EM Forum
Presentation — November 12, 2012
Mass Shootings
Attacker Types and Threat Assessment
August
Vernon
Instructor and Author
Operations Officer, Office of Emergency Management
Forsyth County, North Carolina
Amy Sebring
EIIP Moderator
This transcript contains references to slides which can be
downloaded from http://www.emforum.org/vforum/FirstResponder/MassShootings2.pdf
A video recording of
the live session is available at http://www.emforum.org/pub/eiip/lm121112.wmv
An audio podcast is
available at http://www.emforum.org/pub/eiip/lm121112.mp3
[Welcome /
Introduction]
Amy Sebring: Good morning/afternoon everyone and welcome to EMForum.org. I am Amy
Sebring and will serve as your moderator and host today. We are very glad you could join us.
We are revisiting the topic of Mass Shootings today as unfortunately
these tragic events continue to occur.
Our previous program is linked from today’s background page if you would
like to review that one also. Also,
there is a link to “Handouts” [http://www.emforum.org/vforum/FirstResponder/MassShootings2resources.pdf]
which is a nice collection of one page resources provided by today’s guest.
Today’s recording and a copy of the
slides will be available from our site later this afternoon. A transcript will be available later this
week.
[Slide 1]
Now it is my pleasure to introduce
today’s speaker. August Vernon is
currently the Operations Officer for the Forsyth County Office of Emergency
Management (NC). August has been employed in Emergency Management for twelve
years and previously served with fire services and as a fire service
instructor.
August has given over 160 multi-agency
presentations at classroom sessions, field training events, conferences,
workshops, and seminars and teaches courses in Incident Management, Mass
Violence/Mass Shootings, Emergency & Crisis Management and Terrorism
Planning-Response. Please see today’s Background Page for further biographical
details and additional related links.
Welcome back August, and thank you very
much for taking the time to be with us again today. I now turn the floor over
to you to start us off please.
[Presentation]
[Slide 2]
August Vernon: Thank you very
much, Amy. Good afternoon to everyone or
good morning, depending on where you are in the country. We have a lot of information to cover here so
I’ll get started into this pretty quickly.
First of all we need to say that our thoughts and prayers are with those
that were involved with Hurricane Sandy and to our responders who were involved
with Hurricane Sandy.
Of course with Veteran’s Day we need to
give our thoughts and prayers to our veterans and all those that served in the
military. I especially need to give a
shout out to all those who served in the U.S. Army.
[Slide 3]
We’ll
go ahead and get started and again I’ll hang around for questions even if we go
beyond the one hour mark because there are always concerns and questions about
some of these topics. I’ve done this
training before and I get a lot of information about real world issues that
individuals and agencies are dealing with.
I try to help with those if I can.
We’ll
get started on the topic. First of all
this is a little reminder—these mass shooting incidents are typically over in
four to eight minutes. That is how much
time you have. There is what I call
initial response and secondary response.
The secondary response is what we all picture as taking hours and days
and weeks and even months after the incident.
That
initial incident—that initial gunshots going off or some other kind of attack
is usually over in four to eight minutes.
A lot can happen in four to eight minutes. My focus is to prevent these attacks. A lot of places and organizations and
agencies always focus on responding to the incident. I also like to focus on stopping them. Let’s prevent them if we can.
The
likelihood of an incident is very low but we definitely need to prepare for
them. All these recent incidents that
seem to keep occurring definitely show the need that we all need to prepare for
these—that means private organizations, local agencies, regional, state and
federal need to plan for these events and prepare how we are going to respond
to them.
Again,
I’ve highlighted “prevent”. I think we
can stop a lot of these incidents from happening and that’s what we need to
focus on. I’ll go back to everyone who
is involved in planning for these—you have four to eight minutes. Basically that is the law enforcement
response time to these events when they occur.
[Slide 4]
When it comes to these incidents we need to
look beyond the condemnation of senseless acts of violence, the need for gun
control and trying to explain why really bad things happen to good people. Those are all good topics but I come from
“real-ville” and those topics don’t help us stop those incidents from happening
or responding to them so I want to focus on those.
We have a lot of information to cover. When I do this class it is usually four to
eight hours. You can involve exercises
and things in there so there is a lot of material to cover. We are going to focus on the kinds of
shooters, threat assessments and warning behaviors and maybe a couple of other
topics. There is not enough time to
cover all the materials for all the agencies.
We have private industry, human resources,
emergency management, law enforcement—it is really impossible to cover all the
topics for everybody. Basically we will
focus on some warnings, the types of shooters and maybe some response issues.
[Slide 5]
So
that we are all on the same sheet of music, we will come up with some common
terms. I found a definition years ago
for a mass violence incident. That is
basically any intentional violent criminal act for which a formal investigation
has been opened by any law enforcement agency that impacts a large number of
people.
That
doesn’t necessarily need to be a mass shooting but I would certainly say a mass
shooting is covered by this legal definition of a mass violence incident.
[Slide 6]
There is also the term of “mass murder” and
I’ve seen different versions of that definition and it usually addresses a
number. A mass murder is four or more
murders taking place with one incident.
