A Brief Analysis of U.S. Active Shooter Event FBI Data, Current Site Security Deficiencies, and Proactive Response Planning

By William J. Smith & Stephanie Kent

It seems as though every time we turn on the television, there are reports of another shooting or mass casualty event, an act of terrorism perpetrated by lone or multiple actors. The media reports always highlight at least one devastating casualty to lament, and some horrific method of attack that will inspire copy cats and instill fear in our fellow citizens.

Over the past decade, news of these tragic events have become the norm. It’s time to pragmatically dismantle these incidents and analyze trends in attacks in order to identify and better protect ourselves and our facilities that are particularly vulnerable to acts of terrorism. Now more than ever, tragic events of the past must be understood as critical evidence to preclude and prevent these horrific acts. The lack of comprehensive statistics available for attacks by location category is mind-boggling. While research on the trending vulnerabilities and targets of motivated killers is scant and largely outdated, we came across an intriguing study conducted by the FBI in 2014¹ which sheds some light on the issue.

What did the FBI study?

The study involved the investigation of 160 active shooter incidents throughout the United States that resulted in annual totals of 1,043 casualties. For the purposes of the study, “active shooter” is defined as “an individual (or two individuals) actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Not included in the study are shootings resulting from drug or gang violence, and not all mass shootings have been included in the sample set. However, the results provide remarkable clarity in terms of trending threats and necessary preventative measures.

What were the findings?

First, the findings point to a dramatic increase in the number of annual incidents. During the first seven years of the study, it was found that an average of 6.4 incidents occurred annually. During the last seven years, however, those incidents nearly tripled to an average of 16.4 per year. More importantly, the FBI used this data to categorize the locations in which these shootings occurred. It was found that an overwhelming 45.6% of the active shootings occurred in places of commerce – more specifically, 27.59% in businesses open to pedestrian traffic, 14.49% in businesses closed to pedestrian traffic, and 3.896% in shopping malls. Educational facilities were identified as the second-largest location grouping at 24.4%. At a 10% rate of occurrence were government buildings. Open spaces were at comparable risk to government buildings, with 9.4% of active shooting incidents. The final three categories at risk were residences (4.4%), houses of worship (3.8%) and health care facilities (2.5%). The results of this study strongly indicate a necessary shift in focus toward the protection of soft targets.

What are soft targets?

Soft targets are typically defined as civilian-centric locations that are not generally “fortified.” This would be any type of vulnerable, undefended and unprotected place where civilians might gather or meet. In terms of the FBI study referenced above, nearly all of the location groupings would be considered soft targets, with the presumable exception of government institutions (which often implement high building security measures). However, security would not be considered a primary mission in the other location categories, which would make them all soft targets for terrorism and violence of all kinds. More specific soft target examples might include shopping malls, entertainment venues, nightclubs, high-density gathering areas (like 5th Avenue or Times Square in New York City), hospitals, popular hotels, amusement parks, etc.

How can we harden soft targets?

First and foremost, recognize that any soft target is vulnerable to an act of terrorism. Businesses, educational facilities, and places of mass gathering are prime targets for terrorists. While Federal and State statutes and regulations require² employers of 11 or more have Safety, Security and Emergency Plans to address site-based incidents, most lack policies and procedures that address acts of terrorism or mass casualty events. As the FBI study cited reveals an upward trend in acts of terrorism; businesses, educational facilities, places of mass gathering, such as clubs, concert halls, arenas, and shopping malls should view these as a ‘foreseeable event ‘and take all necessary steps to protect lives and harden their facilities to preclude or prevent acts of terrorism at their facilities.

Secondly, conduct a comprehensive vulnerability assessment to identify weaknesses in your current facility emergency action plan (FEAP) as well as the facilities security and life safety product inventory; perimeter and internal surveillance cameras, access control, visitor management, emergency notification systems and other products and systems that complement the overall security and safety plan. Our licensed and credentialed investigative and security firm has been conducting these assessments for more than 30 years and found that most facilities are deficient in either or both categories.

