“He’s still shooting inside. Shots fired! Shots fired!”

Vail, Colo., an energetic, low-crime resort town, population 4,700, hadn’t had a murder since 1979. That changed on Nov. 7, 2009. The Vail Public Safety Communications Center found itself handling an active shooter incident just six months after its employees had completed an APCO Active Shooter class. Vail dispatch is a small, proactive communications center that tries to stay on the cutting edge of training.

“Our instructor had taught that an active shooter incident can happen anywhere at anytime. In that moment, we were facing what we had trained for head-on,” says Jennifer Kirkland, Vail’s training supervisor.

At 7:28 p.m. on a Saturday night at a community bar called the Sandbar in West Vail, gunfire rang out. Five dispatchers were on duty. After the calls started, they continued for hours without break.

Vail local and Vietnam veteran Richard Moreau was in the Sandbar when staff decided he needed to be removed due to inappropriate behavior. Unfortunately, he was armed, intoxicated and deadly in that moment. By the time Moreau was done, one victim was lying dead in the bar across from Moreau. Three other victims, all male, were injured but survived. The male who was killed had re-entered the bar to look for his wife.

When officers arrived on scene, the shooter was no longer shooting, and the situation was no longer an active shooter incident. “Our officers are trained in active shooter response,” says Kirkland, “but because it was not an active shooter when they arrived, they chose to hold the perimeter while the special operations unit was en route.”

On arrival, officers found victims both in and outside the bar.

In the Beginning
“Because of our training, we were able to recognize the situation as an active shooter and this enabled us to respond more effectively,” says Vail dispatcher Beth Dobransky.

Early warning signs of an active shooter call include:

• An onslaught of calls;
• Open line calls with muffled sounds;
• Shots being fired without a caller speaking;
• Seemingly unrelated explosion or fire calls that begin to form a pattern on the mapping system;
• Suspicious person calls with possible weapon sighting; and
• Fire alarms — the latest strategy is to pull an alarm inside to drive victims outside to a waiting sniper.

Vail was already working a high-risk SWAT call when the Sandbar active shooter calls started coming in. Fortunately, Vail dispatchers, who handle Eagle County and approximately 48,000 people, were able to differentiate the Sandbar calls from the shooting incident they were already managing on a different channel.

“Active shooter calls have a different tone and a different pace,” says Julie Anderson, who was the on-duty supervisor at the time of the shooting. “The phone reports received are not only numerous, they are often received simultaneously. Some begin with the sound of shots being fired, while others begin with screams of panic. Once you have worked an in-progress shooting or heard audio examples from training, there will be no hesitancy recognizing the necessary response measures.”

One of the difficulties of handling an active shooter incident is that feeling of being blind to what’s happening on scene when radio traffic is quiet. I teach dispatch colleagues to give updates as needed but to practice the art of silence and listening.

“I knew what the officers were doing even when they weren’t talking to me,” says Bonnie Collard, who also worked Vail’s shooting incident.

What they were doing was setting up a perimeter and then attempting to clear the bar once they had a proper team in place for entry. The entry took 29 minutes. Outside the Sandbar, responders were confronted by the chaos of those fleeing the bar and those trying to re-enter in search of loved ones.

Once entry is made, having the control to remain silent on the radio is critical to officer safety during an active shooter incident. Unlike other shooting incidents, during an active shooter scenario, the shooter(s) is not given any verbal commands to drop their weapon. The objective is to shoot to kill to eliminate the threat. A dispatcher calling for a status check during such a confrontation could prove deadly for responders.

“[During active shooter incidents, you don’t want any] of this ‘Did-you-all-copy?’ stuff that clogs the air,” says Sgt. Tim Maloney, a 29-year law enforcement veteran with the Brown County Sheriff’s Department in Green Bay, Wis.

“Dispatch the main units in a calm manner, and then be quiet and let the incident command structure out on the street run its course and guide you,” advises Maloney, who is often in command.

A few years ago, one of the responders who handled the Omaha, Neb., mall shooting in December 2007 taught me that an active shooter incident needs to be dispatched like a lawn mower theft that should have been called in two weeks ago: calm, collected and with as little emotion as possible.

As the first calls come in, the entire dispatch team needs to “plant” (i.e., settle or lock in and be ready to go with it)—even if that’s a team of one, such as occurred in October 2008 at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) in Conway, Ark.

At that time, a shooting left two 18-year-old freshmen dead and a third man with gunshot wounds. Criss Walker was the only experienced dispatcher on duty, but tethered to Criss was a trainee experiencing her first dispatch shift.

UCA’s active shooter incident came just 45 minutes before the end of the shift, shortly after 9 p.m. on a Sunday night. “No one was thinking about something like this happening at that time,” says Erica Hlebinsky, UCA’s dispatch training coordinator and supervisor.

UCA received so many calls within the first hour of the incident that its phone logging system collapsed. UCA has a campus population of 11,000 students and 1,200 employees. As Hlebinsky explains, almost every student has a mother, father or both who will call in, as well as students themselves calling.

