The Active Shooter Response Standard

People ask us which response model is the right one. The honest answer surprises them, because response is the part of this that already has a standard.

Response has a national standard

In 2013 the FBI partnered with the ALERRT Center at Texas State University and named ALERRT their national standard for law enforcement response. It has been that ever since. ALERRT was founded in 2002 as a partnership between Texas State, the San Marcos Police Department and the Hays County Sheriff’s Department, and its curriculum has been adopted as the standard by agencies and states across the country.

For civilians rather than responders, Run, Hide, Fight is the accepted guidance, originated by the Department of Homeland Security and carried by the FBI and FEMA.

Both are legitimate. We honor both. We teach response ourselves, because it is the R in the P.R.O. Model™.

The models you are likely to encounter

Model	Who owns it	Who it is for
ALERRT	ALERRT Center, Texas State University. FBI designated National Standard since 2013	Law enforcement and first responders
Run, Hide, Fight	Originated at the Department of Homeland Security, carried by FBI and FEMA	Civilians
Avoid, Deny, Defend	ALERRT, Texas State University	Civilians
CRASE	Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events, ALERRT	Civilians, instructor delivered
ALICE	Navigate360, commercial	Schools and organizations
A.L.I.V.E.	Various providers	Civilians

If someone tells you one of these is the only correct answer, ask who owns it. Several of them come from the same place. One of them is a commercial product. That is worth knowing before you buy.

We have taken each of these one at a time and asked the same question of all of them: what happens in the window before the curriculum activates? Run, Hide, Fight, Avoid, Deny, Defend, ALICE, CRASE and A.L.I.V.E.

Where every one of them stops

Read that table again and notice what it has in common.

Every model on it begins after the attack has already started. That is not a flaw. It is what response means. A response model that activated before anything happened would not be a response model.

But it does mean that an organization which has bought response training has bought the second half of the problem, and has nothing at all for the first half.

That is the gap. Not a shortcoming in anyone’s curriculum. A category that had no standard.

What did not have a standard

Until recently there was no national standard for prevention. Organizations facing identical risk could be taught contradictory things upstream of an attack, and none of them could demonstrate they had chosen correctly, because there was nothing to choose against.

The P.R.O. Model™ is A national standard selected by the U.S. Department of Justice and in use at some installations and commands across the Department of Defense. Prevention. Response. Options.

The R in the middle is the response training described above. We do not replace it and we do not compete with it. We put something in front of it.

The question to ask

If you are responsible for people, the useful question is not which response model to buy.

It is this: when the response model activates, how far upstream did anyone look, and what standard were they working to?

Response training tells your people what to do when it starts. It has no answer for what happens before that, because it was never built to have one.