Swarming police response in mall shooting highlights 'paradigm shift' since Columbine
Steve Dipaola / Reuters
Police
move with an armored vehicle at the Clackamas Town Center shopping mall
near Portland, Ore., on Tuesday. The sheriff says officers arrived at
the shooting scene about a minute after the initial 911 call.
By Elizabeth Chuck and James Eng, NBC News
A gunman wielding a stolen semi-automatic rifle and several fully loaded magazines
opens fire inside a shopping mall teeming with as many as 10,000 people. Yet, only two people are killed and one wounded. Sheer luck, or were authorities and mall officials well-prepared?
Probably a bit of both, say law enforcement and security
experts, some of whom credit new police tactics and better security
training at schools and public venues for helping to minimize the
casualties at the Clackamas Town Center near Portland, Ore.
"I
want to say that we were … well-prepared for this incident because we
had practice in active shooter techniques at the Clackamas Town Center
this past year for this type of situation," Clackamas County Sheriff
Craig Roberts said at a news conference Wednesday.
It's not known what prompted the Tuesday afternoon attack. The
sheriff said only that the shooter, identified as Jacob Tyler Roberts,
22, of Portland, appeared to be on "a mission" to kill.
But he
added that the first officers arrived about one minute after the first
911 calls and immediately separated into teams to head into the mall.
Mall gunman: Personal setbacks, friends' disbelief
Jacob Tyler Roberts is suspected of killing two people at an Oregon shopping mall. NBC's Jay Gray reports.
"Law
enforcement has learned from past tragedies throughout this country
that we can't wait for SWAT teams, and teams need to deploy
immediately," Roberts said. "So we trained and equipped each of our
individual officers to form up in teams as they arrive and move
immediately into engaging the threat, wherever it might be."
That's
a tactic that many law enforcement agencies began instituting in the
aftermath of the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, where two
young gunmen, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, shot to death 12 students
and a teacher and injured 21 others before killing themselves.
At
Columbine, law enforcement followed traditional tactics of surrounding
the building and waiting for more heavily armed units to arrive. Crucial
minutes ticked away, during which Harris and Klebold killed and wounded
more people.
Many agencies now train their officers to go after an "active shooter" immediately rather than wait for tactical squads.
That
rapid-deployment response is exactly what happened in the mass shooting
at an Aurora, Colo., theater on July 12 that left a dozen people dead.
Aurora police got the first call at 12:39 a.m. Seven minutes later,
suspect James Eagan Holmes was arrested.
"Ever since Columbine,
there's been a paradigm shift," said Mark Lomax, executive director of
the National Tactical Officers Association. "In the past, it was the
standard protocol if there was a shooting incident or a barricade
suspect or a hostage situation, the first responder would secure and
contain the crime situation until the SWAT team or negotiators or bomb
techs would arrive."
Girl, 15, shot in Ore. mall cheats death twice
School
shootings highlighted a need to teach first responders to handle
situations before those specialized units' arrival, Lomax said.
"It takes a while for a fully equipped SWAT team or hostage
negotiation team to get to the scene. We've realized over many sad
incidents that time is of the essence when it comes to saving lives and
that those first responders should be fully knowledgeable with how to
handle those situations. They won't be the experts, but they need to
have enough training and equipment to do exactly what they did in
Portland," he said.
Sgt. A.J. DeAndrea of the Arvada (Colo.)
Police Department, who was among the elite team members who searched
Columbine High the day of the shooting, says the tactic of going after
shooters immediately has helped save lives. He told The Denver Post t
he first SWAT team didn't even enter Columbine until 38 minutes after the first call.
"There are times when you cannot wait. It's an inherently risky job. Our job is to go in and protect innocent lives,"
he told The Denver Post in an interview earlier this year.
The
Clackamas Town Center mall general manager Dennis Curtis says the mall
had an emergency plan in place and regularly holds emergency drills.
Watch entire comments.
Many malls and other public venues
now routinely practice responses to emergencies like the one that
unfolded Tuesday in Oregon. Clackamas Town Center has a lockdown
procedure in place.
"Every mall that we own and manage has an
emergency response manual and we rehearse for these things all the time.
We go through those emergency response plans on a regular basis. We've
done drills with the sheriff's office," said the mall's general manager,
Dennis Curtis.
"Basically, in a situation like this it's either
stay right where you're at and lock yourself down or get to the nearest
exit and get out of the building. I just have to commend all of the
retailers and our security staff. They did an amazing job."
Mall shooting victims: Hospice nurse, entrepreneur
Sheriff
Roberts noted that the gunman's rifle jammed at some point, and that
stroke of luck may also have saved some lives. He also said a large
number of police officers arrived on the scene very rapidly, curtailing
the suspect's ability to move around the mall.
Lomax said police
departments across the country have been training for "active shooter"
situations so they, too, can take down a suspect who has a weapon in a
public area rather than waiting for backup or a tactical squad.
"I believe that there are a lot of departments that are being very
proactive on this type of training and equipping their patrol officers
with automatic weapons and ballistic vests and shields to address these
types of things," he said. "It only takes a matter of minutes to do a
lot of mayhem out there, and these sheriffs and police chiefs understand
that they need a very equipped and trained front line whenever it
comes."
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end quote from:
Swarming police response in mall shooting highlights 'paradigm shift' since Columbine - U.S. News
I think that "swarming" of the police is a good idea. But it is after the fact. There needs to be some way to prevent these kinds of incidents "before they happen". Otherwise, more and more families along with the whole nation and world are going to be traumatized over and over again by these kinds of senseless acts by enraged suicidal mostly young men.
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