By With three school shootings throughout the country in the month of October alone, University Police are taking measures to educate students and faculty at California State University Long Beach, even flipping over desks.
Sgt. Keith Caires of the CSULB University Police demonstrated how a desk could be used to barricade a door in the event of a school shooting during a workshop held Tuesday.
Caires said that active shooting training is becoming more and more important in law enforcement as school shootings are taking place more frequently. He went over the university’s plan in the case of an active shooting, along with prevention methods.
“Active shooting situations are low frequency, but high impact,” said Caires as he went over many active shooting events such as the CSU Fullerton shooting in 1976, the Seal Beach shooting in 2011 and the Isla Vista shootings in 2014.
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Run:
- If you can find an escape path, try to leave.
- Evacuate whether others agree to or not.
- Leave your personal belongings behind.
- Keep others from going into danger.
- Call 911 when you’re safe.
Hide:
- Stay out of the shooter’s view.
- Your hiding place should be able to protect you from fired shots.
- Don’t trap yourself or restrict your options.
Fight:
- Try to incapacitate the shooter.
- Act with aggression.
- Improvise weapons
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“I don’t know the numbers, so I can’t say whether the number of shootings have gone up or not,” Caires said. “But what I can say is that the world has shrunk, news has become 24/7 so everyone is more aware of what is happening.”
According to an FBI study released in 2014, mass shootings had increased dramatically in frequency between 2000 and 2013.
Caires showed a video that simplified what to do in an active shooter situation into three words: run, hide and fight.
According to the video, which can be found on the University Police Department’s web page, a person should try to escape the location when the shooting begins.
“If you can leave, leave!” Caires said.
He said the less people that stay in a location under attack, the less people police have to worry about. If there were to be an active shooter on CSULB’s campus, Caires recommended leaving.
If escaping isn’t an option, then hide.
“Typically, active shooters don’t breach,” said Caires when suggesting that a person hide behind a locked door and stay out of sight. “Shooters will want to take the path of least resistance; they know the police are coming, they don’t have time to problem solve.”
But Caires warned the audience that there might be situations in which the shooter will try to go into a locked room and in that case, doors and windows should be barricaded or trapped.
There will be rare occasions when a person may have to confront a shooter and in those occasions they will have to improvise with weapons and attack with intent, Caires said.
“The best time to attack is when a shooter is reloading,” said Caires. “A student at [Seattle Pacific University] pepper sprayed a shooter while he was reloading, it doesn’t take an army to take down a gunman.”
Caires not only spoke about what to do during an active shooting, but also how to prevent it. “It’s better to be safe than sorry,” Caires said. “We would rather receive a lot of false alarms than have an actual active shooting on campus.”
Caires informed the audience that the Campus Assessment, Response and Evaluation for Students Team is available to anyone who thinks someone may be a threat to other students or faculty. The CARES Team investigates and monitors potential or actual threats posed to the campus community.
“[Our active shooter plan] wasn’t recently formed,” Caires said. “It’s been in place for quite some time and it just evolves with every new catastrophe … It’s important that everyone know what to do if there is a shooting situation, because one person who knows what to do can make the difference.”
