Switch to Online Enables Active Shooter Training for All

The frequency of active shooter incidents has increased over the past two decades, doubling from 2016 to 2020. As a result, many people have increasingly sought effective training on this topic. Before the COVID-19 outbreak, participation in 3.5 hours of in-person training was mandatory within L.A. County’s Department of Public Health (LAC DPH) for all staff assigned to any directly related responsibilities. In early 2022, this course successfully transitioned to a fully online version and is now freely available to anyone.

Identifying a Training Gap

In 2014, the director of LAC DPH participated in an active shooter preparedness training event, which prompted a new interest in emergency preparedness measures related to active shooter threats and workplace violence. As a result, developing a training plan and curriculum for all DPH staff, though not necessarily the same training for all staff, began. The director of the Emergency Preparedness and Response Division was the project lead for this assignment. Still, the work was fully coordinated with the director of Organizational Development and Training (ODT) and the agency’s risk manager to ensure the best training solution(s) to meet the staff and agency’s preparedness needs.

During the following year, the Active Shooter Training Project’s members researched the types of in-person and online Active Shooter Preparedness and Response training that were most readily available to agency staff. Based on that research, the agency decided to develop a complete, in-person course for selected segments of LAC DPH staff based on their facility- or safety-related responsibilities:

• Senior facility manager of each of the 50+ facilities from which staff performed their duties
• Building emergency coordinator for each facility
• Floor wardens for each facility, and
• Alternates for any of the above three positions

Based on research findings, project members and agency leaders agreed that the online course through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) Independent Study (IS) web portal – specifically FEMA’s IS-907 (Active Shooter: What You Can Do) – was highly effective. Therefore, this course became the primary mandatory means for providing foundational knowledge on this topic to support all agency staff. By mid-2016, the 3.5-hour agenda and content elements for the agency’s in-person training had been established so that multiple in-person courses per quarter could meet the training requirement beginning in the Fall of 2016 (see Fig. 1).

Overview of the 3.5-Hour Specialized Course

Since completing the FEMA IS-907 online course was already mandatory for all LAC DPH staff, the 3.5-hour course only included a summary of content from that training source. The reviewed content had the workplace violence indicators for prevention activities and the basics of the “Run, Hide, Fight” response options. Additional content not explicitly provided in FEMA’s course was also in the 3.5-hour curriculum to empower staff members with various facility safety leadership responsibilities to complete their pre- and post-incident duties more effectively. However, during an actual violent attack, leaders’ primary responsibilities are like any other workforce member: (1) do not get shot/hurt; and if wounded, do whatever is necessary to survive. Leaders who do not protect themselves are of little value to anyone else.

Of course, participants were never going to be able to practice their response options to the extent necessary to produce muscle memory, so the focus of additional content during the response portion of the curriculum was on the following:

• Preparedness measures before an incident can produce better outcomes than waiting to make last-minute decisions
• Proven security elements were added to the curriculum (e.g., Five phases of security with their respective countermeasures, and Rings of multiple countermeasures). Tool development included a two-page file containing sources of information and resources that reinforce the various security processes and strategies
• A single-page Personal Action Options (Plan/Tool) allows users to identify and document options for implementing each of the three key response strategies (i.e., Run, Hide, Fight) based on their personal capabilities and the characteristics of their typical workspace or another site(s)
• A single-page “Safer” Room Evaluation Tool allows users to pre-identify one or more rooms in their workplace or another site(s) that should provide a reasonable level of safety if they were to encounter an attacker(s)
• Various “target hardening” strategies (e.g., blocking access to individuals) make the shooter’s access to an individual’s position too difficult or time-consuming, so the shooter moves on, or the responders arrive to neutralize the threat
• Online delivery of this course eliminated printed handouts and required that supplemental documents be made available through an online source. Constant and Associates Inc. provided LAC DPH with a new webpage as a community service to meet this need
• When preparedness options fail to prevent exposure to a violent attack, the threatened person must rapidly make decisions, execute identified solution(s), and then reevaluate the situation
• The course teaches the appropriate use of Colonel John Boyd’s OODA Loop (i.e., Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act) as an effective tool for tactical decision-making during highly stressful, adversarial situations
• Urgent decisions during a violent attack must be made without all the desired information, so decisions based on assumptions are sometimes necessary. These mandatory assumptions can be evidence-based instead of simply reactionary by including key statistics and other historical information, which significantly improves their accuracy, reliability, and frequency of success
• The style of the curriculum’s composition is progressive and employs significant use of images to reinforce specific points and the cumulative nature of knowledge transfe