High Threat Cover

On May 24th, 2022 a gunman entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and actively killed for one hour and fifteen minutes before being confronted by police. In the end, 21 people were killed and another 18 were injured during the incident.

Many ask, why did it take over one hour for law enforcement to confront the killer when they were at the school within two minutes? Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center at Texas State University published a post action review of the incident and the insight and observations are scathing. I’ll post a link below for anyone interested. They found cascading errors, along with a refusal to act throughout the incident. Investigators found, many times throughout the incident, school police officers continuing to await administrative direction while shots were being fired in the occupied classroom.

This wasn’t the only incident in which law enforcement could have potentially stopped an active threat earlier in the incident. In 2018, ineffectual school resource officer could have confronted the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter. Instead, the SRO chose to remain outside the building and requested all Broward County Sheriff deputies to maintain a perimeter around the school. A neighboring agency, the Coral Springs Police Department, had multiple officers force through the perimeter and enter the building to attempt to confront the threat.

For over a decade, we have known that engaging the active threat is best practice. So how do some of these responses go terribly wrong? A factor that can effect officers in these situations is plan continuation bias. Plan continuation bias is a type of unconscious bias to adhere to a predetermined plan even when shifting scenarios suggest a change is necessary. In the Robb Elementary School incident, it appears that the officers at the school were early adopters of their predetermined plan of waiting to be told to enter the classroom where innocents were being slaughtered, even when active gunfire HEAVILY suggests to breach, enter, and engage. For the SRO at Parkland, he referred to antiquated training, and requested a perimeter be maintained because, well, that’s the plan he knew. Meanwhile, Marjory Stoneman Douglas students were getting murdered.

A frequent worry of mine as an instructor is inadvertently feeding a practitioners continuation bias by inferring that their is a certain path to success. For example, if I instruct an officer at a high risk location, such as the jurisdictions local middle school, I am hesitant to have the officers respond to the same entrance in multiple scenarios. In the event of a real incident, I don’t want that Officer to repeat behavior just because “that was the plan”, I heavily encourage the idea of momentarily analyzing their decision.

Even if we train in a way to inhibit continuation bias, officers can still be stuck when these traumatic events occur. What can these responding officers in active threat incidents do to inhibit or overcome this?

A really great tool for mitigating this is something taught in almost every level of active threat training, the immediate action plan. Typically, the immediate action plan responsibility occurs after the threat is down, but I’ve found in my own experience, critically analyzing my upcoming actions and “what ifs” as soon as I receive a call for service, and throughout the incident, allows me to shift my direction to achieve the desired outcome much more efficiently and smoothly. There is rarely the feeling of “getting caught with my pants down.”

Utilizing this immediate action plan model has worked for me, in training and in real life situations, to lessen the mental tunnel vision of continuation bias. If you have found yourself stuck droning on following the plan after a situation has drastically changed, give the immediate action plan model a try, it might just work.

Link for ALERRT’s AAR for the Robb Elementary School shooting: https://alerrt.org/r/31