and a tactical to break off separately for this incident priority, this tactical incident that's going on because you still have the rest of the building, you might have injured in other parts of the building. So if you get everybody who's come in and all of your contact teams that, again, containment around this one area and have ignored the rest of the entire, you know, location that you're at, which could a hundred percent happen, right? Everybody wants to be at the area that they see all the attention at instead of thinking larger and thinking, well, what else is happening? Let's make sure that we don't have any other injured. Let's make sure that we don't have any other priorities that we can take care of beyond that. And that kind of smaller threat within like a smaller hot zone almost within a larger hot zone if that makes sense.
Ron Otterbacher:
It goes back to the simplicity of what we do. You go back to your checklist. I arrive on the scene. What am I hearing, seeing, or feeling, you know? What is my danger zone?
If I do those things and I come up say I'm not hearing anything, I'm not seeing anything, you know? Everyone, there's no noise whatsoever. That's gonna let whoever's gonna be your command component start thinking about what do we have to do to try to take care of this animal that we're dealing with.
Bill Godfrey:
So, Tom, Kami and Ron are both kind of talking about some parallel activities or parallel action.
Tom Billington:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
While they were working that, would it make sense to you to get RTFs formed up and on deck to get an ambulance exchange point potentially set maybe even more than one? What would be going through your mind as the medical guy as there's all indications that something has actually happened. This is a legit event, but we don't yet know the scope and scale of it.
Tom Billington:
Well, as Ron just mentioned, you mentioned the word the check sheet, and I was thinking when you said that, Ron, that, yes, people outside also have their check sheets, staging, command, medical branch, law enforcement branch, and these people should be setting up teams. We know we're gonna need RTFs. Staging should be setting those teams up, prepping them, getting them set up.
Your law enforcement branch and incident command should be working on, hey, this contact team is busy with this problem here. I need other contact teams to do A, B, and C and D to do other things. So these things are going on outside in the Incident Command System. That's the ticket to the whole thing is the Incident Command System functioning at all those levels with the check sheet.
Ron Otterbacher:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
Speaking of which one of the components that we recommend standing up pretty early in the process is the intelligence section, getting that staffed and stood up. How important is that? Or does that become even more important in this scenario where, okay, something has happened, but it's not unfolding itself clear. Does that become even more critical early on as the key funnel point to start getting some of the dispatch information? Maybe some of the people that ran out, maybe some of the witnesses that were outside the building and heard something. How does that play?
Kami Maertz:
An incident like this is gonna have a huge intel component and has to be set up very early on. And as soon as you start having any questions in the information you're receiving versus what you're seeing, the command needs to at that point say, I need an intel section set up. I need somebody to go embed with dispatch. I need somebody who's talking to school administrators. That intel investigation side of it is gonna start very early on in this kind of situation where sometimes you have a delay and you can start getting information based on, but they would take priority. And even in a situation like this, you're likely calling your negotiators early on who have a component of intel built into them and start using them initially. Start using them immediately. Embedding in dispatch with negotiators, and things like that is gonna be high priority in a situation like this.
Ron Otterbacher:
And I think it's, as public safety and as law enforcement, we're still, although we think we do a pretty good job, we're still trying to catch up to the intelligence component, you know. Our policies need to indicate we have a situation like this, we've got an investigator heading directly to dispatch. We got another one coming directly to the command post.
You know, it shouldn't be, you know, once it becomes second nature and we're ready for, like, I used to have an incident management team that responded to everything I respond to. If something went on and the high-risk incident commander was notified, that team responded. We need to do the same thing with the intelligence component. It needs to be an automatic call, doesn't need anyone's approval. If you're calling me as the high-risk incident commander, then these people are notified and they're responding. They've got their own assignments, they know what to do.
Once we get to that and it's within our policies, it's written in the policies, that's what we're gonna do. If you look at policies, we're still kinda shy on that area and I think that's a place we can improve on.
Bill Godfrey:
You know, it's funny, Tom, for the years in the fire service, I couldn't even begin to guess when it really started, but the idea of a second alarm fire, a third alarm fire, what we call, you know, another box, which a lot of people don't understand what that means, but it's actually, it's a shorthand way of saying to dispatch, you know, if I want a second alarm fire. What was your second alarm assignment? What was your complement on a second alarm do you remember?
