Three massage spas. A supermarket. An office building. Those were the sites of three of the mass shooting incidents in the US in March, 2021. In the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia. In the college town of Boulder, Colorado. In the affluent small city of Orange, California.
By this time in American history, no one can justifiably think about mass shootings and say, “It couldn’t happen here.” They happen in every part of the country. They happen in entertainment venues, schools and universities, homes, and workplaces. They happened 611 times in 2020.
ICE Safety Solutions has been training corporate employees on active shooter response since 2012. ICE CEO Pamela Isom and I connected through our network of certified woman-owned business enterprises. ICE is also a certified minority-owned business enterprise. I asked her whether the decision to add active shooter training to her menu of safety and emergency response trainings was driven by client requirements.
That played a role, she said, but the primary driver was a sense of moral obligation. As the incidence of armed intruders in workplaces is becoming more frequent than natural disasters, how could she not help employees learn how to survive this type of emergency?
So Pam and her staff got certified to teach the A.L.I.C.E. (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate) method of responding to a violent intruder incident. They help employees to understand the Intruder’s O.O.D.A (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) Loop so they can act to Run-Hide-Fight. Given ICE’s expertise in medical training, they include a Stop the Bleed training unit.
I asked Pam whether employers were eager or hesitant to provide the training to their employees. She said that employers don’t want employees to be scared, but know that they have to confront this risk.
So ICE makes the training empowering rather than scary. Participants learn and sing the superhero song. They dig into their fight or flight instinct. The trainers expose the participants to gunshot sounds: participants need to become acclimated to the sound so they do not freeze in a real event. They learn how to run in a zigzag pattern. The most important element of the training is repetition. How to respond well needs to get into the muscle memory of the participants.
I imagined that participants’ emotional barriers would make this training a difficult one to present. Pam told me that the participants want to be there. They are not just showing up because they have to. She takes them from fear to empowerment. She teaches them that fear is false excuses appearing real. She also makes the participants laugh. For example, during an exercise where everyone in the room is running zigzag and looking for hiding places, Pam throws foam balls with smiley faces at them to simulate gunfire.
The training has evolved over time. The game changer in effective and flexible training presentation has been virtual reality. Using a VR headset, participants experience seeing the shooter, getting shot at, and the sound of gunfire. They experience the story as Pam tells it to them. ICE began offering VR training for many of its trainings in 2017. It played a big role in helping the company survive the widespread shutdown of workplaces in 2020. ICE simply began shipping the VR headsets to employees’ homes. This enabled them to have the full experience of a live training during a time when gathering in workplaces was not safe. It also increased the number of people who could experience the training, as employees could share the VR experience with their family members before returning the headset.
What is the impact on participants of active shooter training? Pam says that they learn that they have nothing to fear but fear itself. They are no longer afraid of an armed intruder in the workplace because now they know what to do. They develop situational awareness.
Employers who are interested in preparing their staff for an active shooter situation can learn more about ICE Safety Solutions at www.getice.com
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