Preparing for the Unimaginable: Campus officials and law enforcement share their plan for an active assailant crisis
Photo courtesy of John Stabler at the Ohio University Police Department.
This story was written in collaboration with Backdrop magazine for Vol. 15 Issue 1 by TNP Staff Writer Eric Boll and Backdrop Writer Abby Neff.
As students return to Ohio University’s campus this fall, many wonder what will be different about the school year. There will be masks, incentives to get vaccinated and maybe the faint feeling of the way things were before. One aspect of pre-pandemic life that has not waned is the threat of gun violence on college campuses.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, an online database that collects daily reports of gun violence incidents in the United States, there were 611 mass shootings in 2020. The Congressional Research Service defines a mass shooting as a firearm incident that kills four or more people. There were almost 200 more mass shootings that occurred in 2020 than in 2019. The number keeps rising. The latest data from the GVA reports there have already been 443 mass shootings as of Aug. 18, 2021.
Some of the deadliest mass shootings in 2021 include shootings at two salons in Atlanta, Georgia in March, when a white man opened fire and killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent. Another shooting that occurred in March happened at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado where the gunman killed 10 people and two injured, including the suspect.
Although a shooting has not occurred at a school or on a university campus this year, the threat continues to concern parents and students. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2018 found that 57% of teen students they spoke to were concerned about a shooting happening at their school.
Ohio U’s active shooter response plan is available on the “Emergency Response Plan” website. Students, faculty and parents can find links to several plans, including bomb threats, fire emergencies and civil demonstrations. According to Ohio U’s active shooter plan, students and faculty should move to a room that can be locked if an assailant is inside or outside the building. If the assailant enters the room, Ohio U advises that it might be possible to negotiate with the shooter. The plan said that overpowering the shooter should be a last resort.
Joe McLaughlin has been working at Ohio U for over 25 years and serves as the vice president of Ohio U’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). He supports the university response plan and cites his faith in the Ohio University Police Department as one of the reasons for that belief. McLaughlin said he believes that the training offered by the university is a worthwhile experience but professors struggle to find time to attend training.
“The University is, all the time, making more and more demands on faculty time that takes them away from their primary duties of teaching and research,” McLaughlin said. “This training seems like it's worthwhile and should be a priority, but I suspect many see it as another straw added to an already burdensome load.”
As a previous chair of Faculty Senate, McLaughlin spoke about actions Faculty Senate took against legislation in the Ohio Senate that would allow concealed carry of firearms on college campuses.
“The campus seemed pretty united against this, and I know many faculty were quite scared about the possibility of students in classes or office hours carrying a gun. Some even told me they would consider ending face-to-face office hours,” McLaughlin said.
The coronavirus pandemic kept students and faculty from gathering, which meant that campus was mostly empty. As students and faculty begin to fill up classrooms and campus spaces, local and campus law enforcement are preparing to protect its residents.
For students and faculty to protect themselves, law enforcement offers training for civilians in the case of an active assailant event.
Officer John Stabler has been an instructor with OUPD for 15 years and teaches active aggressor training courses. Stabler describes Ohio U’s active aggressor training as a mix of multiple popular training courses.
“We have our old ALICE training video online, it stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Escape,” Stabler said. “That is what we used to do but now … we have an active aggressor program that covers components of ALICE as well as the CRASE [Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events] program from Texas State University. It allows us to mold our training to better fit our community.”
The Active Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center at Texas State University developed CRASE training for schools, businesses, and community members. According to ALERRT’s website, the training is based on the strategy “Avoid, Deny, Defend.” The plan is broken down into three parts. The individual should move away from the threat as soon as possible. If the individual can’t escape the situation, he or she should build barriers and turn off the lights to deny the threat access to the space. Finally, if avoiding and denying the threat does not work, ALERRT said the individual must fight back, and he or she should not fight fairly.
Stabler hopes to see an increase in people going through the training and is working with the university to offer training to more students.
