Ep 105: Executing Many Tasks
Episode 105
Published Feb 10, 2025
Last updated Apr 23, 2026
Duration: 32:08
Episode Summary
Ever wondered how first responders juggle competing demands in high-stakes situations? This episode reveals the art of balancing threat neutralization with casualty care, showing how integrated training and synchronized actions can make all the difference in crisis management.
Episode Notes
In Episode 105, our panelists explore how the order of actions can significantly impact the effectiveness of emergency response to active shooter events. Doing things in the right order simultaneously can ultimately save lives. Key topics covered in this episode include:
- The crucial role of proper task prioritization in crisis management
- How law enforcement and medical teams coordinate their efforts
- The challenges of balancing threat neutralization with casualty care
- The importance of quickly establishing staging areas and managing resources
- How integrated training improves coordination between different response teams
We also discuss the use of checklists to ensure proper sequencing and manage the complexity of the response. This episode offers valuable insights into the intricate world of active shooter response, highlighting how strategic planning and coordination can make a substantial difference in high-stakes situations. Join us to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities involved in active shooter response and learn how proper sequencing can transform chaos into a well-orchestrated, life-saving operation.
ASIM Checklist in 60 sec - https://youtube.com/shorts/avTgt0orB4g
View this episode on YouTube at https://youtu.be/HIDjFnvu21M
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:When you're responding to an active shooter event or trying to manage an active shooter event, does the order in which you do things matter? That's today's topic. Stick around.
Welcome to "The Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast." My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. I am joined by three other of our instructors here at the National Center for Integrated Emergency Response. I got Coby Briehn on our law enforcement and medical side across table from me. Coby, good to have you back in.
Coby Briehn:
Hey, thanks for having me, Bill. Appreciate it.
Bill Godfrey:
And Adam Pendley, an old veteran here of the podcast back in. Good to see you again, Adam.
Adam Pendley:
Nice to be here. Thank you.
Bill Godfrey:
And Juan Atan on the fire/EMS side, like myself. Juan, good to have you back.
Juan Atan:
Thank you for having me.
Bill Godfrey:
So today's topic is sequencing our actions and the order in which we do things. Does it matter or do we just need to get everything done right now? Adam?
Adam Pendley:
Well, certainly it matters as far as your initial response. Some actions that have to happen right away. There's gonna be a lot to do. You know, if this type of call comes out, you know that there's gonna be a lot of things that have to happen from start to finish, and you can't do them all at once, right? So, you know, on the law enforcement side, one of the very first actions is to try to get there, size up the situation, engage, and make sure that others that are following on know what you're seeing, and hearing, and moving towards the active threat.
That's kind of sequence number one, you know, in all of this. But keeping in mind, and I'll let my, you know, folks with more fire and EMS experience happen. Simultaneously, those resources are toned out as well, right? So simultaneously there's some first actions that they're going to take. So law enforcement's going to the scene to do that initial active threat response, whereas fire/EMS is dispatched at the same time, and there's certain first actions they're gonna take. And then, you know, other stuff obviously happens in sequence after that.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, we talk about our priorities. Priority number one is active threat. Priority number two is rescue of the injured. Priority number three is then clearing and returning the area to a safe condition. And we can do more than one thing at a time. But when you're shorthanded, and you got right now, right now, problems, you refer back to active threat, rescue, clear. So Coby as we get the first one or two contact teams down range or moving down range to deal with the threat, what needs to happen on the incident management side coming above that?
Coby Briehn:
They need to, one, listen to what's needed and kind of projecting out, like, they have been there before, which they probably should have. If they're at that level, they probably either trained for the being the contact teams that have moved on, progressed on till they've gotten to that level, and they know what the contact team's doing, and they're just listening, and kind of evaluating what would I do if I was in that? And just providing that general nudge that, have you thought of this? Have you done this? And securing that and listening for the important statuses is kind of what we determine is what's the suspect status? And that's gonna determined when we could move on. And then asking for that. You know, are they isolated, distracted, neutralized? Are they gone? Any one of those things that are built in, that determines when we could start bringing in, when LE will start bringing in that RTF, those medical assets to augment their response inside and start tasking that with the clear and the evacuation, right?