Tom Billington:
Well, for a structure fire, your second alarm would include a ladder truck, two more engines, an incident command type person, battalion chief, and another rescue. Then the third alarm would be double that. So instead of saying send me five fire engines and three battalion chiefs, I would just say, give me a third alarm, third alarm. And I know what I'm getting ahead of time. That cuts way back in the timeframe.
Bill Godfrey:
It's a package.
Tom Billington:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
It's a prepackaged response.
Tom Billington:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
Set of assets. And, you know, I mean, Tom and I are both from the fire and EMS side, but I've kind of wondered if there isn't a place in terms of a hostile event response for law enforcement where maybe there should be some standardized protocol like you're describing, Ron, that says if this rises to this level, you know, however you define that in your agency as a hostile event, then that automatically gets this level of dispatch, whether that's eight patrol officers, two sergeants, a lieutenant. I don't know what that looks like. I mean, is that kind of what you're thinking about when you talk about the intelligence package?
Ron Otterbacher:
Yeah, because again, we don't have it written in most policies, the intelligence component for a high-risk incident, but we say we're doing it and we know that, you know, they changed the NIMS standards years ago, but I think we're still trying to catch up. Even when we teach a lot of groups don't understand the importance that that intelligence component brings to the event. And I think as we move forward, we need to look at it more than just intelligence too.
You know, you've got your emergency response teams, or everyone else, you got SWAT. You've already notified SWAT. Who are you gonna notify to help them? Is there gonna be another SWAT team? Have you got enough resources within your agency? Have you called other SWAT teams? Have you called if I need people, you know, although I may have 2,700 deputies, they're not all, they don't all have the capability to be notified right at one time where you got speciality teams that can be notified right at one time. Do I want them to respond? Again, these are things that we should have been thinking about years ago that we're still not quite caught up to yet, in my opinion. That's just my opinion.
Tom Billington:
Yeah. Kami, what do you think? Your organization, you're still on the job very much engaged in this in a leadership role in your organization. Are we at an inflection point in law enforcement where maybe starting to look at some of these types of calls or types of responses and developing a predefined package? Or does it still not fit the way law enforcement does business?
Kami Maertz:
No, well, I think that it's something that we need to move forward to do, right? That everybody knows their role. So if an incident like this comes out, like you're saying is that, you know, we have investigation sections and typically every agency now has their own investigation section. And maybe that's written in a policy that that's their job. If a critical incident happens, their job is not to respond to staging and come as a contact team. Their role is different.
So their role takes on the intel from early on where typically what would happen, right? They'd show up just as staging as any other deputy and we're gonna send them in and do that. And we can still use them for that purpose. If they show up as an intel, they still have all their gear, we can quickly say, we actually need more responders inside. And so they'll be coming to the same location, but their role would be different. And they know going into it what their role is and that's very important in critical incident. Sometimes you don't have that time to say, I need you to do this, is that they just know going in that's my job. Just like SWAT knows when they show up at a scene what their job is. Negotiation knows when they show up at a scene what their job is.
So for investigators to have that pre-planned that this is what your role is if we reach this level of alarm that this is your job to come and do.
Bill Godfrey:
So let's change gears and talk about those in our business that are trainers, that are responsible for setting up these scenarios and setting up exercises and things like that. What are some of the gaps that we've got in training? Whether it's this idea of going into a silent because it is really murky and unclear what's happened, or anything else.
Ron, what are your thoughts on, you know, put yourself back in the day, you got the training hat on. You're having to do some contact team training, maybe bring in some RTFs into the picture. What are some of the scenarios you think that are gaps that trainers should start to put into their content?
Ron Otterbacher:
I think we tend to go the more easy route. We have defined, you know, we're gonna have an active shooter, you know, exercise this week. It tends to be the same, you know. You go in, you got shooting, you got your driving force. Then you gotta, you know, you put the bad guy down, or the bad guy goes away, whatever it may be. And then you gotta work on the RTFs and getting the people transported off and stuff.
And I think we need to change those things up a lot, you know. We need to have it where the bad guy is to the wind, you know, and what are you gonna do from that? We need to try out the silent role and see what happens. You know, I think that's a dynamic that we're trying to understand is this is different.
Again, I go back to that environmental baseline that 99% of the things that happen are right along this line, but what do we do when you got something way up here, or way down there? Have you ever prepared for? Because if you haven't, I promise your chance for success probably won't be as high.
Bill Godfrey:
All right. Kami, what are your thoughts?
