Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting Public Safety Commission Report
The initial report is out for the Parkland School Shooting. It’s only 400 pages and has a lot of holes that I’m still reading and looking into.
Here is a copy of the Public Safety Commission Initial Report I have.
There are couple blaring things that stuck out to me that hopefully you can learn from and help evaluate and educate your local schools, politicians, and police with.
First thing that stuck out to me was in the chain of events; the amount of “Campus Monitors” that saw this guy, had radios, and never pushed the information up was upsetting. One saw the killer before he started firing, and one during the firing, neither used their radio to report a problem.
The second thing I looked at was the time line of 911 calls and radio calls that came in. At first glance, I thought what Cluster F*&K. The Marine in me wanted to kick everyone involved for not taking responsibility and charge of what was going on.
The call logs also showed 2 glaring problems. First anyone would notice is that the killer left the building before a single police officer entered. The Shariff’s office on the school didn’t have radio contact with the local police. And local police took an extra 5 minutes to put it out on their radios, and down it spiraled.
The second glaring problem I saw with the call logs wasn’t as easy to spot. It’s how the ICS is set up (Incident Command Structure (yes other departments and places call it different things, but it’s all the same)). From the radio calls it looks like the Shariff’s department was using a standard fall back like most departments use and that I was trained on. The first person on the ground during a major incident automatically becomes the incident commander and is that until someone with more rank or experience physically shows up to relieve the initial person.
Deputy Peterson was the first person on the scene and was directing everyone back from the building and calling for other units to lock down the campus. Normally a police lockdown like that would place units on the perimeter and stop people from coming in or going out. I hope he was at least calling for the stupid duck and cover drills and locking the doors that schools have been doing and not telling other deputies and officers to stay back, but that doesn’t seem like what he was calling.
The report found training records on Peterson that said he has had resent (2016) training in Active Shooters but didn’t fallow his training at all.
Another Deputy did even worse then Peterson. Deputy Stambaugh was on location and ran to an outside coving position. There was a suggestion on the radio to get someone on an overwatch position (not a bad move), but Stambaugh took it as his way to get out of there.
I’ve come across things like this before. Sometimes that animalistic fear becomes overwhelming and you just need to get out of there. I think that is what happened here, so he left the school when he was one of the armed deputies just outside the building where the shooting happened. It took him over 5 minutes to get to the overwatch position in his patrol car.
So no one really had control of the scene. The one person that should have taken control, Deputy Peterson because he was the first there, had 23 years or experience as a deputy, and he was the school resource officer failed miserably. All his training, experience, and specialized knowledge of the school should have put him in a unique position to lead and help the victims.
Law Enforcement around the world should look at their ICS procedures and update them to have someone be able to take over without physically being there. The most appropriate person maybe the dispatcher, or dispatcher shift commander. They will probably have the most information and can take a step back from what is happing right in front of them to place responding units where they need to go.
One last thought here on the Command and Control aspect of these large incidents is communication. The radios where not linked at all and no one could talk to different agencies. This is a normal problem that needs to be addressed with a plan. Best plan is to have a county wide channel that everyone can flip to on their radio. Then be able to hear what is going on 2 different channels and be able to talk back and forth on the different channels. It’s a complicated radio set up and expensive, and needs to be taken on by lots of different municipalities, and…, and…, and more problems with that. If they can’t do that right now, they should have a bunch of extra radios they can hand out so everyone can get on the same net, including fire and paramedics.
Also, one of the major failures of structure for communication seems to be there was no way for the dispatchers for fire, local PD, and Sheriff’s office to talk to each other except to send CAD messages over a computer. A quick fix is a hot line intercom between them so that information can flow as fast as possible to get the help where it needs to go.
I’ll be going through this report more and find other glaring problems I’m sure, and give an update and full podcast on the subject.
For right now, this report seems to be the most complete and accurate picture of what really happened that day. Read it if you want to be in the know.
Stay Safe,
Ben