Bill Godfrey:
So Adam, you got the contact teams. Got one or two contact teams down range, and they're dealing with priorty number one, which is the active threat. Right behind them, the management structure's gotta start standing up, you know, and hit with a tactical. Why is that so important? Why does that order matter?
Adam Pendley:
Sure, so I'm just gonna extend on everything Coby just said, that the one part of the sequence that should not happen is that every law enforcement resource from the first on the scene to any supervisors to follow on officers, if they all go inside and they all try to do one job, none of the other jobs are gonna get done. So all those things that Coby's listening for, like what is the status of the active threat? Let's communicate with our fire/EMS partners. Let's start preparing for rescue, right? That's things that you can do simultaneously. If every resource on the scene runs in the front door, nobody's preparing for those other things and no one's preparing for contingencies, right?
So again, the proper sequence is to let enough resources, but the right number of resources go do job number one, dealing with the active threat. And then starting to add that management structure right away, you know, using the fifth man concept, that fifth officer. It may not be the exact fifth number, but it's somebody that stays put to start managing all of the follow on resources and all the other jobs that you're gonna get done. And some of those happen in sequence. Some of 'em happen simultaneously. But they have to happen. That's the most important thing about getting your sequencing right.
Bill Godfrey:
So Juan, you got contact teams. You got, you know, one or two contact teams standing up, going down range. We've got a tactical position that stood up and staffed. The very next task that we call for in the checklist is staging. Why is staging so important? Why that early? Why does it matter?
Juan Atan:
Well, staging is your resource, is basically that secret sauce as we mentioned. 'Cause that's what's gonna get us the resources needed to get the mission accomplished for us. So getting that staging, and as Adam said, you don't want everybody going to the location. Yes, everybody wants to play in the sandbox, like they mentioned, but you have to put that break on. If you got that fifth person already taking care of the tactical portion, now we got the staging.
Okay, let's start staging and see what resources are needed and when they're needed and make sure that they're there for when the next actions begin to set up those rescue task forces. We have that staging readily available and don't have to wait for those assets to come in.
Bill Godfrey:
And you know, I think to extend on that, Juan, there are some communities that have ample resources and they can dump a lot of resources in a short period of time.
Juan Atan:
Yes.
Bill Godfrey:
They're the exception, not the rule. Most communities are going to have limited resources. And at the time that you're trying to respond, and understand this thing, and get your arms around it, you need to make sure that the few resources you've got are doing the tasks that you need done right now. And that's part of the role of staging is that task and purpose to assign.
But I think the other thing that's important to understand is that we've got individual unit resources showing up, but they have to be assembled into a team. So you've got two, three, four police officers that show up. You gotta organize them into a contact team. Same thing on the rescue task force side. We need to get some EMTs, some paramedics put together with, you know, a couple of police officers we hope, and staff up that rescue task force. And so you've got these individual unit resources that arrive at this common staging point. You can quickly check 'em in and say, okay, let me get a contact team on deck. Lemme get a rescue task force on deck ready to go. Organize 'em into teams. And then when tactical's ready, calls back and tells you what he needs?
Coby Briehn:
Right. Yeah, tactical is asking for it. So police officers kind of go in the line of just being present is a use of force. We're taught that. Just our physical presence is a use of force, be it on any other scene. So we're kind of getting away from that in this. Yes, our physical presence is needed, but we need it at the right location at the right time.
So to use a football analogy, is that you don't build the kicking unit out on the team that's on the field. You call that in. And that's what's happening here is those guys can be there, and they may interchange, but virtually or essentially you're gonna be bringing the subject matter experts in for that incident. And that would be your RTFs. That's gonna be your specialized units, your things like that. And it's when you need that. Are you just gonna try to build it there or are you gonna build it off on the sidelines, and then bring it in? Sidelines being the staging of that game and somebody's organizing and putting all that together.