In your community, school, location or county if you had an incident
with three individuals killed and ten wounded that is still a mass violence or
mass shooting incident. It is still a
terrible impact on your community.
These events we are talking about typically
involve one location although some mass shootings will target several
locations, basically until the shooter has stopped. There is also the term of “active shooter”
which is the individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill
people in a confined or populated area.
The mass murder and mass violence incidents are what we are focused on.
[Slide 7]
It
definitely appears in today’s world that the bad guys—and I’ll use that term
“bad guy” to cover a lot of different people like criminal elements, domestic
terrorists, school shooters and whatever you want to call them—may be a little
more determined, violent and heavily armed than ever before. There seems to be an uptick, a trend of these
incidents occurring a lot more frequently.
I’ve
included here for the law enforcement agencies there also seems to be an increase
on the number of ambushes and attacks on law enforcement officers. A couple of
key things about these incidents—a lot of times we tend to focus on the last
incident. No two incidents are ever the
same and we need to remember that.
A
lot of the factors come out of the shooter.
What is their motive? Who are
they targeting? What is their motive for
the attack? What kind of funding do they
have? What type of weapons do they
have? What is their knowledge of the
location?
If
you ever visit a college campus for the first time it is very difficult to find
your way around. If it is an insider
threat—workplace violence or a student—they are knowledgeable about that
location which gives them a little bit of an advantage. What kind of security measures are in
place? What type of response times for
law enforcement? All of these and other
factors will all impact that incident.
There
are commonalities with all of them but we can’t always focus on the last
incident. We need to learn from those
but be prepared for the next on. With
these individuals, the motive is the big one.
Who are they targeting? Who are
they wanting to go after?
[Slide 8]
The question always comes up—why, why, why? There are entire college classes and forty
hour classes and books on this topic.
I’m not a psychologist. I don’t
know a lot of those terms so I’m not going to focus on those. I’ll try to keep it a little more simple for
some basic guidelines. There is more
information and training and great instructors about these topics.
But why, why, why? I think we need to understand why. There is not any one reason for any of these
individuals. Typically they are acting
out of a sense of anger or revenge for something. We have to perceive the world from their
perception. We may think we have been
helping a student or employee all we can but in their mind we haven’t done
anything for them. We have made it
worse.
We have to look at the world through their eyes
and their perception. Anger or revenge
for some type of perceived—they’ve been persecuted, slighted or done some
injustice. Some may have some other type
of motivation. It could be
notoriety. They just want to be
famous. It could be political or
religious. It depends on the
individual. The key thing is we have to
perceive the world through their eyes.
The majority of these incidents are
planned. Very few times are these all of
the sudden—they jump up and do this.
There is planning that goes into these.
Almost like a terrorist attack there is pre-operational surveillance and
detailed planning. Some of their
planning may be hours, days, weeks or even months. There is some planning in there and the
reason I say that is that could be an opportunity to stop these individuals.
[Slide 9]
Also some of these individuals may belong to or
hang out on the fringes of hate or extremist groups. Why that is important is that these groups
are magnets to these individuals. A lot
of these groups are not going to be doing anything like this but this is like a
fertilizer for this individual if he is planning it, again, whether it is
personal, religious or political.
There can be a hate group, extremist group or
terrorist threat dynamic to these individuals.
A lot of times you will hear that these individuals are “nuts” or “lunatics”.
Some of them are not. They are very rational and sane which is what
makes it scary. An individual who is
suffering from severe mental health issues—we are going to pick up on that
person. That person can’t come to work
every day. That person can’t be around
us every day.
That is the scary part—is the rational and sane
individuals that are doing this. You
have to remember they are deeply committed to whatever their cause is—revenge,
injustice, personal, religious, political—they are so deeply committed they
feel they are justified and willing to go to any extreme even if that includes
killing friends and family to prove their point.
That is not to say there are no mental health
issues with a lot of these shooters. A
lot of them are able to go to work, able to go to school and be around
individuals, even those that they are targeting while they are planning and
preparing for these attacks.
[Slide 10]
A good term that I’ve heard before is that they
are “injustice collectors”. We all know
in day to day life and activities that bad things happen to good people or
happen to us. We get bad evaluations at
work. People lose jobs. You lose girlfriends. You get bad grades. Bad things happen.
For most of us we are able to cope with that and
continue on with life. A lot of these
individuals who get involved in these attacks are injustice collectors. They are going to collect those. They are going to keep those in the back of
their mind and they are going to focus on what they perceive as injustice that
has been done to them.
If you ever get a threatening letter with a picture
of someone like this in it I would be concerned about that. You would need to contact your human
resources, your security or law enforcement or something. Many of these incidents can be sophisticated
in the degree of planning and execution that goes into them.
Some of them do weeks, months and even years of
planning and preparation. They have
armed themselves. They have plans in
place. They will train to prepare for
this. Really it doesn’t take a lot to do
a mass shooting type of attack. They can
move forward with minimal planning, very few resources, limited funding and limited
training. In most of these attacks they
are not using semi-automatic weapons or military type weapons.
They are using pistols, shotguns and
rifles. A lot of times you’ll always see
knives. They’ll talk about knives,
mention knives and carry knives. If they
are using explosives they are going to use homemade explosives. It really doesn’t take a lot to plan these
attacks on their part.
