PEARCY -- Strategos International has become increasingly busier training organizations how to react to an armed intruder, according to its president, who was in Garland County this week conducting safety training in the Lake Hamilton School District.
"It seems like whatever domain that the attack took place in, the most recent one, whether schools, churches, or workplaces, it seems like that's the industry that we start to get more calls from," said Vaughn Baker, president of Strategos.
On Tuesday, his company gave lectures and scenarios for all staff members at Lake Hamilton about the role they play while waiting on law enforcement in the event an armed intruder enters the school.
"Obviously people don't like to think about this topic, but when it does occur they start thinking 'Hey, we need to do something. We need to train.' So yeah, we have been quite a bit busier with the school sector since the two, Santa Fe, Texas, and the Parkland school shootings. Seems like as the world gets worse, we get busier," he said.
At Lake Hamilton, "We did an hour-and-45-minute lecture and then this next two hours, we'll spend an hour doing walk-throughs of their classrooms and areas that they find themselves throughout the day. ... And teaching them how to do a lockdown and also what to do if a lockdown fails," Baker said. "Then we'll spend the last hour doing scenarios. We'll do three or four reasonable scenarios where they'll be able to practice what they've learned."
Since the Parkland, Fla., school shooting in February and the shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, in May, Strategos has received an increased volume of inquiries from schools around the country on how to prepare for an active shooter event.
"We offer protection services for organizations, but our primary role is to teach them how to be safe when we're not around. We call it 'training the true first responder,'" Baker said. "Up until this point, first responder has been looked at as fire, EMS and police, and those are the folks who respond to the scene of the crisis. However, the true first responders are the people that are on scene when the crisis begins and how can they keep themselves safe until law enforcement gets there."
Strategos teaches what is called a "3 Out Response Model," or lockout, get out and take out, not necessarily in that order. It is a nonlinear approach, where the "out" a person utilizes first is determined by their location and environment in relation to the threat.
"One of the things that we sometimes hear when they're talking about wanting to train their people or not is they're worried about scaring their people, especially when we're talking about doing simulations and scenarios, and we explain to them where fear comes from," Baker said.
"Fear is having a problem without having a solution so what actually happens when we come in and train is we reduce fear, and we reduce anxiety because we're giving them a solution to their problem and empowering them to know how to protect themselves, not only at school but when we teach the '3 Out Model' it applies to anywhere they are throughout the day. Their place of worship, the mall, the movie theater, so they can employ what they've learned today no matter where they are. Even at home if they have a home invasion."
Baker said the organization formed in 2002 to train law enforcement agencies on the tactical response to active shooter situations, but the Virginia Tech shooting shifted their perspective to training the individuals on campus with a response plan until law enforcement arrives.
"After Virginia Tech occurred, we had the best possible response you could ever hope for," he said. "You had two SWAT teams attempting to make entry in two minutes at Virginia Tech and we realized it's not just about training law enforcement -- we've got to train the people that are on scene because we still had a tremendous loss of life at Virginia Tech. So that's when we started expanding and training civilians and the true first responders there on scene."
Baker said one of Strategos' clients actually had an active shooter on campus shortly after receiving training and experienced one fatality as a result.
"They had tremendous response when we went back and looked at the footage from the CCTV cameras. They did a great job in responding very quickly and without delay," he said.
In addition to response training like Tuesday's course, Baker said, "We have another training where we teach people what to look for from a body language and behavior point of view ... where we try to educate people what to look for and try to prevent these things from occurring. Get people to say something once they do recognize that 'Hey, this is concerning behavior.'"
Baker said it is critical to know the opportunities to spot these behaviors as a preventive measure.
"Many times the person that commits the attack has exhibited these behaviors (that are) concerning to others days, weeks and months prior to it," he said. "So we have opportunities and what we've got to do is teach people what to look for and encourage them to say something. So there's plenty of opportunity if we just look for it."
The three-and-a-half minute scenarios represent what Baker calls the past, present and future. The past is how the staff used to handle such attacks, illustrating in the scenario how these plans may not work. The present is how these attacks are currently handled and the future scenario, he said, may offer opportunities for improvement.
Strategos uses current trends the active shooters are using in carrying out their attacks to better prepare individuals to respond.
"One of the things we learned from the attacks in Texas and Florida is they're pulling the fire alarm trying to get people out of lockdown, so (in) one of the scenarios this afternoon, we'll actually do this to try to get them out of lockdown and then maybe the new fire response protocol is 'Hey, before you go evacuating your room, let's confirm that we actually do have a fire,'" he said. "We haven't had a child killed in a school fire in 50 years, but we're getting dozens of killed each year with these types of incidents, so we're trying to prioritize our response as far as how we respond to fire appropriately. We haven't even had a child hurt in a school fire in 25 years."
Strategos has trained about 50,000 school personnel in 16 years, and while the training can be intimidating to anyone who has not completed it, Baker stresses just how rare these events actually are.
"Even though you hear about them a lot -- we'll have maybe 15 a year -- there's 119,000 schools in the country so it's still very unlikely this will occur, so we try not to make people paranoid, but we want to make people prepared if, God forbid, it does occur," he said.
Baker said school districts will have Strategos come in to complete physical security assessments to give them opportunities to improve; however, he said 82 percent of attacks are committed by people who already have access to the school.
"So it doesn't matter how secure you make it from the outside threat. The much higher priority is for the inside threat and doing those physical security improvements may not be your first step," he said. "There's national standards for the physical security, generally, but not for the armed intruder. So we base our recommendations on our analysis and our experience over 16 years, and based on the current trends that we're seeing."
Local on 08/09/2018