Active Shooters – A Growing Threat for Businesses
On Wednesday, January 25th, 2023, the National Threat Assessment Center for the United States Secret Service released a report titled Mass Attacks in Public Spaces: 2016 – 2020, summarizing 173 mass attacks over a five-year period, 73% of which involved the use of firearms. The report covers an overview of the attacks and a summary of the attacker’s profiles. Overwhelmingly, most of the attacks occurred at places of business or in open spaces. Approximately 79.5% took place at business or open space locations, and 7% occurred in educational facilities.
In many cases, a business is not necessarily the target of the event, but simply the location where the attacker carries out their plan. Just over half of the attacks had no known affiliation with the location of the attack (92 attacks.) Of those where the attacker was affiliated with the site, half of those attacks targeted specific employees or customers (38 of 72 attacks.)
About 75% of the reviewed attacks lasted for less than fifteen minutes, while 38% lasted less than one minute. Taking into consideration the speed and surprise of many of these attacks, the attacker does not frequently encounter law enforcement at the location of the attack. This means employees that have been trained in emergency medical trauma have a greater opportunity to save others after the suspect leaves. Research has shown that the survivability of a trauma victim significantly increases when an immediate measure to stop blood loss occurs shortly after the incident. This training is not only beneficial for active attacks but also for workplace injuries and vehicle accidents.
51% of the attacks were based on grievances, either personal, domestic, or workplace, and were the primary driver for the attacks for each of the five years. This is where an organization’s prevention plans come into play. It is best practice for an organization to be aware of issues that employees are facing that may create a danger to the workplace, either professionally or personally. An organization that promotes a culture of safety for all employees in the organization where the reporting of an issue does not create fear for the employee is also recommended. Further, a well-prepared organization will be ready to put additional measures in place to protect an employee after an issue is reported.
The report emphasizes that organizations cannot only focus on prevention, and encourages Emergency Management planning. There are five phases to Emergency Management: Prevention, Preparedness, Response, Recovery, and Mitigation. PPR recommends that every organization consider having a readiness model for each phase of an active shooter situation.
The Prevention phase focuses on creating protective measures such as evacuation plans, work location and environment planning, and design standards. The Preparedness phase is a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating, and taking corrective actions for incidents and emergencies.
The Response phase is the coordination and management of resources during an incident to provide measures to protect life and property, alleviate suffering, and reduce economic losses: it is a reaction to the occurrence of an incident. This may include activating an emergency operations center, evacuating injured and uninjured people, and providing mass care when necessary.
Finally, the Recovery phase consists of activities that continue when the crisis has passed, and is critical to restoring the capabilities and functionality of the organization. The goal of the Recovery phase is to bring the affected area back to some degree of normalcy. The Mitigation phase includes implementing a set of structural and non-structural measures designed to limit the impact of crisis incidents.
When organizations follow the five phases of Emergency Management, they are better prepared for an active shooter incident taking place at their organization. Organizations can also use the findings from these activities on other areas of risk management, such as natural or weather disasters and workplace injuries.
People Performance Resources has consultants that have worked in real-time during emergency incidents, and have first-hand knowledge and experience in helping a business develop its continuity plans. If you would like to ensure that your risk management strategies are effective, need help building out your emergency action plans, or would benefit from professional assistance with your risk management strategies, contact PPR today at info@pprhr.com.
Luke Benson is a Human Capital Consultant with People Performance Resources. Prior to joining the PPR team, Luke served 21 years between the military and law enforcement. During his career he was a Detective, and was assigned to the regional Special Response Team. Further, Luke volunteered for a large disaster response non-profit organization, where he served as an Incident Commander on several disaster operations. His experience also includes working with Regional Planning, and was the Operations Director for the South-Central region of the United States. Luke now works to apply those specialized skills to ensure the safety of our clients.
You can read the full report here: https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/reports/threat-assessments/mass-attacks-public-spaces/details-1