[Slide 11]
I’m know I’m moving quickly so if you
guys have questions let’s save them towards the end. This always comes up so I thought I would
dedicate a slide to it. I’m not going to
get into a lengthy discussion on video games.
What I think is—do video games on their own cause people to become a
mass shooter? I would certainly say no.
All kinds of people play video games and
have no problems. I think the issue is
if you have—especially with younger people—if you have a troubled younger
person coming from their environment of alcohol abuse, neglect, drugs,
bullying, mental health issues, all kinds of underlying issues and you put this
dynamic of a video game in there, I certainly think it could be a component to
this.
In a lot of these video games it is not
even a military type of thing. You are
doing massacres. Some examples here—if
you are familiar with Grand Theft Auto, look up in there, especially those who
work in hospitals and health care, look up “Grand Theft Auto 4: Hospital Massacre”
on YouTube. Basically you are the
shooter and you go into an emergency room in a hospital and start to shoot and
kill and basically do a mass shooting on individuals in a hospital. It looks and sounds real.
There is also the video game “Call of
Duty: Airport Massacre” where you run into an airport and start to massacre
people. The picture on the bottom is
from Grand Theft Auto and the picture on top is from Call of Duty.
There was also a game out there called
School Shooter American Tour 2012. This
game is basically that you are a school shooter and you go into a school and
shoot and kill as many people as you can until you kill yourself or you are
killed by law enforcement. That is the
entire purpose of the game.
I know the game has been stopped for now
but they will find funding at some point and the game will be out there. Again, do I think games on their own cause
these attacks to happen? Certainly not—I
have kids and these games are popular and obviously you let kids play these
games on a limited basis.
But if you have a troubled person, with a
lot of issues, concerns, warnings and behaviors who are playing this stuff
twelve hours a day where you are murdering people, I think it could be maybe
some time of part of that issue.
[Slide 12]
In today’s world a lot of these
individuals they are going to—in boxing it is called “telegraph”—a boxer
telegraphs a punch. He pulls back and
you know he is going to punch. These
individuals are giving off warning signs, communications and behaviors.
This was a MySpace posting a few years
ago from an individual who was planning a school attack. I have red-flagged it. I’ll red flag things I think we need to
remember. This young man, what he was
saying on the internet for people to read, “I wish I could shoot up the school
and get away with it and still get my national recognition”. There is his reason. “That’s how much I hate
these people”.
Two days later he posts again, “I could
kill anyone without feeling bad because society sucks.” This young man had actually begun planning
his attack, getting resources together, his death list and was moving forward
with it. While he was doing it, he was
posting it and someone saw this. This
was his reason if he had killed several people—national recognition and society
sucks.
You can see the “natural selection” on
there. If you didn’t know what that
meant you really wouldn’t understand.
That comes from Klebold and Harris at Columbine. There are always little warning signs and
behavior. This young man is telling it
and obviously someone addressed it and stopped an attack.
[Slide 13]
This
was the beginning of our school year.
This was in Maryland. This was a
young man who on the first day of school attempted to conduct an attack on a
school. I believe one person was
shot. This was his Facebook postings—“First
day of school, last day of my life! F***
the world!”
Here
are his images which, to me, are obviously strange and unusual. I know a lot of people have strange and
unusual postings on Facebook but when you start to see a lot of things that
were on this young man’s posting and his final comments—they are advertising
what they are thinking and doing. He
advertised to the world, “Here is what I am going to do”.
Obviously
school systems for both of these young men need to have some kind of mechanism
in place to address this. Not all of
these kids are going to be school shooters but obviously these kids turned out
to be.
[Slide 14]
When we look at threats we would look at what
is a home grown violent extremist? What
is a lone wolf? What is an insider
threat? Most of these attacks are
insider threats. That could be a lot of
different things, though. Disgruntled
employees, disgruntled students—it is amazing when we do work with schools and
colleges a lot of the times they tend to focus on the student. It’s not always the student.
I have talked to school psychologists and
counselors and they tell me they have just as many staff that come in with
problems. In all these settings you need
to look at both students and employees. With the number of businesses,
industries and corporations that are having layoffs and reductions in forces,
reductions in staff—behavioral problems—most workplace shooters have already
had a history of behavioral problems.
It is typically never your best employee. Is already an employee that management is
used to, HR has been dealing with, is in the complaint system, and is in the
discipline system. Yes, mental health is
an issue but when it comes to mental health it is because they are undiagnosed
or untreated. Individuals with mental
health issues, if they are treated, are fine and are productive members of
society. For that percentage of these attacks, and there are some that have
mental health issues, it is because they are undiagnosed, untreated or not
doing what they are supposed to.
There is the desire for notoriety and fame as
we saw earlier with the man who said, “I want notoriety. I want to be famous.” There can be a
political or religious dynamic. A lot of these attacks are domestic
violence. I’ll talk a little bit about
domestic violence.
Then there is the global view. That is the best term for these individuals.
