How Colleges Train for Active Shooters on Campus

John Gastaldo, ZUMA, Newscom

Shootings and other incidents of violence often raise alarm among students and faculty members about what they should do when a worst-case scenario becomes a reality. So more colleges are taking extra steps to prepare themselves for one of the most-feared situations in academe: an active shooter on the campus.

Campuses are embracing active-shooter training as a way to keep fear at a minimum and raise confidence in moments when chaos might otherwise reign.

How colleges go about that depends on an institution’s needs and how much they want to commit to the training. While some seek guidance from in-house safety experts, others hire companies to lead drills, demonstrations, and simulations. And some make it mandatory for students to watch active-shooter response videos and take e-training courses, while others do not.

Reality-Based Training

An active-shooter-response training exercise was underway last week at Temple University, in Philadelphia, just one day after the deadly shooting at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Raymond L. Betzner, an associate vice president for communications at Temple, said the exercise wasn’t a reaction to the UCLA incident, and had been planned months earlier.

Mr. Betzner said it wasn’t the first time Temple’s emergency responders had undergone active-shooter training. But he said it was the first time the university had held such training on a broad scale.

As part of the safety drill, officers with Temple’s police and security divisions, in full riot gear, searched its residence halls for two mock gunmen played by actors. The officers eventually cornered the shooters, but not before they simulated killing one person and injuring others. The victims, also played by actors, were drenched in fake blood, as medical students and professionals examined their wounds. Meanwhile, Temple’s media-relations team fielded phone calls, simulating the conditions of an actual emergency.

Temple also tested what Mr. Betzner called a “light web page,” which he described as able to withstand heavy traffic and to be used to post basic information in a crisis, just in case the normal site crashed. After the training ended, the participants took part in what’s known as a “hotwash,” in which they talked about their experiences.

Mr. Betzner said the people involved in the training were glad they had participated but hoped they never had to use what they had learned. He strongly encouraged other campuses to stage active-shooter trainings.

“You need to get a feel for this,” Mr. Betzner said. “You need to get the sensations for it. Even though we knew that it was not a real scenario, that there weren’t real people hurt, there is pressure, a real tension that comes, and under that pressure people respond differently.”

Cerritos College, in Norwalk, Calif., held a similar drill last week. Members of the college’s track-and-field team played the role of victims as its campus police department and local law-enforcement agencies combined forces to test their ability to work together in a crisis.

It was the college’s first time conducting multi-agency training, said Tom H. Gallivan, chief of the campus police, and each agency learned about the importance of communication.

Customized Training Services

Randy Spivey is chief executive of the Center for Personal Protection and Safety, a company that trains campus police officers and others to become active-shooter training instructors. The organization has taught many higher-education institutions since 2007, when a gunman shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech and wounded 17 others before killing himself. The tragedy at Virginia Tech was a watershed moment for campus safety, Mr. Spivey said.

In recent years, Mr. Spivey said, campuses have been changing how they want to be trained. In the past, some institutions had asked students to be trained differently than employees, he said, but a majority don’t anymore. He said institutions had feared that students would use the training, somehow, as active shooters themselves. His company offers a range of services, from videos that cost about $200 to fully customized trainings that could cost $70,000 to $150,000, he said.

Greg J. Crane, founder of the Alice Training Institute, which also specializes in active-shooter trainings, said his company had trained hundreds of higher-education institutions.

Mr. Crane said there have been eight instances in which his training system was used in real active-shooter situations. And in those cases, he said, there have been no fatalities.

It is essential for safety officers and other people on campuses, Mr. Crane said, to be trained in how to respond in an active-shooter situation, especially now. The sound of gunshots should elicit a second-nature reaction, similar to muscle memory, he said.

“If the room was on fire,” he said, “I don’t think anybody would say, I didn’t know what to do.”