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Street Survival Insights with Dave Smith |
Black Swans and Active Shooters
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Gunman opens fire in Tenn. church, 2 killed 3 shot at Ariz. commuity college, 2 critical P1 Exclusive: Arming campus cops is elementary P1 Exclusive: Taking the shot for public safety 
Special section: Active shooters
In light of last week's "active shooter" situation in a Tennessee church, we search for an answer to this terrible event. The old saw about “our jobs are secure since the bad guys aren’t going away” (and its many variations) rings true but hollow as an answer to innocents being gunned down in a church.
Since we have so far been spared of any more massive suicide bombings or other 9/11-type attacks, the public is more likely to be distracted by concerns about the mythical beast called “gun violence” than the truly critical issues we face today. Evil and violence come in many forms, and the day to day slaughter in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and LA are relatively easy to ignore since they are rooted in social hot potatoes such as gang violence and a criminal underclass. No one wishes to touch those – and besides, the dead are usually of the same violent subculture, making it easy to simplify the issue around the inanimate but symbolic “gun.”
A school, church, or mall shooting is just as random and violent an act as a gang shooting but the public will relate to the former. In the voter’s mind, these become a greater crisis to resolve and therefore a greater priority in the list of essential first responder issues. The problem with all these random events is they trick us by appearing very predictable (in retrospect) and to many folks, “predictability” implies “preventability.”
No one expects law enforcement to prevent crime in the “Tom Cruise ‘Minority Report’ science fiction prophecy sense,” but in a truly scientific method, using mathematical and psychological advancements plugged into a computer model. Unfortunately, this too, is science fiction fantasy as described in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, where a mathematician named Hari Seldon invents the Science of Psychohistory that predicts the ebb and flow of humanity’s future. I mention this for those who think we should be able to predict as micro an event as an active shooter or terrorist action, since even in the science fiction genre only general planet-wide events could be predicted!
While even science fiction writers don’t pretend to have a formula capable of predicting an exact and singular event, even one as terrible as an active shooter, we can say with some relative certainty that a gang banger in Chicago will shoot another gang banger within the next 24 hours; we just don’t know what corner at which we should stand to observe it. And we haven’t got a clue where the next church or school or mall or even police department shooting will occur! Honestly, any one person being involved in the next active shooter incident or (even one in the future) is highly improbable.
Aristotle has explained something as being so unlikely it would be like “finding a black swan” and in the Western mind the black swan stood as a symbol of highly improbable events until the first explorers from Europe landed in Australia.
Voila’, Black Swans!
In his excellent book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Taleb explains how dramatic, unpredictable events shape our lives and confuse our conscious mind. The Texas Tower shooting, The Howard Johnson Shooting and the SLA shootout lead to the rapid development of tactical teams, command posts, and encouraging first responders to wait for the experts. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois, Trolley Square Mall, and the Amish School shootings all shake that paradigm of response by forcing a sense of expeditious and effective action by our first responders following more of a small unit combat model; such as described in the Marine Corps Warfighting doctrine. It would be foolish to think the active shooter model of response eliminates the need for what is now a classic tactical situation with a tactical team and centralized command. The problem is the fact that the fog of battle will prevent a clear delineation of which is which!
For you, the first responder, almost everything in this article so far has dealt with things from a fairly abstract and theoretical point of view – these are problems for administrators, politicians, sociologists, and psychologists to solve. Essentially they are just noise. The real problem of the active shooter (and critical incidents in general) is that they involve real human beings involved in a real crisis and one of those humans may be you!
PoliceOne and the Calibre Press Newsline have had many great articles on active shooters and tactical incidents, and it is essential the average patrol officer, deputy, and trooper have a tactical awareness of how to deal with an active shooter or, alternately, creating an inner perimeter of a critical incident. The issue you face as a first responder is simply surviving an assault before you recognize a SWAT problem from an active shooter response! This makes it incumbent upon YOU to prepare yourself for that split-second, high-risk decision to act as an assault team member or start an inner perimeter, maybe even just taking cover until more units arrive!
One of Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan approaches in dealing with investment Black Swans is to bet on the extremes to balance the risk. You need to do the same in your choice of preparation for rare but deadly “Black Swans.” This is why “go bags” and patrol rifles and practicing small team movement are the ways in which you “hedge your bets” against the set of black swans faced by law enforcement. One of my great fears is that you may be overwhelmed by all the noise surrounding the active shooter issue and just skip the many articles and interviews that contain true information relevant to you!
I concede that active shooters are rare events and the odds are you probably won’t handle one, but preparing for them sets you up for whatever rare and terrible event you will face someday…maybe today. Remember, somewhere is a gangbanger, criminal, or EDP who is perfectly willing to kill you. You have no idea what the next call will bring or even what the vehicle ahead not reacting to your lights and siren will do, so you do what Taleb says, you bet on the possible rare, terrible event and get ready…just remember what you are using as your ante’…your life!
As a police officer, Dave Smith has held positions in patrol, training, narcotics, SWAT, and management. Dave continues to develop new and innovative programs across the spectrum of police training needs designed to assist your agency and your personnel in meeting the challenges of policing in the new millennium. As a trainer, speaker, and consultant Dave brings with him unparalleled access to modern law enforcement trends. He is currently the senior Street Survival Seminar Instructor and Director of Video Training for PoliceOneTV.
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