They are going to kill everyone, start a revolution and then take care of the
world. These were some of the things
with Cho at Virginia Tech—some of the things he looked at. “I’m going to kick
off a revolution. I’m going to get the revenge
for society doing this wrong for the little people.” It is sort of a broad, generic, global view.
[Slide 15]
Under
the workplace violence—there are a lot of questions about that. I borrowed this from somebody else. I thought it was good so I put it in here. There is not one—when it comes to workplace
violence attacks and these are attacks that kill large numbers of individuals, mass
shooting, mass violence attacks in the workplace—there was not one motivator
that stood out as the number one motivator.
The
only one was irrational behavior and that is only 26% that sticks out. We won’t
go through all the others. Dissatisfied
service was only nineteen percent. When
it comes to workplace violence and the motivators there is not one that really
stands out. We will talk about a little
later the warning signs, behaviors, and communications indicators.
[Slide 16]
Another red flag because I am always asked and
what I have tried to do is just—what is the one person and who do we need to be
warned about? There are entire books and
courses on this but the first one I would say is a factor is they are very
fixated whether it is because they lost their job, whether they are getting a
divorce or there is an issue at school.
They become very fixated on this idea.
Remember I said earlier it is their perception
of the world. We are red-flagging
these. Very fixated—it is all they talk
about, text about, all they post on the internet, and write about. Very fixated.
Prior history of violence—if it is a workplace
attack or a domestic violence attack there is typically a history of some type
of violence. Not always but there always
is, especially with domestic violence, especially in domestic violence, there
is always going to be a history of some type of violence.
In schools it is a little different. Most school shooters have not had a history
of violence. There is a difference
there. That is something a threat
assessment team would look at—what is the history of violence here? Their perception of the world—they perceive
they have been wronged. You may feel as
an agency, human resources or someone dealing with this individual that we have
done everything we can to help this person.
Their perception is they have been wronged and
they are fixated on it. If you come
across a plan—if they are posting plans or writing plans—they are on their laptop I
think we are raising that red flag a little higher because they have moved into
the stage of planning and preparation.
Do they have access to weapons? Obviously that is a concern. It is not that difficult to get weapons but
if this person is already shooting all the time, buying up more ammo, buying up
more guns, talking about guns, that could be a concern. A lot of these attacks are not always guns.
In Asia, overseas especially in Asia because of
the community culture there have been mass violence attacks where they use knives and kill several
people. But do they have access to
weapons? A key component that really
stands out with these individuals is suicide.
They will have talked about suicide.
There is a suicide dynamic. They have attempted it in the past. There is a history of it.
Somewhere in there when we are looking at these
key issues there will be some type of suicide dynamic. If you have a threat or someone you are
concerned about or your threat assessment team or law enforcement and you start
to see these then your red flag goes up.
If you have someone with all of these obviously that is critical.
The key thing here is when it comes to threat
assessment you are not always going to have the complete picture. We only have the complete picture of these
attackers after the attack. We obviously
recognize that. We are trying not to
armchair quarterback them. It is almost
like intelligence—we are trying to prevent.
We are looking at what indicators, behaviors and communications are out
there and we are trying to stop these attacks.
[Slide 17]
This is different than evidence. Prevention intelligence is a lot different
than evidence which typically occurs after the incident.
[Slide 18]
A large percentage of these attacks begin with
some type of warning or threat, usually not specific, though. But there is warnings, behaviors and
communications and that is where I want to focus to try to stop these from
happening.
Threats can be a lot of different things. It can be very alarming behavior that
concerns or frightens people. They are
statements that individuals are making and actions they are taking. It could be physical items that they
have. Are they gathering weapons? Are they making plans?
If they make a death list they are obviously
going through those preparatory stages.
They are obsessing, again, as their perceived injustice of them. What type of art? Their art is going to be very scary. Are they posting on website? They will put videotapes out about this—what
they are thinking and doing. They are
blogging about it.
If law enforcement gets access to their
computers or laptops look at what they have been doing web searches on and what
their notes are. Threats can be a lot of
different things. The threat may not be,
“I am going to blow up the bank tomorrow or I’m going to kill the governor or
shoot up my school.” It is all kinds of
other things that are going on that are alarming people and concerning people.
The threat assessment process—this is not really
about threat assessment teams but the threat assessment process—you are going
to look at their behaviors, activities, history, intent, willingness and
capability to do what they say they are going to do. When
it comes to school attacks—and think of school mass shootings—FBI statistics
show us that in 81% of those attacks there was what they call “leakage”.
That means one or more individuals had
knowledge that attack was going to happen.
If we could even stop half of these attacks or a percentage of them we
would be doing a great thing. In 81%
there is some type of knowledge or leakage about it. There’s that opportunity to prevent those
attacks.
[Slide 19]
I just threw this in as food for thought. There is a gentleman called Gavin DeBecker
who is an expert on these topics who has a book called “Gift of Fear”. In his books he says there has never been a
bomb found in an American classroom based on a bomb threat. That is not saying bombs have never been
found in schools because they have. We have had them.
Actual phone tip bomb threats about a bomb—one
has never been found. I looked into
that. I talked to the ATF and FBI and
this is true. Why I say that—when schools
are evacuating on bomb threats, we have to be careful doing that. I think it is scary that with a thirty second
phone call I can make you evacuate 1,000 people outside.
