ERRI EMERGENCY SERVICES REPORT-EmergencyNet NEWS Service-Friday, August 20, 1999-Vol. 3 - 232

UNITED STATES

LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE COLUMBINE MASSACRE

By: Steve Macko, ERRI Crime Analyst

On 20 April 1999, 15 people died in the now infamous Columbine High School shooting rampage in Littleton, Colorado. That one incident has caused schools and police departments across the nation to look into how they would handle such a situation. Many say its not a matter of "if" it will happen again, but rather "when" it will happen again.

Right after the Columbine shooting, there were many questions being asked. Should officers have moved through the building faster? Should they have focused more on finding the gunmen than on helping the wounded?

ERRI received several messages from readers and other contacts requesting that we condemn or "rip apart" how the SWAT officers in Colorado responded to the incident. Wisely, we think, we did not criticize the officers who worked the "mother" of all SWAT scenarios. In the four months since the massacre, police across the U.S. have begun to alter training procedures based on the lessons learned from the most deadly school shooting in U.S. history to better prepare for the worst-case scenario. Dave Klinger, a University of Missouri professor who oversees a federally-funded study of the use of forces by SWAT teams, said: "Columbine was a big wakeup call for a lot of people. It is no longer unpredictable that some school, somewhere is going to be assaulted by some sort of lunatic, so you'd better prepare for it."

As EmergencyNet News has been reporting, there have been in the past few weeks a number of seminars and training exercises geared toward preparing police, students and teachers on what to do if such a shooting occurs in their schools or communities. We've reported on school training exercises in Pittsburgh and Wisconsin. We know of other exercises that have taken place in Fort Worth, Texas, and Palm Beach, Florida. The Emergency Response & Research Institute (ERRI), the parent organization of this publication, is also currently working on an article that reviews "crisis management in a rapidly transitioning environment," and will make its findings available sometime this Fall.

In Austin, Texas, the police recently started a program called "Homicide in Progress" for officers who are among the first to respond to shooting incidents. The program is designed to teach officers to recognize situations like Columbine, and give the officers some options on what they can do -- whether it is rescuing victims or going directly to the source of the threat.

Most of the questions after the Columbine incident revolved around the actions of the local SWAT team. SWAT is an acronym first coined by the LAPD's Daryl Gates -- before he became chief. At first, SWAT was to stand for: Special Weapons Attack Teams. But superiors told Gates to take out the word "Attack" and he renamed the unit Special Weapons And Tactics. It was the infamous Texas Tower sniper shooting in Austin, Texas, that occurred on 1 August 1966 that started police departments thinking about how to handle crisis incidents. More than a dozen people were killed and more than 30 others were wounded on the fateful day in 1966. The formation of the first SWAT teams began in the late 1960s.

The Los Angeles Police Department has been involved in some of the most serious SWAT incidents to ever be recorded in history. It's first mission, on 8 December 1969, was almost a disaster. It occurred at 4115 South Central and involved an incredible shootout against a militant group called the Black Panthers. The shootout lasted for several hours. According to Daryl Gates, the situation was so bad that the LAPD came dangerously close to using a grenade launcher on the Panthers fortified bunker they called a house. The grenade launcher borrowed from Camp Pendleton was parked just around the corner from the shooting. The shootout ended when six gang members surrendered to officers.

On 17 May 1974, 9,143 rounds of ammunition were exchanged between the LAPD and members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) -- the group that kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. Again, the situation became so bad, that the SWAT team wanted to use fragmentation grenades. This request was denied by Gates. Eventually, the home the SLA was barricaded in at 1466 East 54th Street burned to the ground. Six SLA members, including their pyschopath leader Donald DeFreeze (Cinque) were killed.

Some other infamous SWAT episodes are the 4 April 1991 Good Guys Electronics store case that occurred in Sacramento and the 18 July 1984 McDonald's massacre in San Ysidro, California.

SWAT officers are highly trained in assault tactics, weapons, specialized equipment and tools. Some officers are extremely well trained a crisis hostage negotiations. Among some of the elementary room entry techniques learned by new SWAT team members are "slicing the pie," the crisscross, the button hook, the cross button and the cross lean. How to climb stairs without the tell-tale creak is also learned.

Most people not versed in SWAT teams and their tactics don't realize that there are different positions on a team that entail different functions, such as the element leader, the scout, the rear guard, assaulters, snipers and observers.

