With more than 18,000 first responders in Harris County, it’s important for law enforcement agencies as well as fire and EMS personnel to have an integrated response in crisis situations, said Justin Reed, chief of EMS for the Cy-Fair Fire Department.

The fire department partners with the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, which emphasizes the importance of entities such as the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, Cy-Fair ISD Police Department and the Cy-Fair Fire Department working together.

“A true unified command typically doesn’t happen for hours if we think of a tornado response or even a hurricane response. We’re all working towards that common objective, but we’re not doing it together,” Reed said. “And we’ve realized now, especially with active shooter incidents, time is not on our side. So we have to speed up all of these processes, and the only way to do it is to train together.”

Why it matters

Rusty Jacks, Texas Region 2 director for ALERRT, said the organization was established in 2002 following a 1999 school shooting in Columbine, Colorado, which led to 13 fatalities. He said the way law enforcement trained for such events at the time was inadequate.

Twenty-four years later, the Texas Legislature this year mandated all 80,000 officers statewide have at least 16 hours of ALERRT’s active shooter response training every two-year training cycle, Jacks said.

Over time, active shooter training has evolved from police officers focusing on locating and neutralizing the suspect to integrating first responder medical training, hemorrhage control and other tactics to increase the survivability of the injured victims. Instead of law enforcement being the only ones on the scene, fire departments have gotten involved in recent years.

“Even if we were all trained, we can't train for every scenario. But fortunately, through our experience, we're getting better and better each time,” Reed said.

Jacks said the newest evolution in training trends is incident command control structure, a tactic initially developed to help fight forest fires, to coordinate the efforts of multiple people.

“When you talk about an active shooter event, you may have anywhere from two or three up to 20 or 30 different agencies that show up, and then the question is, ‘Who's in charge?’ And how do you coordinate the efforts of hundreds of police officers that are showing up—a lot of whom are from different agencies?” he said.

Reed said he believes this could be the most important factor in active shooter response.

“If we can get the command and control together early, speaking the same language, then we can make differences no matter what,” he said.

A closer look

In a typical violent incident, fire and EMS officials set up away from the scene until police can secure the scene, which could take hours in a large school campus or office building, Reed said.

Through ALERRT’s Active Attack Integrated Response method, fire and EMS personnel are paired with police officers and head into the scene to assist as many victims as possible as quickly as possible.

“Through AAIR, we're teaching those principles, but we're teaching it together,” Reed said. “So there's 12 law enforcement in this class; there are 12 fire and EMS personnel in this class and dispatchers. So we get to learn a little bit of what they do; they get to learn a little bit of what we do; and then we do it all together. ... And then it culminates into a big full-scale, full-speed exercise.”

Get involved

Reed said community members should educate themselves through a Stop the Bleed training session. The American College of Surgeons administers the program and offers interactive online courses as well as a list of in-person events open to the public.

“We can only move so fast, and so if people understand how to control bleeding—unfortunately, in the world that we live in, I think it's just as important as knowing CPR and how to spot the signs and symptoms of a stroke,” he said.