It is that time of year for my organization, time for our annual active assailant training rotations and I am frustrated that this must be a requirement in today's world. No one is immune to it, not our kids in school, not our elderly in assisted living facilities, not the sick in hospitals, this is a problem that can find anyone anywhere. Yeah, for the most part, I think we do a pretty good job with active assailant response, yeah there are some issues with gaining initial command and control but overall, we're pretty good at taking down the bad guy. But that’s not a successful outcome for this problem, is it? Just ask the many loved ones of the incident victims, they don’t see the response as a success. This book discusses a way we can win this fight by identifying and engaging suspects before they ever commit the act. This book explores the efforts of the Threat Response Group(s) (TRG) and their efforts to stop active assailant incidents. But it takes a whole community to prevent this problem through behavior monitoring and reporting, intelligence gathering and sharing, profiling, and early intervention. This is no easy undertaking, and the impacts of their efforts may never be known because success means nothing happened. When police take down an active assailant it makes headlines, when a troubled mind is deterred from a path of destruction onto a constructive path no one ever hears about it. These folk out there doing this thankless work are some real heroes.
Takeaways
It's going to take a combination of early intervention and access to mental healthcare, controlled access to high-risk areas, deterrence, and response to control this active assailant threat.
Intelligence gathering, sharing, and early intervention are essential to identifying, monitoring, and redirecting would-be assailants.
This effort takes the whole community, and it requires everyone to be vigilant and willing to report anything that does not seem right. There always seems to be someone on the news after an incident who says something like “I knew there was something off about that guy” If only they had reported that gut feeling the incident might have been avoided. But I know that can be a slippery slope leading to a “Big Brother” society, we just need to find the effective sweet spot.