It’s 4:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. Unlike a typical Wednesday, I had decided to take the day off to spend time with my three- and six-year-old children while my spouse is away for work. My phone dings, indicating a text message. The team at the office knows that the best way to get ahold of me during my off time is with a call, so I assume it must be something trivial. With that, I go back to our game of catch.

Then, a phone call. I see that it’s the police lieutenant and quickly pick up. With barely a “hello” uttered, the lieutenant starts without missing a beat. “Our officers were involved in a shooting at the local grocery store. Two individuals were shot. Those are the details I have right now.”

After hanging up the phone, I paused to reflect on my next actions. There wasn’t time to reach out to peers for guidance or to search for articles on how to handle this situation. I knew I had to first take care of my family and get them off to relatives for the evening in order to be able to assist our team. Thankfully, those moments of prepping my children for a sleepover at their grandparents’ house and the drive into the office provided a critical resource—reflection time.

The actions I took next and am sharing with you are not intended to cover any or all of the possibilities and nuances involved in an officer-involved shooting. Rather, this is intended to be a simple guideline to help frame thoughts on how to best respond to the situation. Some of these strategies are items that you can do now, others will depend on the moment and the facts surrounding the case, and some actions will have to take place after the event.

Prepare Now

1. Train your staff.

We regularly and continually train on large mass disaster incidents, but until the moment comes, you will not likely know what short comings your team has. For example, what is your EMS strategy on responding to hot zones? Warm zones? How will this be communicated on ground? Who does the EMS incident commander need to find in order to have unified or joint command with the police? Most of these are items that can be ironed out by actively training together across departments.

2. Train your electeds.

Do your elected officials know where to go in the event of an emergency? Will they show up on scene and start talking to the media? Do your electeds know what they are allowed to say to the media and when? How will you respond when an elected official leaks information to the media or goes on camera?

3. Train yourself.

If you haven’t spoken with your police or fire about these incidents to ask where they would like you staged, now would be a good time to do so. In our case, the advice of our team is to establish a secondary command post at the police station where communication can flow via radio and where media can be staged for interviews.

Speaking of which, if you are fortunate enough to have a public safety radio on your desk, it would be good to test your ability to navigate the channels and to see its range of operability. Our team quickly shifted to an area-wide communication channel, which was stated one time. If we missed that communication or did not know how to navigate to the channel, then we would have missed vital information as the scene developed.

4. Have a policy.

While the details of each policy are going to be agency dependent, our policy specifically places any officer involved in a shooting directly on administrative leave with pay until an internal investigation can be completed.

It was helpful to havethis policy already in place when speaking with the local police union representatives. It allowed us to provide the media with a matter-of-fact statement that prevented the media stories from being focused on discipline. We were even able to share the policy with the media, showing its adoption date to further prove that it was not a result of discipline.

Our policy also states that the officers involved cannot provide their statement on the incident until a minimum of three days after the incident. Studies have shown that individuals involved in a traumatic event will initially repress memories that start to return over a 72-hour time period. In our case, one of the officers mentioned that they did not recall the first 10 seconds of what happened until three days later.

Finally, will you let your officers watch the body cam footage prior to writing their statements? Our policy did not address this issue and it’s an area we are looking to address in a revised policy. Further, what policies do you have on who has access to the body cam footage and will it be locked down to just a few individuals within the police? In our case, only the chief of police had direct access to the footage, which was then turned over to an outside agency for investigation. This was an area of contention for our elected officials, as one of them demanded that they be shown the footage. Using our policies as our guideposts, we did not share those details to protect the investigation.

In the Moment

1. Start the phone tree.

After situating my children in front of the TV with a show to watch, the first thing I did was to inform my elected board of the incident. With a three-member board that all wants the information immediately, I started by sending a text message to each of them with the same information and then calling them one by one after. I am generally aware that our elected board has several media contacts, which meant that I had to be somewhat careful as to what information I provided. In my mind, certain elements of plausible deniability could be beneficial. After calling each elected, I committed to a timeframe by which I would provide them their next update. This helped to mitigate constant calls and texts to me for more information and allowed me the space to call our township attorney, assistant administrators, and communications team.

