If only you can get it past the chiefs and HR.Originally Posted by Lon
If only you can get it past the chiefs and HR.
"Gunfighting is a thinking man's game. So we might want to bring thinking back into it."-MDFA
Beware of my temper, and the dog that I've found...
Fair points, thanks.
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In the wake of all this, here's a local incident that points out some of the problems we have in prevention.
You will note that relatives had contacted the authorities and were told 'without evidence we can do nothing....' In this case I'm not sure if some of the problem might have been that the department is relatively young, with most of the veteran officers who could bailing shortly after a new chief was hired. It may very well be that an in-experienced officer or supervisor didn't understand everything they COULD do.
I've posted the article because I'm not sure it is available online unless you subscribe to the news.
Hutchinson resident accused of planning violent attack on co-workers at Dillons
Olivia Perkins
Hutchinson News USA TODAY NETWORK
Judy Murray watched from down the street on Wednesday as her grandson Andrew Patterson left his residence.
She quickly called her daughter, Patricia Woods.
Woods passed that information, as well as where Patterson was driving, along to Hutchinson Police Department authorities, who stopped and searched his car.
There, police say they found “detailed plans to carry out an act of mass violence.” Later that day, police utilized a search warrant at Patterson’s residence, where offiŹcers said they found additional evidence related to a planned attack.
For months, family members had worried about the 24-year-old Hutchison resident’s mental health.
“He was a loner and didn’t know how to ask for help,” Murray said.
Family members said they reached out to authorities and mental health organizations as Patterson spiraled. Little could be done, however.
Murray and Woods knew they couldn’t sit idly by, especially once they became convinced others could be in danger. They acted.
Andrew Patterson’s writings included violent thoughts, self-harm
Murray and Woods, who is Patterson’s aunt, heard Patterson speak about his mental state, intrusive thoughts and anger toward his peers. His thoughts, they said, included acts of violence, aggression and self-harm. Murray spoke with her grandson often but saw what she called “his eventual spiral into aggressive ideas and despair” as she desperately tried to help him.
“He was just sinking, sinking deeper into this giant hole,” Murray said. “He started writing it in a notebook — these intrusive thoughts — because he told me when he writes it down, it makes him feel better.”
Patterson wrote thoughts of committing a crime to initiate a police response, Murray said. Eventually, he wrote about planning and perpetrating a mass shooting at his workplace — the Dillons Distribution Center on Fourth Avenue in Hutchinson.
Murray said she contacted the Hutchinson Police Department but said officers told her they couldn’t take action without evidence. Murray and Woods said they talked to law enforcement a few times.
The Hutchinson Police Department declined comment on the family’s claims.
Family turned to authorities in hopes of preventing tragedy
Murray said she then turned to local organizations for help.
“These thoughts would come back, so my daughter (Patterson’s mother) and I talked him into checking himself in at the (Hutchinson Regional Medical Center) and trying to get help from them,” Murray said. “He was there for about a week, and they gave him multiple diagnoses and medications, but none of it seemed to make any kind of dent.”
Murray said Patterson, with the help of his family, then turned to Horizons Mental Health Center. The organization had long waiting lists for patient care, but Patterson needed immediate help.
Horizons director of training and education Beth Akins said the wait time for ongoing patient care averages about six to eight weeks because of a staff shortage and an expansion of programs offered.
“There is no setup designated system to help someone who’s in the condition that my grandson is in,” Murray said.
Akins said Horizons recently added adult crisis and mobile crisis units to its roster of services after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services designated Horizons as a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic.
Violent writings and suicidal thoughts increased, family says
Murray said Patterson worked in The Hutchinson News mailroom until March when he was hired at Dillons Distribution Center. Murray and Woods said Patterson enjoyed his job as a security guard at the distribution center first and wanted to protect people.
Eventually, Murray said, the distribution center hired a family member with whom Patterson had a tumultuous relationship. He had asked the hiring staff to deny the application.
Patterson’s thoughts in his journal about violence and suicide worsened after the hire, Murray said.
Patterson doesn’t own a firearm but began looking online to purchase one, she said, leading the women to contact authorities with information about the journal.
Murray and Woods said they wanted to help Patterson and prevent the harm or death of others. They said they agreed to help the police in his arrest.
Suspect’s family advocates for plan for people struggling with mental health
“I believe what needs to be done is there needs to be a plan of action for people who are in the same situation where there’s a place you can go and make these reports,” Murray said. “They will do what needs to be done to keep Dade (Andrew) safe and anyone that he might potentially harm safe.”