“We don’t want folks to be paranoid, we want them to be informed,” Stalber said.
Training sessions are free to the public. Anyone can reach out to OUPD to schedule a training session. Stabler said around a thousand people went through the active aggressor training in 2019.
In addition to training available to the public for active aggressor incidents, OUPD participates in its own training with APD, Athens County Sheriff and the State Highway Patrol to be better prepared for a crisis.
Athens Police Department Captain Ralph Harvey said despite the suspension of in-person collaboration with the OUPD, both forces train for active assailant events together.
Stabler said this training came in use when someone reported an active shooter in the Bromley Hall dormitory in 2019.
“Officers arrived within seconds of each other and worked their way up the stairs. As they came up out of the stairs, they heard screaming and found a group out in the hallway being loud and playing around,” Stabler said. “They cleared that floor and the rest of the building and came back to them.”
“Low and behold, they found it was just them playing around. The noise the caller had heard wasn’t a gunshot. It was a quick and smooth operation.”
Harvey said APD trains officers to respond in several ways, whether that is in a team or individually. If there was an active assailant event on campus, he said OUPD would take the lead.
“The handful of gun violence that we’ve had in Athens in the recent past have been situations that resolve themselves much quicker than a formal callout for SRT or another department,” he said. “But all the departments monitor each other.”
OUPD maintains constant contact with other law enforcement about Ohio U’s academic schedule and evacuation plans. Stabler said some buildings’ evacuation plans depend on the capacity of campus buildings and the time of day the active assailant could enter.
“We subscribe to an active response to active assailant, or active attacker type-of-event,” Harvey said.
Harvey said the former training for an active assailant was similar to training for a bank robbery: to contain the incident, wait for specialized units, such as a Special Response Team or a Special Weapons and Tactics unit. He said law enforcement were still using that method when he started as an officer in 1995.
Originally, APD trained its officers to respond to active attacks in teams of four. Harvey said response is no longer the primary method.
“Even that is too slow to somebody that is actively firing a weapon,” Harvey said.
Instead, the first officer who arrives at the scene is expected to assess the best plan of action. Harvey said an officer can decide to enter an active shooter situation by themself if it is necessary.
Other officers and law enforcement arriving at a scene with an active assailant are expected to form a perimeter around the area. The goal is to prevent more violence from spreading, as well as keeping people from entering an unresolved situation and getting hurt.
The most unique active assailant event Harvey said he has responded to on Ohio U’s campus was behind Tiffin Hall, a dormitory on campus. The assailant was hitting a bench with a battle axe.
“And [the assailant] fled before they [officers] could get him contained or before anyone else arrived,” he said. “So, we actually never did find him.”
Another violent incident that Harvey witnessed in Athens happened when a person was armed with a knife at a bar. He was there with one other officer, and the assailant had injured themselves and one other individual. Harvey tased the individual.
“There are situations where you would be justified or legally allowed to shoot the individual or use deadly force, but you can’t … because it’s just too crowded,” he said.
Despite the rare incidents of violence on campus, there is one event every year when state, county and local law enforcement gather in Athens: Halloween weekend.
“We also have an advantage in that we work at least once a year with every public safety entity in the county, if not larger,” Harvey said. “Meaning, Halloween is essentially a mass event at some level that we plan for every year … It’s basically a dress rehearsal for a major event.”
In the past, there have been several incidents of violent crime. Harvey said there was a knife attack at a hotel one year, and someone fired a gun in Uptown Athens another year. At one point, law enforcement was arresting over a hundred people in one weekend.
Harvey said the crime and arrest rates during Halloween weekend are “a shadow” of what they once were.
“Halloween is nowhere near what it used to be,” he said.
However, the event is an example of how closely law enforcement agencies work together.
“We do a lot of coordination, but a lot of it is completely informal,” he said. “The officers and supervisors for Ohio U and Athens work whatever it is out to assist with each other as much as they can.”
