The tragic school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, USA, on May 24, 2022, revealed three mass shooting-related vulnerabilities facing many of our communities:

1. Many law enforcement agencies lack the specialized active shooter training needed to effectively respond to a mass shooting.

2. The nearest trauma center may be located too far from an incident, or lack the surge capacity, to provide urgently needed medical care to injured victims.

3. Many communities lack an emergency plan to provide the specialized services that victims and families need immediately following a mass shooting (and the weeks, months, and years that follow).

As a local government leader, you are uniquely positioned to ensure your first responders are trained and equipped to effectively respond to a mass shooting, and that your community is prepared to provide life-saving medical care and victim services. This article poses questions for you to consider and provides resources you can use to prepare your community for a mass shooting or other critical incident.

What Can We Learn from Uvalde?

The Uvalde shooting demonstrates the loss of life that can result when law enforcement officials fail to perform their duties. In that incident, officers arrived at the school before the shooter entered the building. They failed to stop him, which allowed the shooter to access an unlocked classroom. Armed officers waited outside the classroom for an agonizing 77 minutes while the shooter fired at children and teachers trapped inside. As a result, 19 children and two adults died, 17 others were physically injured, and a community was traumatized.

A U.S. Department of Justice report on the Uvalde response described significant and systemic law enforcement failures. Among the findings: the officers failed to follow the protocol established 25 years ago after the Columbine school shooting, namely that the first responding officers must act immediately to stop the killing rather than wait for backup. Additionally, the officers in Uvalde failed to properly identify the incident as an active shooter attack. They failed to establish incident or unified command. There were significant communication failures, including radios that were not inter-operational, a requirement since 9/11. Self-deployed officers from other agencies parked their vehicles in the road and outside the school, blocking access to ambulances and emergency vehicles and preventing them from reaching injured victims.

To be clear, all mass shootings are chaotic and deadly. An investigation commissioned by the city of Uvalde found that the Uvalde officers responded in good faith. Certainly, they risked their own lives to save the lives of students and their teachers. However, both the DOJ report and the city’s report noted inadequate training and the lack of coordination between responding agencies as significant factors in the failed response. As a result, lives that might have been saved were lost.

It is tempting to dismiss Uvalde as an isolated incident. But the law enforcement response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Parkland, Florida, USA, on February 14, 2018, also suffered from inadequate training. In fact, this vulnerability may be more widespread than is generally understood. According to John Curnutt, associate director of Advance Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT), most U.S. law enforcement agencies don’t require Active Violent Incident (AVI) training or the equivalent for their officers. Only two states, Texas and Michigan, require it by law.

Nashville’s response to the Covenant School Shooting on March 27, 2023, demonstrates the importance of active shooter training. In response to 911 calls, patrol officers arrived on the scene first, ahead of a specially trained school SWAT team. Rather than wait for the SWAT team, the officers immediately entered the building and stopped the killing within three minutes (compared to 77 minutes in Uvalde). Although three students and three adults died, many more lives were surely saved.

Chief John Drake credits the effective response to the intensive training he requires of his entire force, including himself. “I said to our community after Uvalde that if the same scenario were to occur in Nashville, our officers were going in. That’s what we have trained to do, that’s what we would do, and, on March 27, 2023, that’s what we did. I continue to grieve with my community the six precious innocent lives we lost that day. At the same time, I am so incredibly proud of our officers, some of whom rushed in to engage the threat, while others located victims, scooped them up into their arms, and sprinted out of the building to awaiting ambulances....”

Does Your Law Enforcement Agency Require Active Shooter Training?

As city/county manager, you can exercise your oversight authority to ensure your first responders are prepared. Meet with your chief of police or sheriff to convey your expectation that the entire force—including new recruits, veteran patrol officers, and the chief—have AVI training, or the active shooter equivalent, as soon as is practicable.

Respectfully consider your chief’s assurances that current training is sufficient but take the time to verify. According to Curnutt, at a minimum, the training should include:

1. Tactical skills needed to immediately stop an active shooter.

2. Basics of incident command and building a command structure.

3. Tactical emergency casualty care to stabilize injured victims.

4. A protocol to manage self-deployed law enforcement agencies.

The minimum length and frequency of AVI training is 16 hours for every officer every two years, but Curnutt recommends additional interim training to hone critical skills and build muscle memory.