Hutchinson Police Department officers arrested 24-year-old Patterson at at 1:51 p.m. Wednesday on the 200 block of East Carpenter Street. The arrest was based on his journal, the planned attack against Dillons warehouse employees and other acts of violence detailed in the notebook, the department said in a news release.
Reno County District Attorney Tom Stanton told The Hutchinson News he could expect to file charges by week’s end.
“Prison is not where he needs to be,” Woods said. “He needs to be in a mental hospital getting help to feel safe in his own head. Prison is not going to solve the problem. It’s only going to make families not want to come forward when something’s wrong.”
Murray and Woods said they wanted to help Patterson with his mental condition, but now they worry other families in similar situations might not reach out to authorities.
Through tears, Murray contemplated the systems in place that could have helped her grandson.
“When you love someone unconditionally and know that they need help, where do you go? What do you do?” Murray asked. “He needs help. He doesn’t need to be taunted and made fun of — I wanted to save him.”
Help available for people having a mental health emergency
Gov. Laura Kelly on Thursday signed Senate Bill 19, bipartisan legislation that created a suicide and mental health hotline for Kansas residents. As a result, Kansans will soon be able to call 9-8-8 to receive support during a mental health emergency.
Adding nothing to the conversation since 2015....
So, here again, we miss the mark. Things are set up so you have be in a mental health crisis to get help. That's like your GP saying you have to wait for a heart attack before you can be treated for high blood pressure.
And here we get to the core of the whole active shooter problem. A large percentage of these folks have serious, chronic MH issues. As someone who has some access and funding to pull some of the "strongest" levers in the MH field - I can tell you that those levers, even in my best case scenario, are woefully inadequate. As best, someone in crisis will be housed for a few (3 - 5 in severe cases) days, have some meds thrown at them, and then be discharged. We are putting band-aids on sucking chest wounds, as the saying goes. Then they are largely left to their own devices. Absent some switched on and involved family members with resources, we are mostly just kicking cans down the road.
Until we start funding and administering MH resources the way we do all other medical concerns, this problem is not going away - weapons ban or not. Problem is, most of the folks most in need exist on the periphery of society (homeless, etc.) and simply suffer in silence - until they don't. So far they have been easy to ignore and cast aside.
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
No one is coming. It is up to us.
Comms are a circus when any large event breaks out. These agencies possibly all worked on different freqs, maybe on completely incompatible radio systems (VHF vs UHF vs 800, etc.) Do they share one regional dispatch center, or does each agency run their own dispatch? Can dispatch patch channels to each other and if so, does dispatch do it often enough to remember how in a crisis?
If separate centers, do they have a direct dedicated phone line to talk center to center? Our dispatchers had to make a standard phone call to the other area centers and this failed when big calls broke out. They finally installed a direct line bat phone.
Is there a standard mutual aid radio channel pre-designated, and do the beat cops know where it is on their radio?
If everyone is on the same channel, you get nothing done because the radio becomes white noise and you can't get in with critical traffic.
If you split channels by function, somebody misses the word because they're on the wrong channel.
If the 911 center gets overwhelmed, is there an automatic ring-down system that routes unanswered calls to another center? This can cause critical calls to route to another city or county because the local 911 lines are all used up.
You have to have an established (and drilled!) plan for splitting command and tactical traffic.
Having an RTO or equivalent is a two edged sword. It keeps the IC from getting overwhelmed by traffic. But it also introduces yet another middleman into the already intense information flow. The RTO or Aid has to be very familiar with what the IC does or doesn't need to know; otherwise they filter out important stuff by not knowing its important. Many fire departments who assign drivers or aides to operational battalion chiefs use senior captains for the driver/aid position, not some junior dude who just knows how to drive.
Confronting the shooter has to take absolute priority but you have to get someone from each agency within talking distance of each other asap. Share your intel face to face and make sure it gets passed to the troops inside.
And by the way, who's answering and dispatching the other 911 calls that have nothing to do with the shooter? Grampa still has his heart attack, little Johnny still has to get resuscitated after falling in the pool, and Florida Man is still, well, you know.
None of this is new to the p-f members who work emergency service. I'm just providing a bit of context for those who haven't had to deal with it professionally.
No problems with that at my agency. HR doesn’t interfere w our process, it’s up to the Chief. And our Chief wouldn’t have an issue with that at all.
Formerly known as xpd54.
The opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not reflect the opinions or policies of my employer.
www.gunsnobbery.wordpress.com
Good post, and I wanted to leverage it to mention something, since "ICS" keeps coming up. I'm not qualified to comment on most of the recent thread, but I did want to mention, for those not aware of what ICS is:
I got interested as a private citizen, how I might serve the community more in terms of Emergency Management. Part of that interest got me trained as a CERT volunteer, the training of which mentioned several free FEMA online classes.