Adam Pendley:
You know, and I think at this point in the discussion when you talk about sequencing, some people are gonna have heartburn with the idea. Well, you're still talking about a contact team one and two. And now tactical is setting a staging area. That's too early. We still need people inside, so on and so forth. But that's not true. And we've done whole podcast discussions on the type of staging we're talking about. But I think it's worth emphasizing that this is a gear up and go staging. This is multiple resources coming from different directions. And when that next resource is in a team and ready to go, we send 'em down range. We get 'em where they're needed.
Bill Godfrey:
In one vehicle.
Adam Pendley:
In one vehicle, right. So we cut down on the parking problem. We got everyone arriving at the same time. They're getting the same briefing. They know what their task is. They know who they work for. They know what radio channel they're gonna be on. All of those things need to happen in a designated location.
Now staging at this point in the sequence may not even have a fully dedicated staging manager yet. You know, your first law enforcement supervisor's probably gonna be the one to designate an actual staging manager. Your fire/EMS first on scene is gonna designate someone to manage staging on the fire/EMS side. Together, they have to be together because we have heard and seen horror stories where fire/EMS is ready to go, but all the law enforcement are gone.
Coby Briehn:
I know, it just doesn't work.
Adam Pendley:
You know? Nobody has stayed put to do that very important job, which is the next priority. Begin rescue, right?
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, and herein lies why it's so important to sequence these actions and actually write 'em down, work from a list, as opposed to the seat of your pants. The contact, the first contact team that's down range dealing with the pointy end of the problem, they don't really care about staging. They have limited care about tactical.
Coby Briehn:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
They have no care about staging or any of the rest of the response.
Coby Briehn:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
They're focused on the pointy end of the problem as they should be.
Coby Briehn:
Taking care of-
Bill Godfrey:
And meanwhile at the same time, tactical's focusing on how are they doing? What does the rest of this look like? Where else do I need to deploy teams? Do I need to get more teams to them? Do I need to send them to another area? Are we dealing with a threat that's on the loose? Are we dealing with more than one threat? And tactical has that focus, but even tactical doesn't care about staging.
Coby Briehn:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
But when that contact team wants another contact team, or tactical wants another contact team, or tactical's saying, I'm ready to get the medics in here, and the rescue task forces.
Coby Briehn:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
All of a sudden staging becomes really, really important to the equation. And my point in going through that long-winded explanation is to say part of writing these things down and do 'em in order is because we need more than one thing to happen at the same time. But you can't individually be the one doing all of them.
Juan Atan:
Right.
Adam Pendley:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
You gotta delegate it.
Adam Pendley:
Yeah. And part of the delegation is these kind of scenes can get out of control really quickly when it comes to the number of resources. You know, a lot of times law enforcement, whether it's the primary officer, the first officer on the scene or a supervisor on the scene, in their day-to-day world, they're able to direct a lot of resources. You know, they're able to say, I need these two officers to go do this, these two to do that, and they know their unit numbers. This gets out of hand really quickly as far as the number of resources. So without having a designated staging area that you can call, you start losing track of resource numbers.
And then what staging allows you to do is think of task. The next thing I need to do is I need to have somebody on the north side. I need to have a perimeter, an inner perimeter around the crisis site, and I need an outer perimeter 'cause we're not sure where the suspect is. If you're in that tactical position, you can start thinking about tasks instead of worrying about individual unit numbers. That's another big advantage of having a designated place where people go and get those assignments.
Bill Godfrey:
So as we sequence this thing out, so we've got tactical stood up, we've got the staging stood up, and we're going to at some point switch into priority number two, which is rescue of the injured. Hopefully, very quickly.
Coby Briehn:
Yes.
Bill Godfrey:
We're hoping that the contact teams and tactical can deal with that threat and get us to a warm zone operation pretty quickly. In order for that to happen, we've gotta do some coordination. And that is under the heading of triage and transport who need to be standing side by side with tactical. Why? Why is that so important?