Law enforcement investigations conducted in the aftermath of terrorist attacks reveal the actor(s) pre-visualized and developed a military style attack plan by surveilling a ‘soft target’ several times before the incident. Those attacks may have been prevented by utilizing appropriately modeled and placed surveillance cameras that recorded the actor(s) activities both inside and at the perimeter of the facility.

Finally, once your facility emergency action plan has been updated and qualified security products installed, training and practice drills will familiarize your staff and create proficiency in addressing a site based emergency. By promulgating and adopting policies and procedures that address acts of violence and terrorism; coupled by deployment and use of qualified security, safety and emergency management products, you can dramatically reduce your risk profile and provide for a safer and more secure facility.

Sources:
¹A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013 U.S.; Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation
²Regulation Standards: OSHA 29 CFR 1910:38 – NFPA 1600; Occupational Safety & Health Administration, U.S. Department of Labor

By William J. Smith

Anyone who attended grade school within the last fifty years will certainly recall time spent on the school lawn or in the parking lot waiting for the fire alarm to be reset. Semester after semester, year after year, fire drills were simply another aspect of our lives as students. While we all remember fire drills, how many of us could cite the number of casualties caused by fires at U.S. educational institutions for any year?

Between the years of 2007 and 2011, NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) reports only one civilian death resulting from a school fire, and approximately 82 injuries. These statistics include nursery, elementary, middle and high schools as well as daycare properties, college classroom buildings and adult education centers.

As Stephen C. Satterly, Jr. states in his Report of Relative Risks of Death in U.S. K-12 Schools (2014), “The U.S. Fire Administration data shows no fatalities for the years of 1992-1998, 2002, and 2003-2005 … School-related fatalities by fire are rare, and no documented instances have been found from 1998-2012.” One might think that such uplifting fire casualty data would inspire schools to address other lethal risk factors encountered on school properties.

When comparing fire-related casualties to firearm-related casualties in educational settings, the latter have far outnumbered the former. Between 2010 and 2015, there were 101 fatalities and 145 injuries recorded as the result of school shootings. That’s 246 physically-affected individuals, and thousands more who have been deeply traumatized and emotionally scarred. Mass school shootings like Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Umpqua Community College — among many others — evidence the necessity of a shift in risk-factor focus.

Yes, generally schools are becoming more attuned to the real threat of active shooter incidents, but few are actually adopting related policies and procedures, or allocating greater resources toward addressing this pressing safety risk. In any case, neither the quality nor quantity of new emergency strategies will help to improve mortality rates if the procedures are not well practiced. The only way for any new safety plan to become fully effective is to train under its conditions. Just as schools fine-tune fire emergency practices through frequent fire drills, so too must they train students and faculty in the execution of safety strategies under simulated shooting scenarios.

Consider the following baseball analogy. One could study every book ever written on throwing a curve ball, but does that mean that the reader would be able to step onto a pitching mound and throw a curveball? Of course not. Having knowledge of how to do something rarely translates directly into the ability to perform the action on cue. Further, if the pressure of winning or losing the game is introduced, it is almost certain that the individual would be unable to produce the desired pitch when it is most required.

As exemplified in the above analogy, knowing what to do during an active shooter emergency is not nearly the same as the ability to execute the plan with certain proficiency — especially under life-threatening circumstances.

Further, a lack of resources should not be blamed for the dangerous neglect of situational response training in our schools and colleges. Schools and colleges spend billions annually on security products and services. While these purchases certainly play a role in the prevention of certain safety and security issues, it is the lack of situational response training that creates a potentially dangerous environment for students and staff. Devoting adequate time to both instruction and practice is crucial for any plan to be successful.

While some might argue that such training could traumatize younger students — this need not be the case. Experienced school safety professionals understand that situational response drills must be made sensitive to the potential anxiety that can occur in students, especially in elementary grade classes. Using sound instructional techniques such as the ‘Stranger Danger’ model to explain the process for ‘keeping us all safe’ in advance of the training drills is recommended.

Below you will find a list of recommended action steps to implement — and most importantly — practice in your school or college.