ALERRT (alerrt.org) is an important resource in your effort to ensure your force is fully trained. It is a federally funded training and research organization based at Texas State University. Importantly, ALERRT trainers provide AVI training to law enforcement agencies across the country at no charge. However, training the entire force may require supplemental municipal funding to pay for overtime and related expenses.

In addition to AVI training, your law enforcement agency requires proper equipment. This includes officer-fitted bulletproof vests, portable rifle-rated shields, an appropriate rifle for every officer, radios that are inter-operational with the local fire and emergency medical response agency, and tactical medical kits. Although the need to avoid militarizing our nation’s police is a valid concern, this gear protects the lives of our officers.

Ask your chief what is needed to provide the required AVI training and equipment. Then work with your mayor and local elected officials to deliver it.

What Is Your Protocol for Treating the Critically Wounded?

The most frequent cause of preventable death from an injury is serious bleeding. According to the CDC, an injured person with a compromised artery can bleed out within three to five minutes. In the past, EMTs were trained to wait until an emergency scene was secured by law enforcement before providing medical assistance. As a result, many victims died before EMTs could reach them.

Now, law enforcement officials can and should be trained to provide tactical emergency casualty care, such as applying tourniquets and covering chest wounds, to stabilize severely injured victims until they can be transported to a medical facility (sometimes by police car). This is an important component of AVI training. Similar stop-the-bleed training can also be provided to teachers and other community members.

Additionally, consider establishing a rescue task force (RTF) for your community. A joint RTF team composed of police and EMTs can be deployed to provide point-of-injury care to victims in the “warm zone” (i.e., when there is an ongoing threat). EMTs treat, stabilize, and remove the injured while wearing protective gear under the protection of law enforcement. Understand your community’s fire/EMT protocol, and modify it if necessary, to ensure that police and fire officials/EMTs work and train together to provide these basic, but critical, medical services.

Where Is the Nearest Trauma Center?

A key tenet of trauma care is reducing time from point of injury to initial and definitive care to improve the survival rate of severely injured patients. Some experts believe the time limit for surviving serious injuries without trauma care may be as short as 30 minutes. In Uvalde, several physically injured victims survived the shooting but later died because they did not receive the medical care they required in time.

Your goal is to understand where victims in your community will go for trauma care and how they will be transported. Precision coordination with multiple medical facilities (possibly across state lines) may be required to save the lives of multiple victims. Consider discussing hospital destinations and capabilities with your local medical command and control system. Include local law enforcement leaders and other agencies that may be involved in victim transport in these discussions, as these first responders do not interact with medical command as readily as emergency medical systems (EMS).

If your community is located in a “trauma desert,” the lack of access to trauma care after a mass shooting can lead to higher mortality rates. In rural areas, on islands, or in other geographically hard-to-reach areas, the nearest trauma center may be more than 30 minutes away. Even urban areas with Level 1 and 2 trauma centers can be a “desert” if the hospitals lack the surge capacity to handle a large number of seriously injured victims. In trauma deserts, alternative systems must be in place to shorten the time to critically needed initial medical interventions.

As previously noted, training and equipping first responders and community members to provide hemorrhage control can help stabilize victims until they can be transported to a medical facility. Proper training also ensures that self-deployed law enforcement agencies don’t block roadways, which can hinder the transport of victims to medical centers.

In trauma center deserts, local hospitals may become the receiving facility for mass shooting victims by default, and therefore should prepare for mass casualty events. Their role will be to adequately stabilize and transfer these patients to higher levels of care.

Finally, consider initiating conversations and public-private partnerships with trauma centers and local hospitals to encourage the development of surge capacity. These relationships, though complicated because of the public-private sector divide, should be established before communities are faced with a mass casualty incident.

Is Your Community Ready to Provide Victim Services?

Ensuring your community is prepared to provide appropriate non-medical services to victims and their families in the aftermath of a mass shooting is a significant undertaking that requires advance planning.

Your law enforcement agency will likely establish the first victim response center (often called the family and friends center or family notification center).^* This is where families can be reunited with their loved ones or receive death notifications. However, the victims and families usually require ongoing support. A family assistance center (FAC) should be established to provide a range of services for the weeks following an incident. Ideally, the FAC is followed by a longer-term resiliency center (RC) or trauma recovery center (TRC) to provide long-term support.

Planning these services requires a multi-disciplinary approach. Meet with the representatives of your local public health agencies, the FBI Victim Services Division, local victim advocates (found in the office of the district attorney and/or police departments), the American Red Cross, and community-based organizations to develop a plan to provide victim and family services.