Walker found himself fielding all phone calls and dispatching at the same time, which is the case for many agencies. “You processed a call and then went on to the next,” he explained at the time. “It was impossible to stay with calls. You sorted through what you had and kept going. We had an R.A. [resident assistant] doing CPR on one of the victims, and groups of people running.” As he fielded calls and sent help, he watched helplessly as his police lobby filled with screaming, crying and vomiting witnesses looking for refuge and safety.

Vail (Colo.) Public Safety Communications Center award presentation and photo for successful handling of their November 2009 fatal active shooter incident. From left: Dispatcher Melissa McWithey, Officer Kevin Luse, Dispatcher Randy Braucht, Officer Carrie Briggs, Officer Michael Bindle, Officer Ryan Millbern, Dispatcher Beth Dobransky, (behind her) Officer Craig Westering, Dispatch Supervisor Julie Anderson, Dispatcher Bonnie Collard.

On Scene
Vail’s Melissa McWithey says their key to staying calm and effective was understanding on-scene operations.

Once on scene, the responders’ primary consideration is the shooter(s). Medical takes a back seat until the shooter is neutralized. At the beginning of an active shooter call, the police dispatcher must relay information on shooter location, description and weaponry. The number of injured and casualties is information that’s gathered, but once responders are aware that subjects are down and shooting is continuing, there’s no need to update numbers.

Active shooter incidents are fast moving. “In a perfect world it makes great sense to have a secure channel with tactical dispatchers assigned specifically to the officers making entry. The reality is that these types of incidents happen so fast that the mayhem is done often before the first officers arrive,” says Green Bay Lt. Dave Wesley.

Wesley, who helps with tactical training for Green Bay officers, says he often quotes a long-term study that shows 47% of active shooter incidents last 15 minutes or less and 27% are five minutes or less.[1]

What that means for dispatchers is that far more good can be done by focusing attention on gathering and giving out suspect information because harm has already been done to the victim.

Officer and responder safety is the first consideration, says Wesley. Without it, there’s no end to the active shooter situation. Shooters will continue until they:

• Run out of victims;
• Run out of ammunition;
• Kill themselves; or
• Are compromised by officers or civilians.

“The officer is no good to anyone if he is injured or killed himself. Like responding red lights and siren in a squad car, if you crash before you get to the call, what good were you to the victims?” explains Wesley.

This means dispatchers must provide regular updates on suspect location and firepower. Medical information beyond initial reports is saved for after the suspect(s) has (have) been stopped.

Status checks are made only according to center policy. If there is no policy in place, every 10–15 minutes is a general standard unless a contact team is clearing a building or area.

If you are a dispatcher who must also take calls during an active shooter incident, the basic premise is to keep a caller on the phone as long as you’re getting good suspect information. After that information ceases, you’ll likely have to make the decision to put the call on hold or terminate and move to the next.

Lessons Learned
I was fortunate enough to know long-time Jefferson County, Colo., dispatcher and supervisor, Cindy Cline. Cline was one of the dispatchers who worked the active shooter incident at Columbine High School in April 1999. She survived one of the worst shooting incidents in the history of our country and at a time when there was no training for dispatchers on how to identify, handle and recover from an active shooter incident. And she was my active shooter instructor mentor.

I had traveled to Vail, Colo., to teach the class in May 2009, just months before the Sandbar incident, and Cline had made the drive to Vail to watch me teach and give further advice on how to make the instruction real for students. Three weeks later, she died unexpectedly.

Cline told me she had made the trip to watch me teach because I had been given an honorable responsibility to prepare the future (new dispatchers) for what we already knew was possible from the past.

I asked her to make me a list of active shooter dispatch and calltaker principles based on her experience in navigating Columbine on that day. She was reluctant to make a list that put too much emphasis on Columbine. I took notes as she spoke. “Everyone always wants to speak of Columbine, but there have been plenty of incidents since ours, and they will continue because active shooters are made; they are not born,” said Cline.

Cline taught me the true vulnerability of dispatchers and calltakers during the event. We are taught to have answers for our callers and to give direction. However, an active shooter incident often requires us to give less than that because of the nature of the call. As Cline learned in Columbine and explained, if we tell a caller to stay where they are and they fail to survive, we’re in trouble. If we tell them to flee and they don’t make it, we’re in trouble.

“Unless you’re told that it is a shelter-in-place situation or an evacuation, ask your caller their intentions and try to gather shooter information from asking and background noise,” said Cline.

Cline explained that we have to give our callers a reason to stay away from arriving responders or risk the lifeguard effect, when citizens either grab onto or use as shields the police responders trying to locate the shooter(s).

“Tracy, if I show up with a gun in each hand and you’re on the phone with someone you can’t see, who are you going to bet on to get you out of there? … We have to explain to people in a short period of time that our officers are trying to get the bad guy, and they don’t have time to check on them or get them out until the bad guy is down,” said Cline.

This is why our focus for police dispatch is all suspect until the threat is neutralized.

Shooter Down
After the shooter is down or apprehended, dispatch focus will move to the wounded.