When you get a bomb threat—this is not a class
on bomb threats—you have to do a threat assessment on that bomb threat. Locations that have the tendency to
continuously evacuate when you have a bomb threat you are just generating more
bomb threats. I throw that out as food
for thought. There are a lot of resources
available on that.
[Slide 20]
Domestic violence—as you look into these
attacks even in business and industry a lot of these attacks are domestic
violence. That is a huge concern. Domestic violence, domestic violence,
domestic violence! If you work in a facility with 300 women—this is not a hit
on women—just being honest here—I live in “real-ville”. If you work in a facility with 300 women
domestic violence can be a big concern.
According to OSHA the leading cause for women
in the workplace for females in the United States is domestic violence by
far. One in twenty women will be the
victim of a stalker. There are all kinds
of statistics that show this. If you have an employee that comes to you—and
this even happens in law enforcement—and says she is in fear of an ex-spouse or
boyfriend you need to have a plan.
Back in the past if this happened female
employees were usually terminated or laid off but fortunately that doesn’t
happen anymore. If a female employee
comes to you and says, “I am in fear because my ex-husband says he is going to
kill me and we have served him with papers”, wherever this is at you need to
start putting a plan in place. In a lot
of these attacks this is what happened.
[Slide 21]
Nothing wrong with this movie but as a
reminder you may remember this movie called “Falling Down” with Michael Douglas. It is a pretty good movie and I have watched
it a couple of times recently and it is a good threat assessment movie. The gentleman is William Foster. He has all kinds of triggers—recently
divorced, a restraining order and on top of that he gets fired.
This is one time in the movie where the
individual snaps. He commits suicide by
cop at the end of the movie. Watch this
movie again and think about threat assessments and mass shootings and it is an
interesting movie. Throughout this movie
you have empathy for this individual. I
think it is kind of interesting and something to think about.
[Slide 22]
Two movies I want you to write down because
these movies keep appearing. The first
one is called Zero Day and obviously Elephant.
Both of these movies are about school shooters. I can’t spend a lot of time on them but these
movies show up a lot. These movies used
to be difficult to find but they are now available online and on Netflix and
things like that.
If you are interested in these topics watch
these movies. They are kind of
scary. If you have a student or someone
who says, “My favorite movie is Zero Day and I’ve watched it forty-seven times”,
I would red flag that because these movies are about planning and preparation
for an attack and instigating an attack.
Elephant is more of a movie and Zero Day is
more of a documentary about these two young men. They are both very serious
movies and I would just recommend—I could spend a lot more time talking about
them—be aware of these names if you hear these movies come up especially for
younger people.
[Slide 23]
This
is another movie I have red flagged. I
have only seen bits and pieces of it and I plan on adding it to my list of
weird movies. I watch gang and extremist
movies and I’ve added this one. If they
ever monitor my Netflix list they would wonder what is going on with August.
I’d
write this one down too—what I’ve seen and heard about it—this movie Rampage
which came out in 2010 is about a young man who goes through all the warning
signs, behaviors and indicators and plans an attack to kill as many people as
he can in his town. He goes on a
massacre and kills lots and lots of people, sets off secondary devices, goes in
a beauty salon and murders a lot of women in a beauty salon, which there have
been several of those recently.
It
is kind of a scary movie. I haven’t seen the whole thing yet but what I’ve seen
about it—honestly I would watch this and be aware of it. Again, like the video games if a person
watches this one time because it is a cool movie with lots of explosions and
stuff that’s fine but if you have an individual who has issues, concerns and a
history that he tells you or you find out that he watches this movie
fifty-seven times and idolizes it I might red flag that movie.
[Slide 24]
Because of the workplace violence—we move
around a little bit because I always get questions on this—who is the biggest
possible indicator of workplace violence attack? Typically it is a white male—not always—but
statistically it is the white male who is thirty to fifty years old. But I question marked those because it could
be really be a lot of different individuals.
Usually this individual is always a problem
employee. It is not your best worker
that does this. There is always a history
of problems, issues and concerns. They
also have a history of violent behavior.
They are intimidating others and you could see the use of drugs or
alcohol.
[Slide 25]
Some
of the other indicators of the perpetrator—they are very obsessed with guns and
guns magazines. I own guns and I take my
kids shooting but when I say obsessed, they are obsessed. That is all they talk about. They bring gun magazines and cut out pictures
of guns to show people. They are very
obsessed with them. Also these are individuals who creep people out. They’ll talk about incidents. When you talk about the incident in Colorado
and say it was horrible, they may say it was great or cool. They are going to talk about those incidents
of violence. They may make open or
veiled threats.
It
is kind of weird that they are obsessed with their job but they are not a good
employee. Why I think that is because
they are loners. They have no support
network. There are no friends or
family. They don’t belong to a
church. There is nobody there to kind of
support them. All they may have is their
job.
There
is also the term of “human tripwires”. Other staff and management have dealt with
this person before. I red flag
that. This is not the first time this
employee has been in trouble.
