Shooting exposes flaw in drills
Texas attack shows how preparations can fail
As law enforcement officials throughout the country sketch out strategies on how to respond to activeshooter scenarios, last week’s incident at a Santa Fe, Texas, high school in which 10 people were killed and 13 injured demonstrates that plans have limits in the fog of chaos.
Law enforcement officials who are trained under ALERRT — the Texas State University-designed program that the FBI considers the national standard for how officers should respond to active shooters — are taught that their first responsibility is to stop the perpetrator of the crime as quickly as possible.
It took about 30 minutes from the time 911 emergency dispatchers received their first call about the incident to when the suspect, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, surrendered.
The school had taken part in activeshooter drills, and armed police officers were assigned to patrol the halls. Several of the students pinned in the classroom by the gunman acted on what they were taught, including searching for cover and barricading doors.
Authorities in Texas released scant details on police officers’ response.
It’s unknown when police responders first had contact with the suspect and why he emerged unscathed despite what Galveston County’s top administrator, Judge Mark Henry, described as “a lot of firepower and a lot of rounds exchanged.”
Peter Scharf, a criminologist at Louisiana State University School of Public Health, said police responders can find themselves in a precarious situation in which they need to stop a killer surrounded by bystanders while trying not to get shot by the gunman.
‘Complicated to decode’
“The idea of shooting an innocent bystander is the nightmare situation for the officers in this scenario,” said Scharf, who has studied school shootings. “They can be going in without a clear target, and you are entering a situation where you could have a lot of kids in a room moving around, and there is one kid that you’re looking for. It’s not the most surgical situation. These situations are so complicated to decode.”
Witness accounts and recordings of the 911 emergency dispatch calls suggest that the incident stretched far longer than the average mass shooting, which FBI data show typically lasts five minutes or less.
The gunman had contact with an armed school resource officer soon after the incident began. Dispatch records show the officer was wounded about three minutes after authorities received the first call about the incident.
The gunman struck in the school’s art complex, a maze of four rooms, each connected via interior hallways, that could have made the situation more complicated for the responding officers. All of the injuries and deaths occurred within the art complex. It’s unclear how many students were in that part of the school when the shooting began.
Deedra Van Ness, whose daughter Isabelle was in the art class but survived by hiding in a supply closet, said her child called police twice before they arrived at the scene five to 10 minutes after the gunman started shooting.
Isabelle could hear the gunman reload his weapon and exchange fire with police, according to an account Van Ness shared on Facebook.
‘Isolate, distract or neutralize’
“The suspect may not have been taken into custody for 30 minutes, but part of the stop-the-killing phase (that officers are taught through ALERRT) is to isolate, distract or neutralize,” said Pete Blair, executive director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State, which has trained more than 130,000 officers.
“If, as an officer, I can push you into somewhere you’re not going to gain access to any other victims, or your attention is on me so you’re worried about dealing with me as opposed to seeking out other victims, then I still managed to stop the killing at that point,” he said.
Michelle Phelps, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, questioned how effective it is to train officers to respond to activeshooter scenarios.
She said policymakers should consider whether the training and planning could have unintended negative consequences on students and the school setting.
“There is always going to be an element of luck involved and happenstance,” said Phelps, whose research focuses on the crime and punishment. “What kind of guns does the perpetrator have access to? Who is in the building that day and where are they located? What is the weather like that day? There is always going to be randomness. The question then becomes: Do these policies and training actually reduce risk?”