As a result, I recently completed:
FEMA ICS 100C Introduction to Incident Command System
FEMA IS200C Basic Incident Command System for Initial Response
FEMA IS700B Introduction to the National Incident Management System
FEMA IS800D The National Response Framework, An Introduction
I'm not trying to be an A-hole by mentioning this, I just wanted to highlight the opportunity for anyone to get more familiar with ICS from these free courses, can do so. I would say it took 2-3 hours per course, but I found it very informative and worthwhile.
These are all available at the FEMA web site.
My only hope for this situation is that as information and facts evolve and are disseminated our initial understanding shifts and hopefully the facts that have been presented can absolve some of these officers
I am as frustrated as others about the outcome and try to check myself
If facts change I will acknowledge any inaccuracies in my own admonishment and assessment
We need the truth
What he said. In my first active shooter class (about 2001, and blatantly stolen from LASD) we were taught to follow "dynamic intelligence"- shell casings, screaming, running people, bodies, blood trails, sounds of gunfire etc. to try to locate the shooter. When I went to ALERRT instructor in 2015 we were taught to use that info to throttle our tactics from deliberate search to running and gunning. We were taught to notice things like wounded people and IEDs, and continue past to neutralize the threat. NOTHING else can be done until the threat is gone. THEN we can treat wounded, evacuate them to care, deal with IEDs.
I can't remember if it was '99 or 2000, my agency hosted a "SWAT Roundup". I wasn't on the team, but like for the Canine unit I volunteered for everything possible. In exchange for flipping burgers at lunch, I got to sit in on a Jefferson County SWAT sergeant's 4 hour presentation on Columbine. Some things that I have kept tucked away in my little brain:
-Once the cops made entry comms was down the drain. Fire alarms were the main culprit. Big mo-honkin NFPA approved school fire alarms. If you have never searched a building with one going off, you haven't lived. Pucker factor goes way up because they can be physically painful when you are under one. You can't hear what is going on 10 feet away from you. Radio comms are sketchy at best with good earpieces, which normally are designed to let ambient sounds through.When I trained with another agency's SWAT team in active shooter tactics the instructors got on me because when I was on point or one of the flanks I would turn my head to yell information "I can hear you when you don"t turn your head" was one of their biggest beefs, as I had to drop my AOR for a second to do it. I have searched buildings for felons with active industrial fire alarms. It sucks even without helmets and masks. One of the reasons my Sordins are hanging off my long gun in the rack. As a side note, cell towers and comm centers quickly become ovewhelmed in these situations, and the info you get is already out of date by the time you get it normally. Dispatch info can be good if your suspect has gone silent. When I teach civiallian response to active shooters to schools and churches, I teach people that calling the cops is LAST on the list PERIOD. You can only do it after you clear the area, barricade and shelter in place, or nutralize the the threat. People who are not in any immediate danger will be calling, tying up the cell towers and call takers in dispatch, but getting the hunters rolling.
-Breaching tools available to all. Should be self explanitory. Manual breaching first, everything else is nice rather than necessary. I teach ballistic breaching as well, and metal doors in metal frames require specific techniques to avoid jamming the door shut and needing to manually breach anyway. Slugs, buck, or specialty rounds I care not. The goal is to open the door with the least danger to innocents inside, not jam it closed until you can get the halligan. As I said before, your breach has to be sure and fast, and allow you to commit to the room.
-Water. I carry a 24oz bottle of water in my go bag. Running around in a plate carrier, alert, hunting, carrying your rifle, breaching tools, TECC stuff and everything else sucks. This likely will be the longest, most stressful, hardest day of a cop's career, not unlike what the .mil guys do. We just practice for it less, because we have DWIs to arrest, protection orders to serve, and stolen garden hose reports to take. And most of us ain't young any more. I don't want to become an unnecessary, preventable casualty. I have given water to guys (and consumed it myself) immediately after foot pursuits and knock down drag out fights and it is amazing how much a couple of mouthfuls of lukewarm water centers, focuses and relieves you when you are sucking wind and your pulse is in the high Red Zone.
-Water. Modern fire alarm systems rely on optical sensors to trigger fire alarms when they detect smoke. Gunfire produces smoke. So do smoke devices, IEDs, and fires. The SWAT guys at Columbine were soaked from the sprinkler system until it could be shut off and cleared the basement of the school building in six inches of water.