[Slide 26]
Verbal threats—they are bringing guns to work
to show people. They hold a grudge. I go back to an injustice collector. They get a bad evaluation. You or I we would improve, but for them for
two years all they are going to think about is that bad evaluation.
[Slide 27]
There
is a gentleman named Colonel Grossman who is an expert on the use of lethal
force for the military and law enforcement and he was brought in at one time to
look with the Secret Service and they found out there is no specific profile
only common actions. The killers are
white, Native American, African American, Hispanic, and they come from upper,
middle and lower classes.
Some
come from loving, intact families and others from horrible, broken
families. Most are males but several have
been females. If a female makes a threat
of something like this you need to take it seriously. The key thing is there is no profile.
What
they found out about younger and school shooters is there is a fascination with
violent media. That is the movies, the games
and the music. There is music out there
about doing this stuff. Normal, typical
kids who watch a scary movie or play video games or listen to music that is
fine.
If
you have a troubled person with all the indicators, warnings and behaviors and
they are fascinated with very violent media that could be a concern.
[Slide 28]
I borrowed this from another person I know
named Phil Chalmers who does some excellent training and I wanted to share his
stuff. I took some of his to summarize
school massacres because there is always an interest in that.
Most school massacres are preventable. I go back to that 81%. They are preventable because someone knows
something about it. That 81%. There is no common profile only common
actions, indicators and behavior just like other shooters.
Around eighty percent of these shooters plan on
dying during the shooting. There is
their goal and objective. They are going
to die—either kill themselves or suicide by cop—there will always be some type
of suicide dynamic. These young people
will talk about suicide, they will have attempted it, and they will have talked
about it.
Their reasons again are revenge, instant fame
and recognition just like other shooters.
Shootings can take place anywhere.
In classes I’ve had people tell me “hey this is a rural area and kids go
hunting a lot”. I’m not worried about
kids that go hunting.
These can happen anywhere—Catholic schools,
public schools, private schools, the wealthiest, the poorest, rural and schools
in the middle of a big city. These can
happen anywhere so when people make threats or you are seeing warnings,
indicators or behaviors those need to be addressed.
[Slide 29]
The deadliest hour is the first hour—first
period of school and the second is lunchtime, because that is when everybody is
together. Your two biggest safety factors in school is the School Resource Officer
(SRO) and zero tolerance for bullying.
It is amazing how many of these school shooters would talk about being bullied
and no one would help them.
I do believe this. Amazingly these school shooters, I think all
the shooters, I think go into a trance-like state. They don’t know what they are doing. They don’t hear you. You can yell at them and they are not going
to hear it. It is like a switch. That’s not an excuse—they know what they are
doing, but once they begin that attack they look like a terminator or a robot.
Most school massacres have no history of
violence. In workplace or domestic
violence there could be but in school attacks probably not. What is the deal with schools? SROs, SROs, SROs. Set up a tip line for people—81% know something. Set up some means for people to share that
information.
I throw this out as food for thought. You need to look into this—law enforcement,
SROs, campus police—fake Facebook and social media works very well in stemming
a lot of these issues. You need to look
into that legally because a lot of these individuals are going to post a lot of
this stuff on Facebook and social media.
I strongly encourage you to look into that but obviously you need to do
it legally. It can be done and every
organization needs to look into that.
[Slide 30]
I just show this slide of social media—we could
spend an hour on social media, where young people and people operate, where
they threat. I saw this slide. Every one of these sites you see people can
post and communicate and social media with each other. I haven’t heard of ninety-nine percent of
these. I share this with schools, investigators
and threat assessment teams. You really have
to have someone in an investigative standpoint who knows what this is, how to
look into this. Again, I’m not familiar
with ninety-nine percent of the stuff on here but every one of these people can
communicate.
In some school issues that have come up kids
will set up a Facebook their parents can see and then they set up the real
Facebook—just food for thought on this.
[Slide 31]
Mental health dynamic—since Columbine and
Virginia Tech every time we have these incidents and again with Colorado there
is always a call for more spending on mental health. Amazingly after these attacks funding goes
down. Mental health services go down
after these incidents. I saw some
interesting stats that said if we had improved mental health programs we could
address fifty to seventy percent of crime in America.
I think that is incredible. Just focusing
on the mass shootings, every year we know with tight budgets at the local,
state and federal levels mental health is in big demand but services are cut
more and more. Everyone on this webinar
recognizes that emergency management resources are not cheap, school safety is
not cheap and mental health is not cheap.
I really think a lot of these attacks
maybe with some mental health services could address some of this.
[Slide 32]
An excellent video—there are all kinds of
resources out there but I recommend this to you guys. I like it.
There is a video you can look up on YouTube called Run-Hide-Fight. It is by the City of Houston Department of
Homeland Security and it was grant funded.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VcSwejU2D0&feature=plcp
]
People ask me all the time what we can do
as a citizen as an employee. I share
this video—I like it for a lot of reasons. It is not cheesy. They don’t glamorize anything. It addresses a
lot of different things and it is only about a five or six minute video which I
think a lot of times is everyone’s attention span.
I would encourage you to find this
video. Make sure you get the official
one from the City of Houston and Department of Homeland Security. There are some others out there but I like
this one and it is pretty new and current.