2. Hand off the investigation.

This may not apply if you have a large department or nuances in your state law. However, removing bias is extremely important in an officer-involved shooting to ensure that the details and circumstances related to the incident are reviewed by folks that do not know the officers involved. In our case, we called the State Bureau of Criminal Investigations, which had already handled over 100 officer-involved shootings in the first five months of that year.

3. Isolate involved employees.

Once the incident has stabilized, the officers that discharged their firearms should be isolated to protect the integrity of the internal investigation. If possible, they should be removed from the scene and secluded in a non-threatening area. It’s okay for employees to be in that area as long as those involved are not together, which is going to be difficult as the officers involved will likely want to process the situation together. Bear in mind that where you isolate the officers will have an effect on their mental health. In a prior incident years ago, an officer was isolated to the area where we hold prisoners on a temporary basis. This sent a negative message to the employee, and it’s something they are still processing decades later. With this current incident, we established different employee offices as locations for where all three involved employees would be separately held.

4. Show up.

The easiest thing you can do is to just be present. You may not provide a lot of insight in the moment, but your presence will help to reassure staff that you are physically there for them. Also, make sure the officers call their families. Their families will be extremely worried, and that phone call can go a long way in reminding them of what is important. Finally, if you have time, pick up a pizza or two. The initial response to the event will likely take hours and the employees involved may not have had a chance to eat since the start of their shift.

5. Call the union.

While we all may not always get along, it is important to call the union, if applicable. They will appreciate that you are open with them and will likely be able to provide additional resources to help the employee. Further, this call will give you a chance to set expectations about next steps and return-to-work protocols.

6. Consider public records.

Each state has unique public records laws. There will be a lot of requests for information, reports, and body camera footage. Also, the personnel files for the involved employees will be requested and anything bad in their history will come out. We immediately assigned staff to start pulling and redacting personnel files. We also made our communications team aware of any issues that might be negatively highlighted in the media. Finally, we also made sure that everyone that fills records requests across the organization was in the loop on redaction requirements, information that is or is not public record, and timelines for filling requests.

Following the Incident

1. Prepare mentally for the media circus.

I found that the media was calling me, along with everyone in senior leadership, for the better part of four days. They demanded information. They demanded updates. They used every strategy in the book, including suggesting that they were going to publish a story about how obstinate we were if we didn’t give them what they asked for. To say our patience was tested by the media would be an understatement. Our communications team got together early to discuss strategy and we decided to reveal as much as possible in the moment. After that, we had to rely on the local prosecutor and outside investigation team to determine what could be released and when.

2. Conduct an after-action meeting.

Getting all department leaders and a layer or two of your police command team together in the days following the incident will allow your team to work through any issues that arose during the incident and to plan for ways to address those issues should another incident arise. In our case, we followed a simple agenda:

A. Discussion of on-scene tactics.

B. Discussion of communication.

C. Discussion of post-scene clean-up and release.

D. Other items.

This meeting lasted nearly two hours and we identified a number of ways in which we could improve our response. The two most impactful things we learned:

• We could have freed up more resources if we had our public services team assist with road closures and traffic control.

• Our fire department did not have a radio with police channels.

3. Thank everyone.

Keep a list along the way. There will be a lot of people that will help in the moment, and they should be recognized for their work. Whether it is the police clerk who stayed over and worked an extra eight hours, the on-scene sergeant, or even EMS squads that responded to assist the wounded, everyone that played a role should be recognized and thanked for the help the provided.

Conclusion

When you’re faced with a situation like an officer-involved shooting, your every action must be purposeful. Take the time now to plan out strategies for your response. It’s critical to think about what you can do to ensure that you and your staff are prepared ahead of time, how you should respond in the moment, and how you should navigate the days and weeks that follow. If and when the time comes, being able to rely on established polices and procedures will make all the difference.

JEFF WECKBACH is township administrator of Colerain Township, Ohio, USA.