Page 24 - TPA Journal January - February 2019

assign the roles of Incident Commander, Operations Chief, or Logistics Chief to their in-laws, best
friend, or Chief’s confidants. These roles ruin relationships because of critical incident stress,
meaning any failures will rest with the occupants of these three roles so choose leaders wisely.

The Immediate Evacuation v Sheltering in Place Argument – Is currently among the most heated
ongoing discussions between school administrators and public safety subject matter experts. In
theory, running from the sound of gunshots, explosions, and screaming victims makes perfectly
logical sense and most parents support immediately evacuating their children from dangerous
situations. I support their opinion as well; however, there’s a catch and its one which must be
carefully explained to parents and school officials. Very few domestic terror incidents, such as
school shootings or workplace violence, are random acts, meaning the attackers know their targets
and environment, and do their homework in advance of the attack. They know the school or
business’s evacuation protocols and will exploit them to their advantage, with the goal of getting
potential victims into common areas of buildings being one of their high priorities. Most
emergency managers agree that immediate evacuation ports which lead directly outside a
building should be used and any port which leads potential victims to the common areas inside
a building should be avoided. The goal should be to avoid herding the sheep where the wolves
want them to go. The alternate tactic is sheltering-in-place, meaning locking down a classroom or
office, barricading doors and windows, keeping the room dark and quiet, and working a
survivability plan should the room get breached. Empirical wisdom suggests these attackers won’t
waste time breaching a locked and barricaded door and will move on to more accessible targets.
In short, if a classroom or office can be evacuated through a door or window which leads outside
the building, immediate evacuation is recommended. If the only way out of the room leads to a
common area within the building, lock the room down and shelter in place. Remember, these
tactics require advance planning, practice, and complete cooperation between the community
and its caretakers, and will not occur through the process of Osmosis. Evacuating a room full of
scared victims is the subject of the next paragraph and poses a distinct set of challenges for LEO.

After the Smoke Clears – What Next? We know there are far more classrooms and offices without
immediate ingress and egress routes outside a building than those which lead to common areas
within the building, and assuming the community buys completely into a shelter-in-place strategy,
what do we do next? How do we systematically evacuate a room full of scared and injured people
safely while trying to protect ourselves and crime scene integrity? Could there be both physical
and testimonial evidence within the room and possessed by our victims, and how do we secure
it safely? Is the suspect among our victims and is either he or a victim armed? I believe we all agree
that accessing a formerly locked down room, making a cursory visual inspection of its occupants,
and directing them to “get out of here” isn’t the recommended method of evacuating a crime
scene. Without throwing any LE agency under a bus, this exact scenario occurred in 2018 and the
suspect escaped custody by blending in with victims (he was apprehended five blocks away at a
sandwich shop an hour later). The specific tactics needed to safely evacuate a room under these
circumstances will vary from agency to agency; however, good emergency managers must insure
evacuation, medical triage and stabilization, formal identification processes, transportation to
alternate witness staging areas, comprehensive medical treatment, and repatriation of victims with

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