Action Plan for Active Shooter Training at Schools and Colleges

1. First and foremost, schools and colleges must promulgate and adopt policies and procedures for active shooter incidents and incorporate them within their district’s “All Hazard Safety, Security and Emergency Plan.”
2. Once adopted, districts and their schools — working in coordination with law enforcement and emergency responders — should simulate active shooter scenarios and practice the adopted procedures at least once per year.
3. Every active shooter drill should be overseen by trained and credentialed monitors who would observe first-hand and report on the effectiveness of the drill.
4. Schools should consider providing administrators, faculty, and staff with CRASE (Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events) training, or similar instructional programs. Such training could prove highly beneficial in the development of response protocols for your district.

Finally, know that the adoption of an active shooter plan at your school or college is a largely futile enterprise unless the procedures are practiced until they become second nature to students, faculty, administrators, and staff.

About the Author

Having served as a security consultant to government, education, and industry, William J. Smith is the Managing Member of AmericanSchoolSafety.com. The firm provides instruction, training, and guidance in all matters of school safety, security, and emergency management. Mr. Smith may be reached via contact information provided at https://www.americanschoolsafety.com/or by calling 866-200-4545.

What You Can Do

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© AmericanSchoolSafety.com. LLC 2016. All Rights Reserved.

By Joseph Mazzarella
S.V.P. & Chief Legal Counsel, Mutualink, Inc.

On the heels of the Paris attacks in November this year, the NY Times published an Op-ed piece “Could Paris Happen Here?” written by Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin. Simon and Benjamin, international affairs scholars and counter terrorism experts from Dartmouth College, posited the assessment that the US need not overly worry about a similar attack. This turned out to be gravely erroneous, as the San Bernardino attack confirmed. In their piece, they state that anxiety or worry over a Paris-type attack on US soil was:

…unwarranted. In fact, it is a mistake to assume that America’s security from terrorism is comparable to Europe’s. For many reasons, the United States is a significantly safer place. While vigilance remains essential, no one should panic.”

“Candlelight vigil in London for the victims of the Peshawar school siege.”
Photo by Kashif Haque — Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Commons.

They confidently go on to make the case that the US is different in four essential ways, ranging from its protected geographic access, the lack of a Euro-jihadist culture within our borders, the lack of access to a weapons pipeline, and superior monitoring and intelligence capabilities.

What Simon and Benjamin and many other experts fail to appreciate is that terrorism is a form of asymmetric warfare. Traditional factors often used to assess risks in classic state-sponsored conflicts do not apply. Remarkably, after a large scale attack like Paris, you will hear many media pundits and experts assert that the plot, based on its scale and impact, must have required great sophistication, expertise, planning and outside assistance. This is simply untrue. I would argue quite the opposite.

Terror attacks using conventional high capacity weapons directed at soft civilian targets require very little sophistication or outside assistance. The more open a society is, the more vulnerable it is to low cost, high impact terror events. In the case of America, access to sufficiently high capacity semi-automatic weapons is easy, movement is easy, access to public places of mass gathering is easy, and access to materials and secure communications is easy. Any group of motivated individuals with a few thousand dollars of cash, firearms, smartphones, vehicles, and some hotel reservations can inflict untold civilian casualties with relatively modest planning and coordination.

The 2008 Mumbai terror attacks were in many ways a watershed moment in the evolution of terrorism. It marked the first adaption of a major commando-style urban assault on a civilian target since the Dubrovka Theater siege in Moscow on October 23, 2002. Rather than 30 or 40 commandos, Mumbai involved a smaller group of 10 well-armed attackers who were able to inflict massive casualties and generate mayhem by attacking unprepared, publicly accessible civilian targets. At that time, some experts recognized that Mumbai heralded in a new mode of terror — namely that large-scale urban assaults could be carried out by small teams of well-armed terrorists with devastating consequences.