Kami Maertz:
I think one of the big things in training, you train for failures. So you train with failures built into your scenarios so that you know how to react to 'em and adjust accordingly. And you can do it in a training setting. So if it goes completely sideways, you can stop it and get it back on track.
So you train for failures, you train in unique situations. So you think about how could the situation happen, what would affect it? So when you're thinking about creating a training scenario, you think what would make the situation different? What would change our tactical approach, or whatever approach it is, what in that scenario, and make it happen. Do those scenarios so that you're prepared.
Also, allow things to go a little sideways. Build in something that's gonna go sideways, especially from a management perspective on something like this, it's gonna go a little sideways and you have to have a management you come in, and how are you gonna get it back under control? How are you gonna say, I have 10 contact teams here. I don't need 10 contact teams here. I'm gonna start putting them other places. Let the natural approach happen and then have those failures fixed along the way in training.
Ron Otterbacher:
And then explain why you made those adjustments.
Kami Maertz:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
Sure, so, Tom, on our side for the fire EMS side, rescue task forces, et cetera, what are some of the gaps you think that you're seeing and hearing about in the training scenarios that our people do that we oughta add or adjust?
Tom Billington:
Well, this discussion right here has brought one to light for me on the fire and EMS side is intelligence gathering for fire and EMS. I mean, we test our best responders every year at a competition around the state and we give them awards, and they go into a simulated scenario, and they walk in a room and there's people screaming, there's smoke and there's people laying down moulaged.
What if they walked into a room and there was nothing? What about the intelligence gathering for fire and EMS then how would they respond to that type of things? So we have to change the training up definitely.
Bill Godfrey:
I think for me, one of the big ones that I wanna see is I wanna stop seeing law enforcement doing contact team training without carrying it into the medical and the RTFs.
Ron Otterbacher:
Has to be.
Bill Godfrey:
We need to be there together. We have an extraordinarily high incidence of law enforcement officers getting shot in these things. I think every scenario oughta include dealing with, well, maybe not every scenario, but a significant number of them needs to include an officer down scenario as a component of the response.
I think the other thing is is that, and I'd be curious to see if this mirrors for you, a lot of the full scale hands-on Simunition type of work that I've seen is occurring in some sort of shoot house, or some sort of building. Yet we know from the data that in active shooter events, most cops, by a long shot, more than half of 'em, are getting shot on the outside on the approach, but I don't see that exercised very often. Do you guys, you think that's a gap as well?
Tom Billington:
Well, I know on my end fire side, I have this discussion when I teach, this is a big issue for me 'cause most of these law enforcement officers are being shot when they approach. And I say to law enforcement officers, if a fire truck goes to a structure fire, the firefighters get out of the fire truck, they have their gear on. What if law enforcement took just 60 seconds, pull over, put on your protective gear because high likelihood is you're gonna be in a gun fight that's gonna be outside when you pull up. Can you protect yourself? Can you save your own life? Changing that type aspect of training is very important I feel for law enforcement anyway.
Kami Maertz:
Well, and it's really kind of, you know, going back to basics for us. When we're trained from the academy you park down the road. You are cautious when you approach and so it's that high level of adrenaline rush and everything that people forget that, and that people overlook that and think, I gotta pull right up to the building. I can't delay. I can't stop and put my stuff on. I can't stop down the road and walk up. I need to get as close as I can. And so it's really going back to those fundamentals and putting those back into training.
And just like you're saying, though, is putting it back into training, training for those failures. If the first officer shows up and he's shot on scene, what's gonna happen? Where do our priorities go in that? What do we do? What if he's still on the X, what happens then if we still have active shooting inside? Those are things you need to prepare for and train for.
Bill Godfrey:
Ron, tie this up in a nice bow for us.
Ron Otterbacher:
When have you ever seen a rescue task force evolution by itself, where they just work on the rescue task force responsibilities, you know? We always have, you know, the shooting component then everything. When have we ever just taken those components, said okay, we're gonna run 10 evolutions where you're gonna go into this place, you're gonna treat these people. We're gonna have some where a bad guy may try to come back and you gotta provide protection. We may have one where we have shooting going on to see if your protective force leaves you to go to the other side. We have never done that. Maybe that's part of the things that we need to change in our training.
Kami Maertz:
That's a great idea.
Tom Billington:
Sure.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. Fantastic. I think that's a great place to leave this one. Thank you very much for the engaging and spirited conversation. It's good to have you guys back in the house.
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