[Slide 33, 34]
Just like with terrorism I will apply that to
this topic. Our chances of stopping
these attacks are very slim to none. For
most of these attacks we know about them when we hear the first gunshots. Once that happens in a school, college,
business, mall or a movie theater you are already behind the eight ball. The second it happens, it’s bad.
Even if law enforcement immediately shows up
and shoots and kills the perpetrator it is bad for all the agencies and
everyone involved in that. That’s why I
think threat teams, intelligence, information gathering and sharing, using
every possible method, people sharing information with human resources and with
their security is really the only key to preventing these attacks.
I say the same thing when I do terrorist
threats and attacks. We have got to
share information. We armchair
quarterback these incidents afterwards.
We learn our lesson and we see all the warnings, behaviors, indicators
and communications but what starts to happen is that—think of pieces of the
puzzle. We have got to start bringing
these pieces of the puzzles together and we do that by information sharing.
[Slide 35]
Three
good books I would like to recommend—there are a bunch of other ones but I’d
like to recommend these if you are interested.
These are not 400 page academic reads.
The first book is called “Columbine”. Excellent book—it is about before, during and
after and the recovery and even now about Columbine. Excellent book—it was written by a reporter.
There
is a book called “Shooter Down” by John Giduck.
It is about Virginia Tech and what really happened there. You wouldn’t know it but law enforcement
actually did an excellent response to Virginia Tech with what they had and what
happened. This is an excellent book that
covers that looking beyond the media. It
also talks about some other incidents that have happened. It is a really good book.
There
is a book by the gentleman I was talking about—Phil Chalmers—who I would say is
a subject matter expert on school shooters and teen murderers. His book is called “Inside the Mind of the
Teen Killer”. He has interviewed several
school shooters who have survived their attacks and talks about what they were
thinking and what happened.
I
will say that I don’t agree with everything in all three of these books but
they are excellent tools and excellent reads for you to look into if you want
to research this material.
[Slide 36]
I am done and I am now open to any
questions.
Amy Sebring: Thank you very much August. Please keep your question or comment related
to today’s topic and reasonably concise. We are ready to begin now, so please
enter your comment or question at any time.
[Audience
Questions & Answers]
Comment:
Tracy Huettner: I've seen that, excellent
video!
August Vernon: It is and a lot of people are really—what in
the world to do—and I think people should share that with scout parents, with
church, with everybody. It is a really good video.
Question:
Stephen Mandas: Do you recommend the
movie Home Room?
August Vernon: I am familiar with that
one. There are several out there. I just recommended the three I thought were
probably—there are plenty others out there that are scary when you look at them
in this context. I have heard of Home
Room and several others. What I
recommend is that what comes up in threat assessment teams or people looking at
someone—if you see a movie or reference to things multiple times, look that up
and see what it is.
If
you have never heard of Zero Day—oh it is just a movie until you see that it is
a movie about these young men planning a school attack and they film themselves
prepping for it. I have shown the movie Zero Day in classes and people think it
is real. That is how realistic it
is. There are a lot of movies out
there—just research these if these names come up.
Question:
Bradley Cusick: Any advice on how fire, EMS, and police agencies can work together
in advance of an event in order to communicate better during an event?
Comment:
Amy Sebring: I do want to mention that August did address some of that in a
previous program that we have a recording of on our site. You might want to look
that program up as well.
August Vernon: I’ll be honest. It is very difficult. We did very well for several years for
several years after 9/11 on bringing agencies together but I’m starting to see
us drift a little bit but that is because everyone is so busy with their day to
day activities. I think we do a good job
in my county because we stay on top of it.
You
would be surprised how difficult it is to get those three entities
together. If you haven’t done any prep
work or training and all of a sudden you do a full-scale exercise of this you
are going to issues, problems and concerns.
Just to get those three entities together—law enforcement, EMS and
fire—to train how to respond, to run through some scenarios, how to rescue
people, how law enforcement escorts people.
It is actually pretty difficult to do that.
We
have to start over and bring these three agencies together. We have had a lot of turnover since 9/11.
Virginia Tech was years ago, and Colorado—you have to reinforce this. Go to the previous presentation and if you
want more I can share it with you.
Contact me offline. It is hard to
do even in today’s world.
Law
enforcement trains consistently on this.
Fire and EMS do not. There are
agencies I have gone to that have never trained on this one time. If you have never done that and your agency
is dispatched to a shooting with eighteen people shot you are going to be
scrambling.
Question:
Jo Moss: Law enforcement has done a good job of
teaching schools in particular about going into a lockdown, but no one has come
up with a good way to safely end a lockdown. Any suggestions?
August Vernon: Yes, number one, there needs to be two
different kinds of lockdowns. I’ll use
an example—years ago we had several little two liter MacGyver bombs, bottle
bombs, at an elementary school outside the school. We were just told that the school had locked
down as we were outside with fire, EMS, the bomb squad and HazMat dealing with
that.
Two
hours later we found out that they had locked down by putting all the students
under the desks, turning the lights off and locking the doors. They didn’t need to do that. All they needed to do was lock the exterior
doors and they could have continued on with school. Number one, lockdown means different things
to different people.