It’s at this point in the incident during which holding the perimeter is critical and control at the staging and triage areas is vital to the safety of responders.

“We had pockets of people everywhere,” said Cline. “They were running in and they were running out.” She said it was critical for her dispatch team to compare information as they went and treat each call on its own merits for information. “On dispatch, we tried to sort out the information before we gave it out. That’s our job during an active shooter incident. We stay calm. We lock in on suspect information. We sift through the pieces and give out what they need.”

The following are all considerations for a police dispatcher working an active shooter call:

• The number of shooters and on­going location updates;
• Where to send and position responders for containment and safety;
• Secondary issues, such as snipers, bombs, hostage taking;
• Escaping suspect(s);
• Large groups of people moving in and out of the area and the anticipated effects;
• Safety for responders at triage areas because of the amount of emotion in those areas;
• Evacuations or sheltering-in-place and the special needs of each;
• Traffic;
• Alarms;
• Explosions and fires; and
• The media. Dispatchers will often receive as many calls from the media as they do from the public. One dispatch strategy for small agencies where a dispatcher might serve as the public information officer is to give an update every hour whether there is new information or not in the form of a fax to media outlets.

Calls that police dispatchers can expect to increase in the wake of an active shooter incident include:

• Suicidal persons;
• Suspicious persons;
• Welfare checks;
• Traffic accidents; and
• Suspicious vehicles.

Aftermath
I was asleep in a hotel room when the steady vibration of my cell phone against the hotel nightstand finally woke me. My eyes only half open, I dangled my left hand to the nightstand and pulled the Blackberry screen in front of me. My phone was lit in orange with numerous missed calls and text messages, alerting me to the shooting at UCA. As I began to move through them, a sickness deep in my gut began to crawl.

Nine days later, I was on a flight to meet with and debrief the UCA team, sworn and civilian, on what had happened. We had a class to deliver the next morning to 50-plus dispatchers who wanted fresh answers from UCA’s experience on how to survive such an incident.

“Miss Tracy,” said responding officer Sgt. Ben Majors, “when I close my eyes, I can still see the glimmer of the earring in that baby girl’s ear. I grabbed her, and I ran with her like she was a football.” Majors rescued the eight-month-old baby from the arms of a man who had been shot.

I had heard many recreations of active shooter incidents and listened to countless audio recordings. Somehow though, seeing the emotion in their faces just a week removed impressed on me the responsibility we potentially face every shift we begin as a dispatcher.

That night, I was given a tour of the campus, and my guides brought me to the scene of the shooting where blood stains still scarred the concrete in front of the underclassman dormitory.

I asked dispatch supervisor and training coordinator Hlebinsky what, if anything, had helped them the past few days.

She led me quietly to an office and without saying a word, she handed me a simple condolence card. I opened it and began to read messages from unsung heroes:

“We’re with you.”

“I know they won’t tell you this, but you did a good job because you did your best.”

“Northern Illinois University active shooter dispatchers and telecommunicators from February 2008, oh, how you made the difference for some other heroes at the University of Central Arkansas.”

Every agency with which I have ever worked after an active shooter incident has conveyed the importance of self-care for the dispatchers following the event.

We’re not very good at commending each other and certainly not ourselves for a job well done, but we’re getting better. Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM), along with Critical Incident Stress Debriefings (CISD), is vital for the health of a team that has just handled an active shooter incident. The dispatcher is part of that first responder team and must be included.

CISM allows for the sharing of information about an incident in a safe environment without a critique of what happened.

Understanding the need for compassionate camaraderie, more and more agencies are showing support for the actions and emotional health of other dispatchers.

Conclusion
I chose to use Vail, UCA, Omaha and even Green Bay as examples in this article because active shooter incidents are not limited to larger, populated areas. In the current economic climate and unrest, we must be prepared to experience an active shooter incident anywhere, any time.

We think of active shooter incidents as those we hear about on the national news but truly, dispatchers may find themselves handling such an incident on every traffic stop. All it takes is a disgruntled, armed driver to take off in a chase and then abandon the vehicle and begin firing. That is an active shooter incident, whether someone gets hurt or not. Any time we have someone shooting with unrestricted access to victims, it is an active shooter incident.

Consider doing an active shooter threat assessment for:

• Community events;
• Large gatherings of people;
• Entertainment facilities;
• Sporting facilities;
• Schools/universities;
• Shopping areas;
• Banks/financial institutions;
• Landmarks;
• Churches/synagogues; and
• Businesses with recent layoffs, cutbacks or closings.

About the Author
Tracy Ertl is an adjunct instructor with the APCO Institute and a 17-year veteran dispatcher/trainer with Brown County Public Safety Communications Center in Green Bay, Wis. She has a dispatch blog, www.psychologytoday.com, called “Riding the Alligator—On the front line of law enforcement and life.”

Reference
1. U.S. Secret Service; U.S. Department of Education: The Final Report & Findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States. July 2004. Accessed June 2010: http://www2.ed.gov/admins/lead/safety/preventingattacksreport.pdf.

Originally published in Public Safety Communications magazine, Vol. 76(9):40-45.