Juan Atan:
It is very important because again, we've talked about being in silos. We don't want triage and transport being on one side of the building where tactical's on the other side of the building. We want to be next to each other so that when tactical looks over to me, I'm triage and says, hey, are your RTS ready to go? Yes, they're ready to go. Where do you need 'em? We are ready to go. So we know exactly what needs to be done. Because if we were working on silos, and you're on one building on one side of the building and I'm the other, I don't know what you're doing, I don't know what you're thinking. So we're not in integrated into one team. So it's very important to make sure that we're working all together on the same page and following those tasks.
Adam Pendley:
Right, and that we need to know everyone on the scene. Again, working and training from a checklist format. They need to know that the next thing in the sequence is rescue. So to kind of extend on what you said Bill, we may not have fully dealt with the active threat yet, 'cause we know many times they have fled the scene. They've stopped shooting for unknown reasons. They might be barricaded somewhere. They might have been taken out somewhere else.
So, but what law enforcement can do, because they know the next important step in the sequence is beginning rescue, is they can secure what they have, right? That first contact team may continue the mission of trying to find who did all these bad things, but somebody's gonna stay put and start fixing what we know we have. And that is, we know we have casualties here. We know we have an area that can be secured because the next thing in the sequence is rescue. And if we get stuck on active threat, and we're still hunting and hunting and hunting, I've used it many times in other podcasts, but I'm gonna use my turn of phrase, is that known bleeding will not stop while you search for unknown threats. So if you're still out there hunting, and you haven't found anything, and you don't have it in your mind that hey, the next thing we need to get done is rescue, then you're gonna get stuck. And to extend on what you said, the only way you're not gonna get stuck is if you're working together.
Bill Godfrey:
Coby, you have spent a lot of time over the years working with patrol officers on contact team functions and done a lot of coaching in that position. Inevitably, the first time they hit the scenario where the shooter's in the wind and they don't know why, the shooting stopped, they don't know why, they don't know where he is, they struggle to shift gears to the rescue priority. Why do you think that is?
Coby Briehn:
It is. That's just how we're ingrained, is the bad guy supposed to be there. And all our trainings and all our thoughts before that... I shouldn't say all. I'd say the majority of the time, all of it is the bad guy supposed to be there. And we're always second guessing ourselves 'cause I've been in that deal. He's gotta be here. They've gotta be here somewhere. What am I missing? And I don't want to be that person that missed him. We don't wanna be that team that missed it. So we're gonna go into that until somebody who is looking at it from a higher level says, hey, we're getting resources now. We're getting information now that they're probably not here or they've have gone. They've fled this area. They're stopped down the road. They're at another location. Anything like that. So we've just gotta break that of at some happy point or some median in there. It's like we need to look at what's important now. And if they're not telling us where they are, bad guy, we gotta work on what Adam's saying is where the injured are. So once we lose that, if we spend so much time looking for them, we're gonna lose the other them. We're gonna lose the other.
Bill Godfrey:
And the the reality is, we've all seen this in training. We've seen people struggle with this. Sometimes somebody on the contact team, you know, a single officer will speak up and go, hey, hey, hey, hey, let's divide our tasks up here. You know, contact one, you go do that. Contact two, let's get back-
Coby Briehn:
Exactly
Bill Godfrey:
And set up a CCP, do this. We've also seen where that doesn't happen.
Juan Atan:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
And tactical has to say, hey, three contact teams. Contact Team One, you continue searching. Contact Two and Three, move back to this location to deal with this task.
Adam Pendley:
Right.
Coby Briehn:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
And that's part of the structure and the purpose to get that overlap, Adam. Why is that so important?
Adam Pendley:
Well, I think it's the important thing about the structure of having a sequence, and having a checklist, and going back, and cross-checking things that haven't gotten done, right? If you're in that higher up position, and when I say higher up, it doesn't have even have to be a supervisor. It can be leadership at any level of the organization where somebody in that tactical position is thinking through the priorities and the sequencing of things and they go, all I'm hearing is searching. All I'm hearing is searching. But I did hear them call out eight casualties in the library on their way up. Who's dealing with those?