-Fire Alarms, yet again. The Jeffco SWAT sergeant spoke of the stress of doing a slow and deliberate search for shooters, opening doors to small rooms and finding strobe lights going off inside, and having to realize it is a strobe and not a muzzle flash.
I had a local emergency manager approach me about setting up an active shooter drill for the state's only medical school. He wanted to set up MASH tents and have the med students doing triage, etc around one of the college's buildings. I told him that he just needed to set up a standard Mass Casualty Incident with the approprate injuries and call it an active shooter event. He kept using words like interdiscilinary, multi-agency response, stress innoculation. After all, the Emergency Medical Residents and some of the Paramedic students have the opportunity of a take a Tactical Medicine semester, and play with the Sheriff's Department SWAT team on field trips! They get plate carriers and helmets and get to shoot guns and rappel. I reminded him that they were students, and have no business in the Hot Zone of the incident, let alone the Kill Zone, and by the college's own policy and annual active shooter training would be expected to Run, Hide, Fight. I told him that in the event of an active shooter every on duty available cop in the metro area would be flying into the area with the first handfull going in after the shooter(s), and the rest setting up perimeters and staging areas. His wounded would be brought to him, he wasn't going in to get them. He continued to argue until I provided him case law where nurses and teachers succesfully sued over the stress and emotional pain that "too realistic" training provided. The courts have held that they don't need modern, realistic training in active shooter response like we do, because their response is not ours. That kept the SRT (Student Response Team) training from ever happening.
pat
Last edited by UNM1136; 06-03-2022 at 09:48 PM.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/u...smid=url-share
No Radio, Old Tactics: How the Police Response in Uvalde Broke Down
The commander at the scene arrived without a police radio, and decided in the first minutes on an approach that would delay a confrontation.
UVALDE, Texas — Two minutes after a gunman burst through an unlocked door at Robb Elementary School and began shooting inside a pair of connected classrooms, Pete Arredondo arrived outside, one of the first police officers to reach the scene.
The gunman could still be heard firing repeatedly, and Chief Arredondo, as leader of the small school district police force in Uvalde, took charge.
But there were problems from the start.
Chief Arredondo did not have a police radio with him, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, which may have impeded his immediate ability to communicate with police dispatchers. As two supervisors from the local police department were grazed by bullets fired by the gunman, he made a decision to fall back, the official said.
Using a cellphone, the chief called a police landline with a message that set the stage for what would prove to be a disastrous delay in interrupting the attack: The gunman has an AR-15, he told them, but he is contained; we need more firepower and we need the building surrounded.
A New York Times examination of the police response, based on dozens of interviews with law enforcement officials, children who survived, parents who were witnesses outside and experts on policing, found that breakdowns in communication and tactical decisions that were out of step with years of police preparations for school shootings may have contributed to additional deaths, and certainly delayed critical medical attention to the wounded.
A tactical team led by Border Patrol officers ultimately ignored orders not to breach the classroom, interviews revealed, after a 10-year-old girl inside the classroom warned 911 dispatchers that one of the two teachers in the room was in urgent need of medical attention.
The report that the incident commander at least initially had no police radio emerges as the latest important detail in what has been a shifting official account of the police response that has at times proved to be inaccurate on key points about the May 24 shooting.
Officers who arrived at the scene, coming from at least 14 agencies, did not go into the classrooms as sporadic gunfire could be heard inside, nor after 911 calls began arriving from children inside.
“There is a lot of bodies,” a 10-year-old student, Khloie Torres, quietly told a 911 dispatcher at 12:10 p.m. — 37 minutes after the gunman began shooting inside the classrooms — according to a review of a transcript of the call. “I don’t want to die, my teacher is dead, my teacher is dead, please send help, send help for my teacher, she is shot but still alive.”
She stayed on the line for about 17 minutes. Around 11 minutes into the call, the sound of gunfire could be heard.
The officers who finally breached the locked classrooms with a janitor’s key were not a formal tactical unit, according to a person briefed on the response. The officers, including specially trained Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and a sheriff’s deputy, formed an ad hoc group on their own and gathered in the hallway outside the classroom, a tense space where they said there appeared to be no chain of command.
They were done waiting for permission, one of them said, according to the person, before they moved toward the classroom where the gunman waited. They continued even after one of them heard a command crackling in his earpiece: Do not breach.
They entered the room and killed the gunman.
The actions by Chief Arredondo and the array of officers he suddenly directed — which grew to number more than 140, from local, state and federal agencies, including state troopers, sheriff’s deputies, constables and game wardens — are now the subject of overlapping investigations by the Texas Rangers, the Justice Department and the local district attorney’s office.