The federal Office of Victims of Crime funds the National Mass Violence Center, which can help your community prepare for a collaborative response to mass shootings. The NMVC’s 16 Best Practices help guide communities through the steps needed to prepare for a mass violence incident.

Are Your First Responders Training with Neighboring Communities?

Improving coordination with neighboring communities and mutual aid partners is also an important priority. Discuss the need for AVI training with the city leaders of neighboring communities; their law enforcement agencies will likely respond to your mass shooting and vice versa. Coordinate a multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional active shooter drill to test the ability of your first responders to establish a unified command structure, coordinate with mutual aid partners, and manage self-deployed officers. Depending on your community’s emergency operations plan, you may be called to serve as the incident commander of the entire emergency scene following a mass shooting. In that case, your role is critical to managing every facet of the operation, including police, fire/EMS, communications, victim support, and more.

Understanding what the law enforcement response should look like will allow you and your mayor to monitor an actual critical incident. You will need to intervene if significant problems emerge, such as the failure of law enforcement to establish incident command, which happened in Uvalde.

Is Your Mayor Ready?

A separate training should be held with the mayor and other local leaders to ensure they understand their role during the response to a mass shooting. For an overview of the mayor’s role, see the article, “Until We Find a Way to Prevent Mass Shootings, Your City Needs to Prepare,” from PM Magazine.

It is worth noting that Nashville Mayor John Cooper’s office prepared before the Covenant School shooting. As Kristin Wilson, Nashville’s COO, later explained, “As much as we might wish for it not to be so, it’s critically important for cities to prepare for the possibility of an active shooter incident.” Wilson scheduled a briefing with city staff and my organization, UnitedOnGuns, to better understand the city’s role in response to a mass shooting. She directed her team to review our resources, the Mass Shooting Protocol & Playbook. She later organized a tabletop exercise. When Wilson received the dreadful call that a mass shooting was underway at the Covenant School, she went to the office, picked up the playbook, and went straight to the school. Wilson said that she, Mayor Cooper, and other staff members referred to the resources throughout the response.

What’s in Your Toolkit?

In 2020, UnitedOnGuns, a nonpartisan initiative of the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University, interviewed mayors and staff from six cities who had responded to a mass shooting. Our focus was the role of city leaders during the response. We used the best practices of these city leaders combined with resources developed by the CDC, the FBI, and other federal agencies to develop resources that city managers can use to plan for, respond to, and recover from mass shootings.

To bolster local preparedness, we developed a Preparedness Checklist, which summarizes the key actions a city should take to ensure a unified response. The checklist recommends the following actions to ensure a unified response: (1) plan crisis communications; (2) ensure law enforcement agencies are prepared; (3) prepare to provide victim services; (4) support the needs of staff and first responders before an incident; and (5) schedule a tabletop exercise.

The Tabletop Exercise Template can be used alongside the Preparedness Checklist to plan the city’s unified response to a mass shooting. The template, developed in cooperation with the city of Orlando, provides helpful guidelines for organizing a tabletop exercise focusing on specific goals to work toward. An annual exercise will help city agencies, stakeholders, and multiple jurisdictions determine their roles and clarify how they will cooperate.

To aid in the response to a mass shooting, we developed the Mass Shooting Protocol  and the Mass Shooting Playbook: A Resource for U.S. Mayors and City Managers. The protocol is a checklist that highlights the key responsibilities of a mayor or city manager during the first 24 hours after a mass shooting. The playbook is a comprehensive resource that city leaders can use to prepare for, respond to, and help their communities recover from a mass shooting. These and other key resources for city leaders are available free of charge on our website, unitedonguns.org.

The burden of responding to a mass shooting rests largely on the shoulders of city leaders. However, the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention (O/GVP) recently announced an initiative to help coordinate support provided by federal agencies to cities responding to a mass shooting. Contact O/GVP or the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs for more information.

^* The term “Family Reunification Center” is still used by law enforcement, but victim advocates recommend against using it because it suggests victims will be reunited with their families. This may not happen, adding further trauma to their experience.

SARAH C. PECK is director of UnitedOnGuns, an initiative of the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University School of Law.

Learn more about mass shooting preparedness at the 2024 ICMA Annual Conference session, “It’s Not If but When: Critical Incident and Mass Shooting Preparedness for City Managers,” on September 22 at 11:45 a.m.