And hopefully they're switching gears and saying, okay, I have enough resources now. Let's do the next thing in the sequence, which is rescue. And then shortly behind that, and sometimes simultaneously, maybe we have dealt with the active threat, and we're beginning rescue that those additional resources that are looking for a job to do, we start thinking of the next thing in the priorities. We gotta start checking all the other spaces in the crisis site for more injured for other things that need to be cleared.
Juan Atan:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. So we get to the point where, you know, we've got triage and transport that are shoulder to shoulder with tactical. And we've found from experience, because when we first started doing this over a decade ago, we didn't have triage and transport shoulder to shoulder with tactical. And that caused all kinds of communication errors and mistakes, in some cases unsafe situations. But mainly it just slowed things down.
So we've got tactical triage and transport shoulder to shoulder. They're making decisions about downrange, and pulling, and pushing resources. So we get the rescue task forces downrange. Now, like Adam said, maybe the active threat has been dealt with. Maybe they've been isolated. Maybe it's a question mark. But meanwhile, you know, back at the big house, we are dealing with the rescue operations and getting RTFs down range. And when that first RTF goes through the door, Juan, when the first RTF goes through the door, there's a tendency to grab the closest patient and say, this one's mine.
Juan Atan:
Correct.
Bill Godfrey:
Why is that a mistake?
Juan Atan:
It's a big mistake 'cause, again, there's more than one patient in there, and we're dealing now with the time. The clock is against us right now. 'Cause again, these officers, the contact teams were in there. You know, we know exactly how long they were in there, but they were shot. You know, we got age differences depending where we at. So we're working against the clock now. So we have to start doing our triage, start taking care of our patients, and then start moving these patients out of that location as quickly as possible.
Because, again, time is against us, as mentioned before. And each patient is like, we talk about, oh, everybody's gonna see a surgeon right off the bat when we take him to the hospital. They're not. Because depending on the severity of that injury, you know, let's say this patient, it's an older patient, got shot in the leg. We took care of, but he's bleeding a lot so he's gonna see the surgeon a lot quicker than somebody that had a graze or something to that effect. So, you know, we're gonna do our own triage. Take care of the patient. Take 'em to the hospital. Then the hospital's gonna do their thing, and see who's gonna go priority number one to the surgery. 'Cause a lot of people go, oh, they need to go see a surgeon right off the bat. No, it doesn't happen that way. The hospital's gonna do their thing. You know, we did ours. Now, the hospital's gonna do their thing. But again, for us, you know, mentioning that eight patients, where are they at? The good thing of being triaged next to tactical, I could nudge tactical and say, hey, didn't they mention that there were eight patients in room 31?
Coby Briehn:
Right.
Juan Atan:
Do they need some first aid in there right now? And tactical can go to the contact team, say, hey, Contact Team Number One, you mentioned eight patients in that room. Do you need to get our rescue task forces in there? So that's a great thing of having us next to each other because if, like I mentioned before, if you're on that side of the room, and I'm on this side of the room, I cannot nudge you and say, hey, tactical, I just heard there were eight patients in room 31. Can we go in there now?
Coby Briehn:
Yeah.
Adam Pendley:
And I don't think it's bad to be afraid of that. Different responders have different roles and are gonna be nudging for different things, right? They're gonna-
Bill Godfrey:
Yes.
Adam Pendley:
And that helps with the sequencing as well 'cause if you get stuck in your one silo, and you're only thinking about the things you're supposed to do, you're forgetting that all the other stuff needs to get done. And you're forgetting the fact that each patient might kind of be on their own clock, right? We know we're fighting the clock the whole time.
Juan Atan:
Right.
Adam Pendley:
But different patients were potentially shot at different times, and their situation is more dire.
Bill Godfrey:
You know, tagging off of what Adam just said, you know, the situation's more dire, depending on the patient. So Coby, you've got both law enforcement background and medical background. And one of the misconceptions that it seems to me that quite a few law enforcement officers have, you know, they just don't know, is that somebody's been shot: they need to go, they need to go, they need to go, they need to go. And one of the challenges for us on the medical side is to figure out the order in which they need to go because not everybody's been injured with the same severity.