Adam Pennington, an 8-year-old student, was in the front office when the school received what appeared to be the first alert. “A phone call came in and said a man jumped the fence holding a gun,” said Adam, who said he hurried to shelter under a table.
An employee on the campus used a cellphone to open a district security app, selecting a red “lockdown” button and a second button warning that there was an active shooter, according to David Rogers, the chief marketing officer for Raptor Technologies, the company that provides the security app.
That warning tool was part of an extensive effort to enhance security in the Uvalde school district, which also included two-way radios for “key staff,” two new school district police officers and requirements that all classroom doors remain locked.
But Chief Arredondo had no police radio when he arrived, according to the latest information gathered in the investigation, and the door to the classroom where most of the killing occurred, Room 112, was unlocked when the gunman arrived.The lockdown alert was sent at 26 seconds past 11:32 a.m., about two minutes after the initial 911 call from outside the school. It triggered an immediate mass distribution of emails, text messages and notifications that included blaring alarms sent to the cellphones of other school employees, Mr. Rogers said.
Less than a minute later, the gunman was already inside the school.
Khloie Torres had been watching a movie with her fourth-grade classmates in Room 112 when her teacher, Irma Garcia, told the class to go into lockdown. Ms. Garcia turned off the movie, and then rushed toward the classroom door to lock it. But she struggled to find the right key for the door. Gunfire could be heard in the hallways.
Ms. Garcia finally got hold of the right key, but the gunman was already there. “He grabbed the door, and he opened it,” Khloie said. Ms. Garcia tried to protect her students. The gunman began firing.
Khloie hid under a table, listening to more gunshots. “You’ll die,” the gunman said to the room.
He shot one of Khloie’s best friends, Amerie Jo Garza, and the other teacher in the class, Eva Mireles. Then the gunman said “Good night,” Khloie said, and began firing at students across the classroom.
One child shouted, “I’m shot,” catching the attention of the gunman. He came back to the spot where the child was lying and shot the student again, killing him, Khloie said.
Chief Arredondo arrived at 11:35 a.m., as the first officers began moving into the hallway outside the classroom door. Two minutes later, a lieutenant and a sergeant from the Uvalde Police Department approached the door, and were grazed by bullets.
Shortly after that, Chief Arredondo placed a phone call from the scene, reaching a police department landline. He described the situation and requested a radio, a rifle and a contingent of heavily armed officers, according to the law enforcement official familiar with the initial response, who described it on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to publicly disclose the details.Inside, the gunman moved between the two adjoining classrooms. After he left her room, Khloie said, she called out quietly: “Is anybody OK? Is anybody hurt?”
“Yeah,” one classmate replied.
“Just be quiet, so he doesn’t come back in here,” Khloie remembered responding. Another child asked for help getting Ms. Garcia’s body off her.
A boy in her class, Khloie said, was worried that the gunman would find them. “He won’t find us,” she told him.
Shortly after noon, nearly half an hour after the first police officers had arrived, Khloie began dialing 911. She said she called over and over again.
By then, the first tactical teams had arrived, along with officers carrying long guns. Scores of other officers were outside the school, keeping frantic parents away and starting to remove children from other classrooms, pulling some through windows. In video taken outside the school, Border Patrol agents could be seen donning specialized equipment at around 12:15 p.m.
Six minutes later, several shots were heard, the sound coming from inside the classroom.In the hallway outside the classrooms, a throng of heavily armed law enforcement officers anxiously awaited instructions. But frustrations were growing, particularly among members of a Border Patrol tactical unit, according to the person who was briefed on the team’s response.
“No one entity or individual seemed to have control of the scene,” the person said. “It was chaos.”
The sense of frustration among tactical team members was corroborated by two officials familiar with their debriefing.
After more than an hour, the ad hoc group of officers who had arrived ready to attack the gunman was growing impatient, and decided to move in.
One of the members — equipped with an earpiece and small microphone — quietly announced over the radio that the group was preparing to go into the classrooms. At that point a voice responded, telling them not to breach the doors.
They ignored the directive.
As the agents entered, the gunman appeared to be ready for them, the person said. He fired. They fired back, with at least one bullet striking him in the head. A bullet fragment also grazed the head of one of the Border Patrol agents.
As soon as the agents announced over the radio that the gunman had been killed, attention turned to treating the wounded. The agents helped set up a triage system, as more officers and emergency medical workers descended on the classrooms, trying to stabilize the children who had been shot but were still alive. At one point during the siege, one of the two children who called 911 had reported that at least eight or nine of the children in the two classrooms were still alive.
Last edited by HCM; 06-03-2022 at 11:25 PM.
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