Addressing Human Intuition Can Improve Workplace Safety Ahead of Active Shooter Situations

Testing the plans that you've got on paper to make sure what you have on paper will actually work. And so if you never test your emergency operations plan or you never test Directive shooter specific plan, you don't know if it's gonna fail at the the wrong moment. And so testing and training is essential. So my presentation was on how to best mitigate and prepare for an active shooter event if it ever happened at your facility, whether it's a school, hospital business factor, whatever your setting is, it's to how best prepare for it in case the unthinkable habits. So it all starts with the mitigation side, and that includes the formation of behavioral behavioral intervention teams or threat assessment teams as they're known. We want to prevent a shooting situation from happening before it ever even comes to fruition. And those are the best ways you can do, for your particular business or setting as to try to get people on your radar who you think may cause potential problems. Every time there's a mass shooting that happens and you see it on the media, someone is interviewed and they say, I knew it was gonna be that person. We wanna prevent that person from ever happening. And so we try to put people on the radar and just keep touch with them, touch base with them and make sure everything's going okay so that we can head off potential problems and get them to help them they might need. Another thing, of course, is making sure your physical security is appropriate for the business that you're trying to protect, it starts outside in. It's perimeter lighting and fencing and things like that. It's access control. It's video surveillance. It's visitor badging and things like that. So Making sure your physical security program is up to par to help prevent even the intrusion of an active shooter to your facility. The next thing is the training of your security team. If you have one, especially if they're armed, we need to make sure that training is dynamic specific to your environment, training your own buildings, make sure that your security people know the buildings more thoroughly than anyone else your facility. Make sure you have interoperability with law enforcement personnel as well, invite them to your facilities, help them train with your security personnel let them utilize your spaces for some of their training too. So they know your facilities, at least in a more than superficial way. We also wanna train all of your stakeholders within the business. No matter what type of business you have, is we wanna make sure anyone who is threatened by an active shooter or active assailant event knows what to do. There are lots of different programs out there, but they basically come down to the same things. You either try to run away from it hide away from it or fight if you need to. And so you make sure that your constituents know what they should do. You get that training to them as often as you hands, so that they're prepared because no new thinking comes under stress. And so you wanna make sure that they they train and are prepared as best they can. Assay, it's communicating to your people how and who initiates a a lockdown or lets people know that there's an active shooter there. How do your own responders communicate each other how they communicate with law enforcement. And so all the communication pieces are essential too to make sure that you're as prepared as you can be at your business. A final, piece to that as well is testing the plans that you've got on paper to make sure what you have on paper will actually work And so if you never test your emergency operations plan or you never test your active shooter specific plan, you don't know if it's gonna fail at the the wrong moment So testing and training is essential. I always tell everybody, though, you never ever do an announced drill or scenario or exercise ever, especially when it comes to active shooting. The last thing you want is to have a surprise. There have been bad things happen. People actually injured different things. And that's not the learning environment where they get a positive experience and understand what they need to do that puts more trepidation in them it actually has the opposite effect. So make sure that you're planning accordingly. And when you do practice, make sure everybody knows in advance that it's gonna happen. And so those are my major takeaways today. I I think that all institutions have good intentions when it comes to accuracy or even really any emergency situation preparedness. They do. And so they'll put some resources in initially. To putting a plan on paper. It would skid everybody, everybody signs off on it. And then the plan goes on the shelf and sits and collects dust. And so any, emergence plan, especially that shooter side of things. It needs to be a living, breathing document. It needs to be reevaluated on a constant basis to make sure what's in the plan actually reflects the practices that are out there right now for the business itself. Sometimes we see they don't even have the same people listed anymore. They've been gone for ten or fifteen years because the is just sat there. And so that's the thing. If you're going to plan, planning is crucial, but make sure that plan's a living document and you actually train to the most current version Yep.