Coby Briehn:
Right, right. Yeah, so we're breaking that down. We're trying to give 'em, hey what's the worst? We say worst is first. So what is worse? Where in the extremities can it be? Are the tourniquets working? Are they stopping the blood flow or the blood loss? Or if they're shot in the truncal area, or you have the tension pneumothorax, or they're shot in the head or the neck. Right? That's a whole junctional area in itself, and what to do with that? If the tourniquets aren't working, if the tourniquets are working, does that make it... If they are working, does that reduce them down? And then the ones that we don't think about, but a neck shot or the chest shot, does that raise them up? If they're unconscious or they're conscious, does that raise them up on the thing? Unconscious? I would say yes. 'Cause that's the body's way of saying you're losing the-
Bill Godfrey:
Something's not right.
Coby Briehn:
You're losing the ability to make great decisions. So we're just gonna do a control, alt, delete shut down, and we're gonna let somebody else come and fix it. And that's what I try to tell 'em is, the unconscious, that's the body's way of saying you're losing that ability. So we have to do that. So they are unconscious. Do we leave them in that current position on the ground or we position them? 'Cause we can make them worse if we do nothing. So even a failed act is still an act. All right? So we just give them something to do, something to take care of. And if we think it's bad, it's probably bad. And jump on that. And what is working? And that's where some police get... I've got tourniquets on the arm. He needs to go before the person that shot in a chest. Well why? Because they just see the thing that's attached to 'em. They don't see what's inside. They just see the thing attached to 'em. So we're trying to get that into there. And if you don't know, who do we go to? RTFs or we ask
Adam Pendley:
And I know I've seen law enforcement on this. You know, they might not even be thinking medical sequencing. They're just thinking that I want all the patients outta this room so I can move my team to the next room. And that's the wrong sequence. And again, doing this integrated training to get people to understand, getting law enforcement to understand that there is an order of things, that we have to do these actions first because, you know, the goal is to save the life. The goal isn't to just get 'em off scene. The goal is to make their situation better, to increase their survivability. And there's certain things that have to happen before they're moved to increase survivability. You know, doing the integrated training and getting law enforcement teams to understand that.
Juan Atan:
Yes.
Adam Pendley:
Whereas a law enforcement team, they just want to, hey, I need all these five patients outta here 'cause I wanna secure this room and move to the next one.
Coby Briehn:
If I don't see 'em, it's not my problem.
Adam Pendley:
Exactly. And that's bad sequencing.
Juan Atan:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, and, you know, it was funny, I had a conversation recently with a law enforcement instructor and they were saying something to that effect of, I just want get 'em loaded, get 'em outta here, get 'em outta here, and I want 'em outta here. And I said, "No, what you want is for them to survive."
Adam Pendley:
Right.
Coby Briehn:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
And if you don't let us do our job on the medical side to figure out who needs to go first and who can wait in that proper sequence... I mean, the clock is ticking, but every patient's clock is different, depending on the nature of the injury, which is not always terribly obvious, and certainly not part of the start triage system.
Juan Atan:
No.
Bill Godfrey:
But so we've got our RTFs down range. Tactical's got its contact teams. We got security. Maybe there's some clearing that's going on, but we need to get a transportation area set up. We need an ambulance exchange point, which by all measures should have some security attached to it.
Coby Briehn:
Oh yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
It's interesting to me that most of the time it's EMS that's saying to law enforcement, hey, I need an AEP set up and secured because they didn't think about it. And yet the one that needs to pick it and get it secured is largely law enforcement. Adam.
Adam Pendley:
Sure, so what's funny as far as a sequencing goes is sometimes you might see the opposite, right? I mean, I like that the transport officer's able to say to tactical, we need a good route, and we need a good ambulance exchange point. On paper, on the map, it looks like this would be a good location. Can you secure it? They work that out with down range. Well, then sequencing-wise, the transport officer, he just wants to get all his transport units down there right now. Like let's get all six of 'em in line so I can go ahead and load 'em, and get 'em on the way. So now the opposite happens where law enforcement has to say, slow down a little bit. You can start pre-staging 'em a little bit, get 'em a little closer, but I can only safely secure one or two at a time, right? And say, okay, you know, you have 'em, bring one or two, get 'em loaded, and then we'll bring the other one or two right in behind them because, you know, six, seven targets lined up is not good for law enforcement.