You
need to identify a couple of different kinds of lockdowns. When you go on a lockdown there needs to be
an all clear. In a school a lockdown
drill should take about three minutes.
You announce—don’t use any codes, like “code green” or any of that—just “lockdown,
lockdown, lockdown” and then give them two minutes and start checking doors.
Once
that is done you need to give the “all clear, all clear, all clear”. In real incidents you still have to start
looking for people because they are hiding and things like that. You need to have a plan in place beyond
initiating lockdown. What does lockdown
mean? What type of lockdown? Who can
make that decision?
Some
schools have told me that only the principal can initiate lockdown. I think that’s absurd. The principal may not be there. Lockdown is just one component. Let’s have a better lockdown plan in place and
that includes an “all clear”.
Question:
Michele Tanton: Is there anything
specific that hospitals can look for besides irate, angry patients? Is there a way to prepare?
August Vernon: Hospitals—number one, every problem that happens in a community
always ends up in a hospital whether it is domestic violence, gang related or
issues in a community. Number one, robust
security—but I know a hospital is supposed to be a public place. You need to
have robust security. You need to have
camera systems in place.
A
lot of workplace attacks are workplace related in hospitals. They have employees so that’s where you do employee
awareness and no tolerance programs and having IDs and constant access
control. You have to have HR program
there. A lot of shootings are employees
and workplace violence.
I
noticed some recent ones were nurses and their husbands came after them. If my ex-wife is hiding from me I still know
she has to go to work and I can show up at work. That goes back to the employee
saying, “I am in fear of my life. My
husband is going to show up and kill me,” that hospital needs to have a plan in
place.
If
that guy shows up, what’s our plan? You
need to have a better plan than “call 911” because that 911 call could take
four to eight minutes to get help there.
What is our plan? Do we stop this
guy in the parking lot? What does he look like?
It is okay to do all these things.
I’m
trying to cover a very serious topic very quickly.
Comment:
Roy Williams: Reference to Hospital
response, CPPS offers (for purchase) "Shots Fired for
Healthcare". Same producers of
"Shots Fired: When Lightning Strikes". Follows DHS recommendations of response to
Active Shooter.
Question:
Shawn Moser: FEMA Independent Study
also offers course "IS-907, Active Shooter, What You Can Do." [http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/IS/is907.asp]
I thought it was a good lesson. I worked under a state homeland security grant
as a safe school planner for 15 counties in my state. Truly preventative measures were almost
non-existent, or the programs in place were in name only. I think that mostly was due to funding. Are there any good initiatives out there that
can be talked about or directed to?
August Vernon: There are some resources. Number
one, go to the resources at emforum.org.
We have put a lot of on there. Number
two, go to US Secret Service and look up school shooters. They have some stuff there. Go to the US Department of Education and look
up school shooters. There are sometimes
grants and materials available.
A
lot of times your best resource is just pulling teams together. I totally recognize what you are saying. We deal with it a lot. Yes, our school has a plan and yes we have a
threat assessment team and it is in name only.
When a threat finally appears they have no idea what to do. The best approach I can take is that it may
take an individual in a community to lead the fight and bring people together.
There
are plenty of resources out there, not as much funding, but there are lots of
resources. You are going to have to
educate yourselves. That is why I try to
do some of these things and look these materials up. I’ll be glad to help people. Look up Secret Service, go to their website
and look up school shooters and threat assessments. Go to US Department of Education and look up
threat assessments. Go to the EM Forum and Amy has posted some resources there
to look at. That will give you a pile of
stuff to look through.
Comment:
Amy Sebring: I think we’ll go ahead and wrap it up now August. Our timing
worked out just fine. What I am stunned about is we hear about the unusual event or the particularly tragic event
but so many of these events have occurred in the past year it is
astounding. It reinforces what you say
about this could happen anywhere.
Comment:
August Vernon: A lot of these incidents happen in places that are really nice
places that would say it could never happen here. The night of the Batman movie in Colorado my
oldest son went with some other parents—I couldn’t go to opening night because
I had to work the next day—but my son went with some of his friends and other
dads to the midnight showing here.
Honestly these things can happen anywhere.
I
just can’t stress this enough. When they
happen that is not the time to start figuring out what you are going to do
because it is too late. That’s why I try
to focus a lot on prevention.
[Closing]
Amy Sebring: Exactly. On behalf of Avagene, myself, and all our participants today, thank you
very much August, again, for being with us. And as always you do a fine job
that is much appreciated.
August Vernon: Thank you for the
opportunity. If anybody needs help just give me some time because I may get
dozens of real world issues that come up about this but I will be glad to help
anybody out.
Amy Sebring: Folks, before you go, PLEASE take a moment to do the rating and enter
any additional comments you may have.
Our next program is scheduled for
November 28th and our topic will be a mutual aid framework called
“Water and Wastewater Agency Response Networks (WARN)”. Please make plans to join us, and do extend
the invitation to other appropriate individuals in your organization.
Until then, have a great afternoon and do
have a Happy Thanksgiving with your family and friends. Thanks for all your participation today and
all the great questions and comments. We do appreciate those as well. We are
adjourned.