High Threat Cover

During active threats the first responding officer is expected to immediately make entry into the building where the incident is taking place. One of the main difficulties is approaching thresholds and entering rooms. Two methods have been utilized to limit the risks associated with entering and clearing rooms, limited penetration threshold assessments and the teams based approach of dynamic entry.

We will begin this discussion by doing a brief breakdown of limited penetration threshold assessments. With the proliferation of the solo officer response to active threats, tacticians needed an answer to working hallways, thresholds, and rooms with only one officer. Limited penetration threshold assessments is one proposed method to minimize risk to the responding officer. This method requires the user to approach the doorway, slow down, and from approximately 6 feet away begin clearing segments of the room that remain visible from the doorway. The responding officer utilizes the doorway itself to offer concealment from a possible threat in the room. Many tacticians criticize the method due to officers being forced into the “fatal funnel” for far too long.

As seen in this graphic, the corner fed room has one has one hard corner, highlighted in red, which cannot be cleared from the threshold. To clear the entirety of the room, the officer needs to “peak” in, with weapon focused on the corner, to verify if a threat is there or not. The drawback is that there is a very high likelihood that the threat knows of your presence in the threshold at this point.

With the center fed room, another hard corner is present which creates a dilema for the solo officer. If those corners need to be cleared, how does only one person clear it? Instructors of limited pentration threshold assessments suggest using that peaking method to enter as even as possible to the door frame, and scan those corners, while remaining in the fatal funnel. If a threat is encountered the officer needs to pivot to square up and engage the target. This is hardly ideal.

Another suggestion is to use the team method of dynamic entry. As opposed to the slower, methodical, “slicing the pie” approach, the officer approaches the threshold and quickly enters the room while focusing on the hard corners of the room. This drastically lowers the amount of time in the fatal funnel but also forces the officer into the possibility of an open ground gun fight with a threat. In center fed rooms, this dynaminc entry also requires the officer to, however briefly, have their back toward an uncleared hard corner. Many propose that this risk is worth it as the likelihood that the threat would have accurate shots on target is low.

Neither of these entry methods are ideal especially for center fed rooms. I have been trained in both, with the majority of my most recent training in limited penetration threshold assessments, but remain open minded to the possibility of better approaches. How would you approach these rooms? Is there a better way that hasn’t reached mainstream tacticians?