Excaliber,
You, as usual, make some very good points. You are obviously correct that all of the risks I mention can be mitigated with a little prior planning and correct action at the time. You are also correct about the odds of police being there in the first two to three minutes. I think most agencies still consider three minutes as a good response time for an emergency call, and that is from the time the officer in the car gets the call. There is always a delay between the call coming in and the police officer being dispatched and that does not include the delay of getting someone to actually call it in.
Most important, the decision is a personal one and no one should fault a CHL from making either decision in this situation. I would not fault a CHL for trying to help and I would not fault them for staying put or leaving the area instead of going and looking for the bad guy.
I guess the only real difference between us on this is that I do counsel people to not go looking for the bad guy. I generally think the risks are greater than the benefits. In the interests of full disclosure and having posted my advice earlier, I should admit that my training and experience, both military and law enforcement, has been to move towards the sounds of the guns. I would probably not take my own advice if I were in that kind of situation myself.
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Return to “Texas Peace Officers Need to Reevaluate their ALERRT Training!”
- Fri Nov 06, 2015 11:38 pm
- Forum: Texas Firearms Coalition
- Topic: Texas Peace Officers Need to Reevaluate their ALERRT Training!
- Replies: 28
- Views: 18078
- Thu Nov 05, 2015 11:16 pm
- Forum: Texas Firearms Coalition
- Topic: Texas Peace Officers Need to Reevaluate their ALERRT Training!
- Replies: 28
- Views: 18078
Re: Texas Peace Officers Need to Reevaluate their ALERRT Training!
Mongoose,
EDIT: You and Charles.Contingency discussed this while I was typing the below, so it might be irrelevant, btu I leave it as a message to others who may think of going looking for the shooter.
I strongly recommend you reconsider your plan of action. You do not have any responsibility or legal duty to go looking for the shooter and it places you at a much higher risk than taking cover and staying in place would. When you go into an area where there is an active shooter and you are in civilian clothes with no way to identify yourself as a good guy with a gun, you become the exact person Dr. Blair was talking to. You are in a high probability of being mistaken for the bad guy.I don't think the officers are being taught to enter with guns blazing but their adrenaline and yours are going to lead to a problem fairly quickly.
Consider some of the known effects of stress and adrenaline. One that should concern you when it happens to the police officers is called time distortion. The police officer will yell for you to freeze and then he will pause to see if you comply. he will yell again after a pause. Then he will open fire on you if you do not comply. I know you think this will not be a problem because you will comply, but the officer will think he paused for several seconds each time when it was actually just a minute fraction of a second. My experience with this time distortion came in a shooting where I heard three shots fired with a distinct pause between the shots. My partner said he fired a double tap as quickly as he could and the witness said it was just one shot fired because it sounded like one continuous bang.My shot was between the two my partner fired.
Even worse, and contributing to a potentially deadly scenario is a second common effect of stress. This one is the auditory exclusion effect. When you are under stress because you are getting close to the real shooter, you will not hear things around you. If this gets combined with an extreme focus on the danger (another common effect), you will NOT hear the officer say anything. These combined make it very likely that a very deadly error will occur.
But lets take the best scenario. You go looking for the bad guy. Other people in the area will have no idea that you are a good guy trying to help. They may see your gun and think you are another bad guy. Since you are not a bad guy, you will not be harming these people but some of them are not going to think and will call in to the police where you are. This will delay the police from being able to fully respond to the real bad guy. Even if none of this happens and you get to the area or are intercepted by a police officer near it, and you hear the officer and do comply, it will take him some time to secure you and get you identified as a a good guy. This again delays the officer from dealing with the bad guy. That means more innocent people may get hurt or killed.
Now, it is also possible that the police will be slow and you will be able to get there first and deal with the bad guy. In this case, you will be saving lives. But it is not as likely to happen unless you hear the shots from the room next to you or almost that close. So, I recommend you reconsider and plan on taking cover and staying in place.
Charles,
I used to think the ALERRT program was a good program. I have to admit that it has improved police response to active shooters in general. I have not gone through the program to know everything it teaches. I have since reconsidered after talking with Dr. Blair on campus at Texas State. I was talking with him because I was thinking of trying for a grad assistant position at ALERRT. I decided not to because I can no longer support some of the things they teach. I am very concerned about a trend in law enforcement, including ALERRT, that has officers shooting people with guns who were attempting to leave the area after a shooting.
My understanding of the Garner decision was that deadly force was forbidden when someone was fleeing the scene unless you could show that the danger to society was greater if he was allowed to leave than shooting him would be. The classic example I used was if you stopped the Son of Sam after he was leaving his fourth murder and could show you knew he was the serial killer. Then you could argue that it would be likely he would kill again if he was allowed to leave and that might justify shooting. But even if the guy had a gun and had been involved in a shooting at a single scene, I am not sure you could justify just shooting him when he was leaving, even if he refused to comply with your orders to stop or disarm. Dr. Blair and I discussed this and he claimed that you could not prove he was not headed off to commit another murder so you could justify it that way. I cannot support this type of training.
