Few Conn. businesses plan active shooter response

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.

Getting a mandate — and a champion

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.

The Department of Homeland Security has long adhered to a doctrine of “run, hide, fight” — in that order — as the best general advice for people to increase the odds of escaping harm. And if the lastditch option represents an awful prospect, the chances improve with employing the first two to survive — with advance planning and training.

Mitchell says that planning process has evolved into a standardized exercise no different from any other function of business preparation. He offers handson workshops on the topic as well as an hour video on the flaws with existing response protocols today to activeshooter incidents.

The Norwalkbased human

resources consultancy OperationsInc includes creating an action plan for active shooter incidents as part of its regular workshop on workplace violence prevention. And the topic is on the calendar as well for the southern Connecticut chapter of the security trade association ASIS International, which has scheduled an Oct. 10 forum in Monroe.

Felix Giannini, the chapter’s covice chairman, who is owner of Lexco Security, which has locations in Fairfield and Darien, told Hearst Connecticut Media that synagogues and churches in the Northeast and nationally have been out front of commercial businesses in taking heed of the increase in shootings and prepare for the possibility. And he notes they face challenges many businesses do not, including how to protect an open assembly area with many elderly people on hand; and in security upgrades to what in many cases are old structures whose appearance is a treasured memory for members.

“These are mitigation strategies for vulnerabilities (and) for perceived vulnerabilities that a business has,” Giannini said. “I advise my clients to take a big step back and start with what we call an allrisk, allhazard assessment . ... That necessitates forming a team and also getting a mandate from (an executive), because if you are going to go through all this, you really need a ‘Clevel’ person to be the champion of it.”

‘Pinning the tail on the donkey’

Ideally, that individual has

influence on the budgeting process, according to Bill Edwards, a retired U.S. Army colonel who is vice president of protective design and security at Thornton Tomasetti in New York City, whose projects have included the new World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

“I think the awareness in the private sector has risen in the past two years — without a doubt,” Edwards said. “Companies are starting to realize that they have to be serious about building a security budget . ... I’m seeing a lot of interest in the past couple of months that specifically address a shooter threat.”

Edwards said installing the full gamut of entry security and other measures deemed best practice today can add 5 percent or more to the cost of a new building, and that retrofitting an existing building can cost multiples of that figure. But he said too few business owners put that figure in the context of an amortized cost over time, which reduces the number to the equivalent of an insurance premium or any other recurring cost of doing business.

More importantly, Edwards added, organizations need to train their employees to spot the warning signs of any individual in the workplace or other associations whose words, social media posts or actions suggests something could be brewing. And employees need to know that channels exist to report any observations with anonymity, so that they do not fear any reprisal by an individual or management.

OperationsInc CEO David

Lewis said that his firm’s phones ring each time there is a publicized workplace shooting.

“The issue is so complicated as it goes well beyond just knowing what to do when you find yourself with an incident in your office,” Lewis told Hearst Connecticut Media. “It goes back to how we treat our employees, how we communicate, and how we deliver the news of concerns about someone’s performance, or even termination. The violence part often is a reaction to the runway of events leading up to the boiling point incident.”

Mitchell said that there is Supreme Court precedent for holding business owners or CEOs personally liable in injury or loss of life as a result of inadequate emergencies that require evacuations, with judges able to instruct juries to rely on Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations and state fire code standards in determining liability.

“(Organizations) are supposed to write an emergency action plan ... the object of which is to take care of their employees,” Mitchell said. “The fire code in Connecticut doesn’t, pointblank, say the property owner or the landlord (of a commercial building) is responsible for writing an emergency action plan for their tenant employers. So there is a gap there, as far as pinning the tail on the donkey.

“Ignorance of the law is not a defense,” Mitchell added. “It’s all there in blackletter law.”