Bill Godfrey:
Suboptimal.
Adam Pendley:
Exactly. Suboptimal, that's a good way to say that. But again, the opposite kind of happens right? In law enforcement, we want all the patients out. Let's get 'em out now, so I can move to the next room. The transport officer's gonna do the same thing. Let's get all seven of my transport units down there so I can get 'em out. And we have in that integrated working together, solved some of that.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, so here's the interesting thing is, we've talked exclusively about what's going on downrange with the threat and with the injured. But meanwhile, back at the big house in the command post, there's a whole bunch more work that downrange may not particularly care about, but it matters. It matters for the protection of the scene. It matters to the community. Matters for the security posture. Adam, where does that play in? How do we make sure that the perimeter gets handled appropriately as additional resources come in, and that sequencing?
Adam Pendley:
Right, so, first of all, knowing and recognizing that those jobs have to get done and understanding that they can happen simultaneously, that there's others that can take on those roles. Understanding that when you train to a checklist, there's whole other sections here that need to be addressed. And the further up you are, maybe, you know, at the command post level, you're listening, you're certainly making sure that all of those earlier tasks are being accomplished properly. But you should be looking up and out, and a checklist format helps you do that.
So to your point, there's things that have to be thought about, like, you know, setting up early intelligence and understanding what's going on and how and why this is happening. And, you know, the perimeter, like you mentioned. You know, those are some, some parallel things that can be happening right now. And we also know in a social media world that we live in, that the first information about this hit social media probably while it was happening. Somebody might even have been Facebooking it live or, you know, on one of those devices. So we think of public information as an after thing, a press conference after this has happened. That's not the case. You have to have that public information piece happening almost simultaneously while the lifesaving might still be going on.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, numerous examples of attacks at schools. The parents are at the perimeter before the first law enforcement officers even have a contact team established down range. And so that becomes a huge challenge in protecting the scene, the community, making sure that the bad guy doesn't get away from you if he is trying to flee, all of those components. And so really the checklist becomes not about dictating this is the only way to get it done, but more, this is a way to save time on the clock for everybody. To get the threat neutralized faster, to get to our injured more quickly, figure out which of the ones that have the most severe injuries, get them off the scene more quickly, on and on down the road. I mean, doesn't that strike you that way, Coby, that the totality of trying to put all this stuff together if you don't have a plan?
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, if you don't... I like to say that leadership starts at the barrel of the gun wherever it is, and then it works its way out of there. And each step, each foot distance, whatever virtual separation you want to use, from that, more leadership is there. You're still in charge at the gun because you're still doing that work, but it's just the layers of responsibility that adds onto there. And it goes all the way out to not just the scene you're at, but out to the incident command, and then to the hospitals, and then to the residence where the assailants originated from, and the vehicles, and all that. All that comes into play. And if you don't have it, if it's not me, then who?
Juan Atan:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
That kind of thing. And then I can't put it back on the guy that's still got the gun in their hand to worry about what the perimeter looks like there.
Bill Godfrey:
That may be the phrase: "If it's not me, then who?"
Coby Briehn:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
And if you don't have a plan, if you're not operating from a checklist or something equivalent, then it's not me, but who is a big question mark, right?
Adam Pendley:
Yeah, absolutely.
Juan Atan:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
Gentlemen, thank you so much for doing this. For those that are listening, if you are not familiar with the checklist, we have a 60-second video. Truly, it's less than one minute that explains how to use the checklist. Karla, when you put that out, would you make sure to put a link to that video in the show notes for people to be able to see it?
Gentlemen, thank you for coming in today. I appreciate it.
Coby Briehn:
Thanks, Bill.
Juan Atan:
For those who are watching, I hope you like and subscribe to the podcast. Let us know if you have any questions. We always appreciate the comments as well. The positive comments, of course. The purpose of this is training, not trolling. And with that, Karla, our producer, Karla Torres, thank you. And stay safe till next time.