I think that the warning from Dr. Blair is just a poorly worded caution as you say and that he is not training officers to just run in and shoot people with guns. I know my discussion with him did not include just shooting the suspect without a warning even when you knew he was the active shooter walking away from that scene. BTW, my statements above are paraphrasing and not a direct quote. I could have misunderstood or misremember this. My impression of Dr. Blair was that he was a good guy. I know he is a strong supporter of citizen possession and carrying of firearms, including guns on campus. You may be able to get him to clarify his warning if you get to talk to him.
I do think that the ALERRT program may be teaching officers to be a little quicker on the trigger than I would think is right, but it might be more a matter of degree than a real disagreement on basic points. I had the same discussion with an Air Force officer about how the SPs at Lackland were being trained and their program is much freer with shooting than the civilian police training is.
EDIT: You and Charles.Contingency discussed this while I was typing the below, so it might be irrelevant, btu I leave it as a message to others who may think of going looking for the shooter.
I strongly recommend you reconsider your plan of action. You do not have any responsibility or legal duty to go looking for the shooter and it places you at a much higher risk than taking cover and staying in place would. When you go into an area where there is an active shooter and you are in civilian clothes with no way to identify yourself as a good guy with a gun, you become the exact person Dr. Blair was talking to. You are in a high probability of being mistaken for the bad guy.I don't think the officers are being taught to enter with guns blazing but their adrenaline and yours are going to lead to a problem fairly quickly.
Consider some of the known effects of stress and adrenaline. One that should concern you when it happens to the police officers is called time distortion. The police officer will yell for you to freeze and then he will pause to see if you comply. he will yell again after a pause. Then he will open fire on you if you do not comply. I know you think this will not be a problem because you will comply, but the officer will think he paused for several seconds each time when it was actually just a minute fraction of a second. My experience with this time distortion came in a shooting where I heard three shots fired with a distinct pause between the shots. My partner said he fired a double tap as quickly as he could and the witness said it was just one shot fired because it sounded like one continuous bang.My shot was between the two my partner fired.
Even worse, and contributing to a potentially deadly scenario is a second common effect of stress. This one is the auditory exclusion effect. When you are under stress because you are getting close to the real shooter, you will not hear things around you. If this gets combined with an extreme focus on the danger (another common effect), you will NOT hear the officer say anything. These combined make it very likely that a very deadly error will occur.
But lets take the best scenario. You go looking for the bad guy. Other people in the area will have no idea that you are a good guy trying to help. They may see your gun and think you are another bad guy. Since you are not a bad guy, you will not be harming these people but some of them are not going to think and will call in to the police where you are. This will delay the police from being able to fully respond to the real bad guy. Even if none of this happens and you get to the area or are intercepted by a police officer near it, and you hear the officer and do comply, it will take him some time to secure you and get you identified as a a good guy. This again delays the officer from dealing with the bad guy. That means more innocent people may get hurt or killed.
Now, it is also possible that the police will be slow and you will be able to get there first and deal with the bad guy. In this case, you will be saving lives. But it is not as likely to happen unless you hear the shots from the room next to you or almost that close. So, I recommend you reconsider and plan on taking cover and staying in place.
Charles,
I used to think the ALERRT program was a good program. I have to admit that it has improved police response to active shooters in general. I have not gone through the program to know everything it teaches. I have since reconsidered after talking with Dr. Blair on campus at Texas State. I was talking with him because I was thinking of trying for a grad assistant position at ALERRT. I decided not to because I can no longer support some of the things they teach. I am very concerned about a trend in law enforcement, including ALERRT, that has officers shooting people with guns who were attempting to leave the area after a shooting.
My understanding of the Garner decision was that deadly force was forbidden when someone was fleeing the scene unless you could show that the danger to society was greater if he was allowed to leave than shooting him would be. The classic example I used was if you stopped the Son of Sam after he was leaving his fourth murder and could show you knew he was the serial killer. Then you could argue that it would be likely he would kill again if he was allowed to leave and that might justify shooting. But even if the guy had a gun and had been involved in a shooting at a single scene, I am not sure you could justify just shooting him when he was leaving, even if he refused to comply with your orders to stop or disarm. Dr. Blair and I discussed this and he claimed that you could not prove he was not headed off to commit another murder so you could justify it that way. I cannot support this type of training.
I think that the warning from Dr. Blair is just a poorly worded caution as you say and that he is not training officers to just run in and shoot people with guns. I know my discussion with him did not include just shooting the suspect without a warning even when you knew he was the active shooter walking away from that scene. BTW, my statements above are paraphrasing and not a direct quote. I could have misunderstood or misremember this. My impression of Dr. Blair was that he was a good guy. I know he is a strong supporter of citizen possession and carrying of firearms, including guns on campus. You may be able to get him to clarify his warning if you get to talk to him.
I do think that the ALERRT program may be teaching officers to be a little quicker on the trigger than I would think is right, but it might be more a matter of degree than a real disagreement on basic points. I had the same discussion with an Air Force officer about how the SPs at Lackland were being trained and their program is much freer with shooting than the civilian police training is.