With less than two weeks to go until kids across Maine go back to school, law enforcement and some educators gathered in Brewer earlier this week to prepare for the unthinkable: an active shooter in a place of learning or other public venue.
Coming on the heels of an active shooter incident on Route 302 in Windham late last week, the grisly prospect – while thankfully unprecedented in Maine to date – is not inconceivable, and a tactical trainer from the state of Florida walked attendees through procedures and best practices that might just minimize the losses in such an event.
Two lockdowns in Southern Maine schools of May and June of this year illustrate the broad range of risk those charged with keeping students safe must consider and confront. In May, Biddeford police arrested a man with a rifle near the city’s high school. The following month, a Harpswell school went into lockdown over a report of a man with a rifle who was later found just to be defending his chickens from four-legged predators.
Yet the threat remains distressingly real. Since the 1999 Columbine school massacre in Colorado, there have been 420 school shootings in America – a gruesome average of nearly 17 per year.
Two years ago, the Maine Legislature considered a bill that would allow parents to opt out of the active shooter drills that schools now regularly conduct. While there has been a drumbeat of discussion by groups like the anti-gun Everytown for Gun Safety about the traumatic effect of such training for kids, prepping adults seems like basic prudence given the level of threat that exists in the present day.
Conducted by the National Tactical Officers Association (NTOA), the Brewer training is one of scores that the group has conducted nation-wide. Led by Chief Rick Francis who heads school security for Florida’s Seminole County Sheriff’s Office, it was delivered from the perspective of someone with responsibility for the safety of some 70,000 students. He paired off with his office’s Lieutenant Kelly Martin to cover ten modules encompassing the landscape of school safety, informed by often searing experience.
Much of this training focused on what Francis called the “left of bang” space on the continuum of a mass shooting incident where the left side of an event is the proactive sphere and the right the reactive. Based on a doctrine employed by the U.S. Marines since 2006, “left of bang” encourages a heightened degree of situational awareness and sensitivity to potential threats.
While no “profile” of a mass shooter, research by the U.S. Secret Service finds the following commonalities:
- There is no profile of a student attacker, nor is there a profile for the targeted school type.
- Attackers usually had multiple motives, the most common involving a grievance with classmates.
- Most attackers used firearms, most often acquired from the home.
- Most attackers had experienced psychological, behavioral, or developmental symptoms.
- Half of the attackers had interests in violent topics, like the Columbine shooting or Hitler.
- All attackers experienced social stressors involving their relationships with peers and/or romantic partners.
- Nearly every attacker experienced negative home life factors.
- Most attackers were victims of bullying, which was often observed by others.
- Most attackers had a history of school disciplinary actions, and many had prior contact with law enforcement.
- All attackers exhibited concerning behaviors. Most elicited concern from others, and most communicated their intent to attack.
The way in which the training was structured and delivered applied not only to school shootings but more broadly to mass shooting events, which is why it drew participants from the banking and insurance industries as well. Given that Maine’s one mass shooting incident to date occurred both in a bar and a bowling alley in Lewiston nearly two years ago, this broadening of the training audience was applicable to Maine’s experience.
Mass murder, the trainers stressed, is a form of suicide in which the threat or killer usually has no exit plan. On average, the most lethal parts of these events last 12 seconds, and nearly all—95 percent of them—arise from internal threats. From the outset, this understanding is essential to minimizing violence once an incident has begun and maximizing the chances of a safe and effective rescue for all innocents involved.
According to research conducted on mass murderers over the past quarter century, almost all of those in school settings studied the Columbine massacre.
Careful study of past mass shootings events shows another trend that has contributed to their lethality, which has surged in recent years. Victims and potential victims often freeze once the shooting begins. This only makes the killer’s job easier. “Getting off the X,” the training stressed, is key to enhancing the chances of surviving a mass shooting event. Those who are designing drills might incorporate this finding and encourage targets to be become more kinetic.
Famously, the 2022 Uvalde school massacre in Texas provided a wide array of learning opportunities as the response to that incident was largely seen as botched. Despite over 400 law enforcement officers and other first responders on the scene, no one took control for an interminably critical period of time. Infamously, that event will always remind responders of the importance of taking aggressive action quickly – by trained professionals of course – rather than holding back and waiting for instruction.
The NTOA training also covered key areas of crisis management. Tactical police teams are training in schools, large commercial centers and religious gathering places to better familiarize themselves with the environments ahead of time. How they interact with other first responders, like fire and rescue, was another functional area on which trainers dedicated substantial focus.
Teamwork and communications can always be improved, Francis observed.
Last year, law enforcement in Cumberland and Sagadahoc counties had to scramble to counter an active shooter on I-295 in Yarmouth, who spun violently out of control after killing his mother. In 2023, the emotionally unstable Robert Card of Bowdoin unleashed America’s eighth most violent massacre to date in Lewiston, and a mosque in Maine’s second largest city has been the apparent target in repeated shootings over the last year.
“This is about target-hardening,” Brewer Police Chief Chris Martin told The Maine Wire. While it is the first in-person training his department has sponsored since the COVID-19 pandemic, they have held 5-6 similar trainings in the past, he said.
“We really need to get ahead of the reactionary curve,” Chief Martin said. “Let’s get people trained up so we can do everything possible to make our communities safer and protect the most vulnerable,” he added.
Attendance at this week’s training in Brewer was down from past years, he noted. While the Maine Department of Education was invited to attend, there were no representatives from the state level present though the superintendent of the Brewer school department did participate as did a school board member, a Maine state representative serving on the legislature’s Education Committee and a state senator on the Judiciary Committee as well as school resource officers from throughout the region.
The lead trainer also noted that The Maine Wire is the first news organization he has yet to see participate in such a training.
“Failing to plan is planning to fail,” Chief Francis stressed at the training’s outset. The roughly two dozen educators, law enforcement officers and corporate security professionals who did take two days out of a glorious late summer week to plan for the events no one wants to ever happen are now better equipped to share what they’ve learned with others.
