Officers from the Methuen, Mass., police department carry training weapons as they search the halls of a school during a demonstration. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
I have been instructing active shooter response for the better part of 15 years. Some tactics have come and gone, but the basic premise has stayed the same: Law enforcement needs to immediately respond to a violent event, make entry and find and eliminate the threat. Recently, I became concerned that law enforcement was starting to use active shooter tactics in all school lockdowns and searches.
There is no question that any time officers confront active shooting, they need to make a forced entry in order to save lives. In reality, however, law enforcement rarely has the opportunity to engage the shooter. Officers are more likely to conduct a building search and evacuation. This is also true for schools that have gone into a lockdown for any number of reasons. Schools in the United States routinely go into lockdown for threats, false alarms and unidentified intruders.
Instructing active shooter response for my county academy, I was exposed to numerous plans as to how various agencies planned to gain access to the locked classrooms. Departments had made plans to do everything from using breaching tools to issuing keys to the search teams. The first time I suggested they could always knock on the door and ask to be let in, I was literally laughed at. I am not saying that you shouldn’t have tools and keys with you if they are available. I am just saying it may be safer not to use them.
Let’s look at what happens when searching a school in lockdown. Unless there is shooting actively taking place, the purpose is not to eliminate a threat, it is to make sure no one gets hurt.
Lockdown response is a first responder tactic. Patrol officers will enter a locked down school if they receive information there may be an active threat inside, but the average patrol officer is not trained for making entry into a hostage situation and engaging a threat.
The rooms that the officers are making entry into are probably going to be dark, with all of the children packed into one corner. The hallways are usually well lit. The scenario then becomes having a patrol officer, who may have no hostage takedown training, going from a lighted area into a dark room where everyone is in one mass at the far corner of the room.
It is important to remember that you are not sneaking up on anyone. Most active shooter teams told me that they felt they lost the element of surprise by knocking on a door and it would put them at greater risk. It is highly unlikely that once the school is in lockdown the bad guy hasn’t figured out already that you are coming.
So then, what is the advantage of knocking on the door? Believe it or not, the purpose of knocking on the door is to allow the bad guy to tell you not to come in. The important part of this tactic is that you have the ability to tell the occupants beforehand what you plan on doing. Law enforcement could not possibly do this for every single building they ever expect to search. However, we can do this with schools. Asking schools to work this information into their lockdown drills is actually pretty easy. Over the past 10 years, we have made presentations at our local schools during their in-service days. We have demonstrated to them exactly what we will say, and how we want them to respond. The most difficult part is telling teachers that it is okay to open the door. They have been told for years, “never ever open your door during a lockdown.” Well, actually it is okay, and we recommend it.
(AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
The most obvious benefit is that you are not trying to breach or find a key for every locked classroom in the building. Doors that are opened for you can be re-locked. Breaking doors means that you now have to move those students because their security is compromised. One or two officers can hold security for a hallway of locked doors. Our approach is to knock loudly on the door, identify ourselves and then issue the command to “open the door and step away.” A couple of things can happen next:
1) The door can open. At that point we have the option of initiating verbal contact with the teacher and begin to gather information on the room. We almost always use soft entries and we will attempt to view as much of the room prior to making an entry. We can introduce mirrors, cameras, etc. Entering a room is just much easier when you don’t have to figure out how to get the door open.
2) We can get a reply from the teacher that he or she can’t open the door because someone won’t let them. Everything at this point stops and we begin hostage/barricaded tactics. It is important to let the bad guy know that we are not going to force entry into the room, whether we believe them to be armed or not. The key is to remember that at this point, no one is currently being injured. We are going to do everything we can to keep it that way. In the meantime, we are also working on obtaining as much information about the inside of the room as possible. I interviewed a principal once who unlocked a door and walked into a hostage situation. He will be the first to tell you that he is thankful it did not prompt the bad guy to start shooting.
3) You can get no reply at all. Usually, officers are able to tell whether a room was occupied at the time of a lockdown. Rooms that are occupied will have books and papers on desks, backpacks at chairs and so on. Our protocol is to announce again. No reply after the second attempt will initiate a much more cautious and deliberate analysis of the room. Eventually, we may force the door, but we will not make entry until we establish communication.
When we inform the teachers that we will be asking them to open the door, we usually get the same questions: How will I know it is you? What if I am too afraid? I have had the opportunity to interview teachers who have been in real events. They all said the same thing: they had no doubt that it was the police when they finally made it to their room. In cases where the teacher is too afraid to move, then we tell them to verbally communicate that with us too. Bottom line, we tell them don’t open the door if you are not 100% sure. We also advise them do exactly what the bad guy tells them.
We have begun instructing high school students on the plan to knock on the door as well. Through research we have found that there had been numerous cases where students had locked themselves into rooms and there was no teacher present. We have done drills where we remove the teacher from the classroom prior to an announced lockdown drill. The students, to their credit, responded as they had been trained. One student will always step up as a leader, open the door and step away.
Summary
In the end, we could not find a downside to knocking on the door. We ran a decision tree with probability outcomes and anything bad that came out of knocking was probably going to happen had we made an unannounced dynamic entry.
Knocking on the door had the highest probability of not producing casualties due to entry team and suspect contact. It had the highest probability of safely locating the bad guy and resulting in negotiations rather than use of force. The tactic left the vast majority of doors intact, resulting in less forced evacuations. We also found that the teachers became much more effective in managing the students when they were asked to assist in opening the door. We also found that it was extremely effective for small specialized classrooms and places like the nurse’s office. Instead of entering, we could call out the occupants one by one.