Taking the Pulse


on time and manpower at best, or a major reputational nightmare at worst. ASAC Hopper agreed it could be a challenge, but stated that delegation was the best way to avoid the worst. “A lesson learned for me was not only needing to trust your people, but your need for good people. To identify in advance who are your crisis management coordinators (CMCs), the people that you will charge with handling subsets of your response. I had a CMC involved in processing the crime scene, one responsible for tracking and assigning leads to the LE partners that turned up wanting to help. I also had a CMC assigned to oversee the intel collection, dissemination and review and one charged with other aspects of the investigation that needed to be treated with more granularity. My two takeaways were know your people, so you know which people for which roles, and trust those people because as much as you would like to be involved in everything and micromanage it, that’s not a realistic goal when you are dealing with a crisis response of this magnitude.” Another major challenge facing any


city that has had a similar attack is what to prepare for next. Local exercises that run the same scenario as the one that just happened are much needed, to show to the public and would be perpetrators that the response will be better in the future. There is also the government funding that pours in to fill requirements that have been identified in the lessons learned, and which then need training. All this adds up to a less balanced training portfolio than might have existed before the attack, and while copycat incidents are always a threat there is no guarantee that the next attack will look like the previous one. How then did the FBI try to ensure that they had a balanced portfolio and didn’t become over specialised? “We keep it balanced, these


schedules are set months and years in advance as they take so many resources to develop. A feel-good story that came out of this tragedy was that two months prior to Pulse the FBI and state and local agencies came together with Orlando regional medical centre for a field training exercise. What was different was that we didn’t focus on the


tactical resolution of the problem. We had a fictitious active shooter at a school and started the scenario with the shooter disabled and the threat resolved. It was designed to test the resolve and interaction between FBI, state and local investigators, the emergency rooms, the doctors, nurses, and hospital staff. We knew that if people were transported from the crisis site they would have to be interviewed as we tried to determine whether there was a second or third shooter, what he said when he was committing this act, etc. “We are interested in what the


witnesses tell us about the event because we may have to be concerned with a secondary attack or a simultaneous attack elsewhere. Agents and LE personnel responded to the hospital and while the surgeons and nurses were conducting triage and working on patients in a role playing mode, we were asking questions as they tried to tend to injuries and other needs. It tested the integration of LE and life preservation resources so we could train it and understand how that stress affects our response. Following Pulse there were 12 surgeons that worked on the patients and were interviewed that night and the overwhelming response was that the field training exercise a couple of months earlier resulted in protocols being put in place at the hospital that ultimately saved lives the night of the Pulse attack.” There has naturally been a great


deal of interest in the response to the Pulse shooting and the lessons that came out of it. As such ASAC Hopper and others have been speaking to many people in LE and beyond about their experiences. This tends to be a mutual learning experience. The listeners obviously get an idea of how to adapt their forces to deal with that kind of situation, while it’s also an opportunity for Orlando to understand what elements of their response are considered ‘special’ and allows them to focus on that. ASAC Hopper stated that it was the close ties between forces that interested most agencies, that trust is invaluable in situations like this. One of the things that I tout in these


presentations to LE, is that “the CP in a crisis situation is no place to be handing out your business card.” If you don’t have that rapport and trust built so that you are sitting at the table making decisions with the key individuals, then you are behind the eight ball. One of the things I push is that if those relationship aren’t in place with states and local then immediate action is needed for any state, local or federal agency. Up until the Vegas incident this was the worst mass shooting in the US, but the things that we saw in Pulse have been encountered on smaller scale on multiple occasions over the years. The FBI works with local LE to help understand those things. One such problem is that of multiple LE wanting to help, but lacking the guidance to ensure they are not in the way and are, instead, adding value. We speak about how to manage those resources, how to best utilise them and make them efficient and effective. “There also needs to be an


interpersonal approach to resolving things in a collaborative manner, instead of one agency taking the lead. There was a time when it was taboo for multiple SWAT teams to train together as you only train with your team and that is who you respond with… well, gone are those days. With active shooter situations two or three people can show up from different agencies and they are expected to, and will, move directly to the threat; interagency training will make these responses safer and more effective. The thing to remember is that 75% of the time these active shooter situations are resolved in five minutes or less, over 50% of them are resolved in two minutes or less. The response time of LE isn’t typically what resolves these issues, it is usually someone on scene, an off duty LE officer or the shooter taking their own life. The public needs to understand that when you are faced with this situation “Run if you can, hide if you can’t, fight if you must. You may have to go right to FIGHT.” That training has been going on, it was already happening in central Florida, but FBI, state and local are working to push that training out.”


CBRNe Convergence, Orlando, USA, 6-8 November 2018 www.cbrneworld.com/convergence2018 46 CBRNe WORLD February 2018 www.cbrneworld.com


CBRNeWORLD


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