Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
TOO MUCH, TOO LITTLE
Sheriff’s report cites swarm of officers, lack of plan on airport shooting
As word crackled over police radios about a mass shooting at Fort Lauderdale’s airport — followed by false reports of additional gunshots — the crush of more than 2,000 law enforcement officers who responded turned from a strength to a liability in mere moments.
The size of the force that descended on the airport dwarfed the response to similar incidents at other large airports in recent years and contributed to a situation that raced out of control.
A stampede of officers is predictable in such events, experts say, but the Broward Sheriff ’s Office was not prepared to manage the situation, according to a draft internal review by the agency.
More than three times as many officers responded in Fort Lauderdale as the 600 who rushed to a 2013 shooting at Los Ange-
les International Airport, where a gunman killed a Transportation Security Administration officer and wounded three others.
At LAX, travelers from several terminals fled onto the tarmac during the chaos, just as during the panic at Fort Lauderdale. In Los Angeles, though, there were no reports of a second round of gunshots to bring a separate wave of law enforcement.
In August 2016, false reports of gunshots sent passengers stampeding onto the tarmacs of LAX and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City.
About 275 officers responded to JFK, a review by federal and state security experts found. Roughly 100 responded to the Los Angeles incident, an airport police department spokesman said. No actual shooting occurred in either case.
The swarm of wellmeaning officers in Fort Lauderdale contributed to the hysteria of a 12-hour ordeal for travelers who were stranded with no transportation out and virtually no food or water, according to the draft report obtained by the Sun Sentinel.
“Their presence, in many cases, obstructed the containment and control of the scene,” the report found.
When a call for help goes out, officers in the area often start heading in the direction of the scene because they want to help, said Pete Blair, a criminal justice professor at Texas State University.
“You can end up with 100 or more officers who are in the attack location — usually you don’t need that many officers inside,” he said. “Officers shouldn’t be there unless they have some purpose they’re trying to fulfill.”
Officials who do the strategic planning for emergency responses to mass crimes are cautioned to guard against this phenomenon, known as “overconvergence” in police jargon. Sometimes too many officers — and too many guns — are a bigger problem than having too few respond.
Recent terrorism incidents have underscored the warnings.
A crush of law enforcement officers complicated the search for the Boston Marathon bombers. More than 2,500 local, state and federal officers descended on Watertown, Mass., as bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were pinned down, said Ed Deveau, the city’s former police chief.
A Police Foundation review of the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., and a 2013 search for a former Los Angeles police officer gone rogue found that the crush of police officers who responded to the scene without being summoned created unnecessary issues for law enforcement.
“Police officers have an inherent bias for action, and the minute they hear there’s a violent incident underway, their immediate inclination is to go to it and try to stop the violence that is occurring,” said Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based police research organization. “And we want that in police officers. The problem is being able to channel that.”
Experts who have studied those cases point to failures in radio communications, a lack of a unified command structure and poor training as elements that can lead a scene to be overrun by law enforcement officers.
All were issues identified as problems by the Sheriff ’s Office draft review of the Fort Lauderdale airport response.
Failings of the county’s aging radio system, and a lack leadership and preparedness led to supervisors duplicating efforts and making decisions on the fly. Responding officers and agents sometimes simply were not told where to go or what to do, signs that an effective command system had not been established.
Many of the officers methodically worked through the 1,400-acre airport’s four terminals and multiple parking garages, diffusing the threat of an ongoing attack. But others created gridlock with their vehicles or increased the possibility of police inadvertently shooting each other as plainclothes and undercover officers — some wearing ski masks — ran while brandishing their guns and with no visible IDs.
Although shooting suspect Esteban Santiago was taken into custody roughly 85 seconds after the shooting began, the agency’s regional communications department continued to make routine announcements of an active shooter at the airport for an hour after the scene was under control. This may have looked like the agency was making calls for additional help, the report said.
And when help was actually needed, the review found officials at the scene did not provide direction, assignments and control to the officers who did respond.
The lack of coordination was magnified around 2:20 p.m. — 90 minutes after Santiago had been captured — as reports of additional gunshots peppered police radios, making it seem as if the airport was under a coordinated attack by several shooters. At 2:27 p.m., the Sheriff ’s Office put out a call for backup, summoning deputies from all regions of the county.
“Strip out the districts. Send everybody to the airport.”
It’s not clear from the draft review how many of the law enforcement officers responded after the unfounded reports of gunshots. Keyla Concepcion, a Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman, said in an email that the agency would not comment on its review before it is finished. What can be done? Preparation is key to preventing the miscommunication and confusion brought on by law enforcement officers racing to an active mass casualty scene, experts said.
“You can have 2,000 people at the scene of an attack, but if no one is coordinating what all of those people are doing, and no one is ensuring that information is relayed accurately, you may have a response that is as problematic as the initial attack itself,” said John Cohen a professor at Rutgers University and a former counterterrorism coordinator at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “It’s very difficult to develop a regional plan for a mass casualty event during the event.”
Prior training was especially lacking in Fort Lauderdale, according to the Sheriff ’s Office draft review.
The review said that no prior meetings with other local, state and federal agencies occurred to discuss how to handle such largescale events. The meetings that do occur, between airport officials and the Sheriff’s Office, don’t happen often enough and don’t go beyond rote tasks.
“These practices are infrequent and extremely deficient in simulating or preparing any participant for what is to come,” the review said.
A bright spot for law enforcement, the report noted, were the 18 SWAT teams that showed up from across the region. They were well trained and prepared to react to the disorder caused by the shooting and second round of panic.
Agencies have to take part in constant training, whether it’s so-called tabletop exercises or live drills, no matter their size, said Cohen, the professor and former homeland security official.
“This is the age we’re in now,” he said.