Few Conn. businesses plan for active shooters
As El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, joined this month the list of places that have suffered mass shootings, several workshops have been held this year in Connecticut on the topic of dealing with active shooters, starting last February at Western Connecticut State University, which experienced a 2018 scare that turned out to be a false alarm.
But security experts say the most obvious forum for such preparations — the workplace — remains largely quiet on the topic, whether because business owners and managers do not wish to contemplate the investment of time and money to address security or due to the human impulse to stick one’s head in the sand.
“Everybody’s bad at this, and nobody’s gotten better at it,” said Bo Mitchell, a former Wilton police chief who has been helping organizations plan for any event and train their people through his 911 Consulting for the better part of two decades. “The problem is that 99.9 percent of employers in the United States of America ... don’t recognize it, don’t understand it — and have never heard of it.”
In 2019, there is no escaping it, with 17 mass shootings to date this year. Steadily, the frequency of activeshooter incidents triggering a police response has escalated as tracked by the FBI, from one a month on average in 2007, to two incidents a month in 2010, to more than 30 attacks last year.
If the Newtown shootings of 2012 prompted Connecticut school boards to set aside funding for police on campus and lockdown drills for students, experts say businesses have not responded with the same investment after the highprofile mass shootings in workplaces and public spaces of the past few years. A 2018 IHS Market study estimated U.S. schools spent $2.7 billion on security upgrades the year before, while predicting increases of just 1 percent annually through 2021.
Businesses in the Northeast have seen plenty of red flags in the prior years — more than two decades worth, in fact, dating back to the March 1998 shooting at the Connecticut Lottery’s offices in Newington, when an accountant killed four coworkers.
Two years later, seven would perish at the Wakefield, Mass., offices of technology consultant Edgewater Technology, and eight in August 2010 at Hartford Beer Distribution Center in Manchester. The previous year, 13 were killed at a civic association facility in Binghamton, N.Y., with the gunman positioning a vehicle to prevent escape through a rear door and then moving through the facility.