In the years that followed, several terror plots were uncovered in Europe and reported as being successfully thwarted. Around that time, in late 2010, I revisited the significance of Mumbai writing that:

The significance of the Mumbai attacks should not be lost in that it represented a continuing departure from the historically favored terror targets of air and rail transportation, and a move towards commando style coordinated attacks. The Mumbai attacks were immensely”successful” from a terrorist perspective, causing large scale carnage and disruption across a major metropolitan region and”success” breeds emulation.”

In the years since, a series of terrorist attacks across the world have served to provide insight into evolving terror tactics and tendencies. In particular, I recount the following major attacks, among others:

• The Muna Hotel attack in Somalia in August 24, 2010 was military commando style attack on a hotel resulting in the death of 31 people
• Spozhmai Hotel attack in Kabul in April 2012 was an assault and suicide bombing killing 20;
• The Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013 was a planted bombing killing 3 and injuring 264 others.
• The Westgate Mall Massacre in September 2013, was a commando style attack on a mall resulting in 62 dead, and another 175 injured.
• The Nigerian School attack and kidnapping of 250 school children by Boko Haram.
• Volograd, Russia attacks in December 2013 were multi-site suicide bombing attacks killing 34 and injuring 80.
• The Peshawar School Massacre in December, 2014 was a commando style attack on a school resulting in over 400 children and personnel dead.
• The Charlie Hebdo terror attack in January 2015 was a commando style attack on a newspaper office building and subsequent kosher supermarket resulting in 17 killed and 22 others injured.
• The Paris terror attack in November, 2015 was a multi-site, commando style attack on a stadium, theater, restaurant and mall with suicide bombers.
• The San Bernardino terror attack in December, 2015 was a two-person commando style attack on an office building resulting in 14 killed and 21 injured.

As can be quickly observed, commando-style attacks on soft civilian targets are the current preferred mode of terror attack. As I previously discussed in an article (Kenya Mall Terror Attack Reinforces a Disturbing Pattern, Sep. 23, 2013), it is my view that modern terror movements and organizations like ISIL, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Ansar al-Shari’a, al-Shabaab and others are not merely loosely affiliated groups of cells that are disconnected from each other. They are distributed thinking entities that are self-aware, share a common gestalt, and are highly adaptive. Emulation, adaptation and iteration in tactics and techniques can be observed over the course of time across among ostensibly distinct, geographically separated organizations. These changes are notable because as they evolve they are optimizing towards exploitation of minimal security presence, ease of execution, reduced operational complexity, less resource dependencies or need for command and control, and greater terror impact.

There is no question in my mind that the Pakistan school massacre by Taliban terrorists on December 16, 2014 was inspired, in part, by the Sandy Hook massacre on December 14, 2012, almost exactly two years prior. Just as what followed with the Boko Haram attack and massacre in Nigeria a month later on January 12, 2015 resulting in 2,000 dead and 350 school children being taken, was no coincidence. These are convergences of thought facilitated by access to freely available real time news sources and scores of social networking sites. The biggest mistake made by many terror analysts is the assumption that all of these organizations, large or small, even down to the lone wolf, are not connected to each other by conscious awareness of what others are doing or have done. Stated simply, they learn from one another, copy one another, inspire one another and obtain tacit ideological approval from one another which propels successive incidents.

I will repeat my concern again. The US needs to vastly improve school security. A commando style attack on a school is a major risk. School targets house many potential victims, they are not generally secure, and the psychological terror impact of such an attack would be devastating. The Beslan School siege in 2004 looms like an ever-present shadow over ongoing events. The Peshawar school massacre and Nigerian school attacks which sent shock waves of horror around the globe, are demonstrable examples that terrorists have learned there is great value in attacking schools. Recent revelations that the San Bernardino terrorists had access to and information on local schools should serve as notice. Other targets of concern should be malls, large hotels and theater performance spaces. We all have a natural desire to be reassured by experts that we should not worry, but as we can see, many so-called experts just get it wrong, and getting it wrong has deadly consequences. It’s time to get about the business of better protecting against and preparing for the next shoe — which will surely drop.

This article originally appeared at Emergency Preparedness Today on Friday, December 11, 2015. It has been republished with permission.