[SML] Security: Active shooter

[Stephen Litterst]

On 10/16/16 5:22 PM, Chip Wood via Stagecraft wrote:
> My wife is a Docent at the Phoenix Art Museum and their Security guy
> gave them a briefing yesterday on how to deal w/ an active shooter.  We
> have discussed many security related topics , esp fire, on this list,
> but never this one.  Given today's political climate and incidents in
> crowded places, it seems to be very relevant.  Is this briefing common
> in your training?

It's not mandatory on our campus, but our Public Safety department 
offers it as an outreach program.  The officers will come and do a stock 
presentation coupled with a walk-through of your specific environment.

We asked some pretty targeted questions about our responsibility as 
facility managers and event planners and were told that our 
responsibility is to keep ourselves safe and to let the responding 
officers handle the threat.

A couple of discussion points:

- Houselights on or off?  The answer was any time we spend changing the 
environment to aid/hinder the shooter is time we are exposing ourselves 
to danger.  The responding officers are trained to evaluate the 
situation as it unfolds, so they are not expecting light or darkness.

- The same answer applied to questions about sound.

- Should we, as facility managers, shelter in place to aid responding 
officers, since we know the ins-and-outs of the facility.  NO.  Any aid 
we attempt to give responding officers will be a distraction at best. 
The best way to accomplish this is invite your local PD into your 
facility to allow them to poke around and learn.  Even so, the odds that 
the responding officer in an emergency was there for this training 
session are slim.

- So, what can we do?  Train our audiences.  Make sure the preshow 
announcement points out exits and primes the audience to think ahead 
about how to get out of the facility.

There was an article in the summer 2016 Protocol magazine about this 
topic.  I found it a bit arrogant, but there is still some good 
information in there.

Steve L.
-- 
Stephen Litterst            Technical Operations Supervisor
litterst at udel.edu           Mitchell Hall
302/831-0601                University of Delaware