At Columbine, police and emergency response crews arrived on the scene at the school within minutes of 911 calls. Lt. Terry Manwaring, a Jefferson County SWAT team commander, arrived within 12 minutes [author's observation: very quick]. Manwaring found some students, who quickly sketched a layout of the school. One of the first functions upon arrival to the scene of a SWAT incident is to acquire intelligence. It is proven that an assault conducted without proper intelligence is doomed to fail before it even begins.

But the on-going situation at Columbine did not allow officers the luxury to acquire the necessary intelligence that they really needed. A hastily assembled team of ten officers from three agencies approached the building 20 minutes after Marwaring arrived on the scene, again, this is considered to be pretty quick. During the next 90 minutes, three SWAT teams made up of nearly 50 officers from four jurisdictions slowly walked through debris-filled hallways. They found hundreds of terrorized students, many barricaded in classrooms and closets. 

Manwaring said they received a lot of false information: there were as many as eight gunmen; snipers were on the roof; killers were hiding in ceilings or in heating ducts or trying to mingle with escaping students. The officers agree one of their biggest problems was communication because different agencies operated on radios set on different frequencies. At times, vital information did not reach the elements inside the school. Critics have said that may have contributed to the death of Dave Sanders, the only teacher killed in the rampage.  A student placed a sign that said "1 bleeding to death" in a window and it was spotted by police before noon. No one reached Sanders until after 1500 MDT.

After Columbine, there were many people -- inside and outside of law enforcement -- who said that the SWAT officers should've rushed in and saved Sanders. It is generally accepted by SWAT teams that if officers are unable to reach a known injured or bleeding victim in time to get them medical attention, the mission is considered a failure.

However, the Jefferson County SWAT team defended their actions by saying if officers had just rushed in and if they were ambushed -- killed or wounded -- the situation would've become more of a disaster. After running a computer scenario using similar conditions -- two gunmen, multiple hostages, one bleeding victim and a large building to be searched -- ERRI analysts have determined that the Jefferson County SWAT team is correct in their defense.

A SWAT element generally has five personnel assigned to it -- the number depends on the team. The LAPD model was used in our simulation -- The team usually comprises of an element leader, scout, rear guard and two assaulters. Analysts ran a computer simulation in which the location of the bleeding victim was known and a SWAT element was rushed directly to the victim.

About 50 percent of the time, the element was ambushed by the two gunmen. If one or two officers in the element were killed and another one or two were wounded -- a dangerous situation suddenly became an outright disaster. Rushing through a building where there are known gunmen to be without methodically and carefully threading your way to a victim is a recipe for disaster. This was proven by the computer simulation.

Was the Columbine incident handled perfectly? Probably not. But neither are most SWAT incidents that involve any kind of shooting. Murphy's law is very much alive. But the training that SWAT officers receive still can prevent a bad situation from turning into a disaster. Under the circumstances, the SWAT officers at Columbine did the best they could. That's all anyone can ask...

Letter to the Editor - 08/20/99 12:23CDT

To:  Mr. Steve Macko
       Editor, EmergencyNet News:

I just read the above Emergency Services Report, and the article on the Columbine Lessons by Mr. Macko. The LAPD and the LASD sent their SWAT tacticians to Columbine within hours of the occurrence in order to debrief the SWAT units that handled the call. The reason for this was to learn from their experiences.

LAPD SWAT immediately developed a plan called "Immediate Action Rapid Deployment" and has began training all LAPD patrol personnel on quick deployment tactics. Since patrol officers will generally be the first ones at scene, this plan will ensure their quick response to a similar situation. This training is being introduced to all LAPD patrol personnel as they currently go through refresher training on Mobile Field Force tactics in preparation for the New Year deployment. LAPD SWAT is currently finishing up the lesson plan on Immediate Action Rapid deployment to be taught to all patrol personnel, with emphasis on specific tactics to be used. This will entail another 8-hour training day for just this tactic, in the coming months.

We have learned from the Columbine incident, and now are passing those lessons to all patrol personnel as quickly as possible. The Granada Hills day care center shooting caused the responding officers to use some of the lessons learned in this training, to immediately enter the location in search of the suspect, instead of waiting for SWAT to arrive. Had the suspect been there, he would have been engaged right away.

Thanks for the good reporting.

Andre' Belotto, Sergeant, Newton Patrol Division,  Los Angeles P.D.

© EmergencyNet News Service, 1999. May be redistributed, with permission, to bona-fide law enforcement, emergency service and government agencies.

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