New National Standard Unifies Active Shooter/Hostile Event Response Plans

Las Vegas.  Orlando.  New York.  Boston.  Sandy Hook.  These are all names that need little description to many of us when it comes to recalling an “active shooter” or “hostile event” incident – where one person, or a group of people, decided that it was time to kill and maim as many innocent people as possible.  But what about FreightCar America, Memorial Tire and Auto, or the Melbourne Square Mall?  Those were also places that had this type of incident occur within the last three years, but because of limited national airtime, might be incidents that you’ve never even heard about.  There, too, people died, and lives were changed forever – and the reality is that an incident can just as easily happen in your service area, no matter where you are. All of us in public safety serve the same ultimate goal: the preservation of life, liberty, and property – in various orders of priority depending upon which uniform we wear and the circumstances of the call we’re on.  But for many years, despite these types of events occurring, most of our response planning for them took place primarily on a local or regional level, and with only the standard level of cooperation: namely, that each agency type came together and performed their individual roles independent of each other, with “handoff” of one to the other at appropriate points in the evolution of an incident.  The reality, however, is that the fluid nature of th...
Source: JEMS Operations - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Major Incidents Operations Source Type: news