Plans continued to emphasize single-option lockdown, with location dependency on classrooms for a response. Vague and largely unworkable mentions of reverse evacuations or reverse fire drills back to classrooms for active threats or terrorism inside the building, over facility evacuation, continued to be widely used. The single-option hiding concept became common practice in buildings, though every room was occupied. Shoving people into bathrooms, closets, under desks and into corners became recommended, despite the tragic effects of limiting movement. Being mobile in a crisis equals increasing survivability.
It should have been obvious that contact would lead to mass casualties. Physical security and technology were chosen over training, even though it was well established that the perpetrators scouted the locations, had their own plans to overcome those defenses, were not concerned about armed response even if it was on scene, and selected victims who had been trained and conditioned to be passive.
Many of these plans never even mentioned students, ignoring the fact that in many incidents students were targeted first or were the actual first responders. Using a model that is not intended for what you are using it for can lead to model (concept) failure and collapse of the system. Single-option lockdown concept failure at Sandy Hook led to change in the model in June 2013 from the federal government. These changes in providing options, recommended by some experts in the field more than 10 years earlier, were based on studies of incidents.
Even today, there are some who continue to emphasize the old model. There are several reasons for the failure to adapt models to reality.
One is the inability to adapt to risks outside of the model. Organizations have downplayed risk from these types of incidents, calling them low risk or unlikely. In reality, they are foreseeable events on the level of a large fire, tornado or flood. Ignoring the risk or giving 45 seconds of lockdown training to building occupants does not extinguish the risk.
Scholar and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to these types of incidents as black swans. 9/11 is an example. The Beslan school massacre, where 385 were killed in Russia, and the Garissa College attack in Kenya that killed 147 are also examples. Though we have not seen a terrorist attack on a school in the U.S. on that level, most experts in the field believe it is a matter of time and that we are highly unprepared.
Another issue is that model users become committed to a model, even when results are questionable or it becomes obvious to others that it is headed for trouble. For years, many law enforcement officers have been recommending to their own children not to follow the school lockdown plan for an active threat and to instead evacuate the facility.
While lockdown is a viable secondary response for those who cannot or do not know if they can safely evacuate, there still remain those who are unable to adjust to the model change. They continue to recommend lockdown as a primary response, argue against training students, argue against drills involving all building occupants, and fail to recognize that the threats make every location a tactical training environment. Success for the lockdown model assumes that our buildings will slow the bad guys long enough for a law enforcement response to neutralize the threat.
Several incidents have now shown us this assumption is false. We never have built our structures that way. Threat assessments should continue to attempt to interdict potential offenders, but count on plan failure. To paraphrase Gen. Carl von Clausewitz’s famous quote, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Most of these incidents begin in contact and having more than 90 percent of a building’s occupants trained to sit on the ground, not move and be quiet (training taught in schools and then brought by students into the workplace and universities) is an exploitable tactic and illustrates the limitations of the model.
This commitment leads to model bias. When the lockdown model started being used for active threats, no one questioned or studied the response. It spread across the country and even after the lesson of Columbine (people contacted by the threats had no trained options; 50 percent of building occupants self-evacuated) some blamed the failures on implementation, not concept.
There are some who continue to defend single-option lockdown response as a primary response in education because it was the first concept offered and what was initially recommended. This bias and lack of recognition that the model is prone to failure is dangerous. The researchers state that the widespread use of a uniform model (single-option lockdown in this instance) makes it more likely that everyone will be uniformly wrong when the system collapses.
To law enforcements’ credit, their awareness of concept failure led to nationwide change from a primary SWAT response to small unit tactics for active shooter response. That has even changed to single-officer response. The simple reason is that the law enforcement response was too slow. Notice that the SWAT and small-unit tactics responses were not discarded when model failure occurred. They were simply supplanted as the primary response. This is what has happened with the recommended primary civilian response.
Although it is impossible to train for every foreseeable event, not training everyone for an event that carries the possibility of loss of an entire facility is a huge hole in many models. Saying “we have an all-hazards plan” does not mean you have proper training or a proper model for this event.
The need to examine our response models in a new light is dire. The evolutions of tactical threats, improper infrastructure, social media and lack of options in training for potential victims have made single-option lockdown training obsolete. It is hoped we will not need another black swan in education to make us realize our model is inadequate.
Lt. Joe Hendry of the Kent State Police Department is a certified instructor for law enforcement in solo-engagement tactics, active shooter response, preventing and responding to suicide bombing incidents, and tactical chemical weapons. He is a past member of a multiagency SWAT team and is currently a terrorism liaison officer with the Ohio Department of Homeland Security.
