Chris Grollnek · Active Shooter Expert

Come Build With Us

An open invitation to join the Active Shooter Prevention Project’s open meetings with our Community of Experts.

Here is the actual announcement

Today, news broke announcing one of the key features and strengths of the Active Shooter Prevention Project, LLC.  So instead of limited reach, we received permission to repost it and make some editorial discretionary adjustments for accuracy and clarity. This announcement is a quieter one than the world usually promises. After fifteen years of building the Active Shooter Prevention Project, we are opening our doors wider than we ever have. We are inviting organizations, experts, and companies to sit at the table with us to think out loud, to challenge one another, and to get better at the one thing that matters most: stopping these events before they start.

How it works: We hold open community meetings, and we welcome other companies in, not to do business, but to do the best things for the human benefit possible. Our Community of Experts carries more than 800 years of combined experience: 28 strategic company partners across 140 individual partnerships, with subject-matter experts in 26 states, as well as Canada, Mexico, and Poland. The only price of admission is caring about the same thing we do.

I am grateful for the people and companies who keep showing up. Allied Universal, the world’s largest private security provider, has roughly 800,000 employees and a partner to more than 400 of the Fortune 500. Scylla AI, whose computer-vision threat detection helps us see trouble sooner. Garrett, a trusted name in detection. Brecourt Solutions, whose iDFR™, the Indoor Drone as a First Responder, is closing the gap between the moment a threat appears and the moment help arrives. And Safeware, one of the most respected members of our Community of Experts and the distributor that equips so much of it, has been standing with first responders since 1979.

None of them comes into those rooms to sell anything. They come because the work is bigger than any one company, and because the table is stronger with more honest people around it.

What we are built on

The destination has a name #NeverHere™. The way to get there is the P.R.O. Model™ Prevention. Response. Options. The U.S. Department of Justice selected our work to help shape a national standard for prevention, not once, but twice, across two separate windows. That second selection cannot be bought; it is earned, and then it has to be earned again. And when the worst happens, the methodology is simple enough to remember and strong enough to save a life: React, Evade, Survive. This has always been about being prepared, not scared, and about choosing a return on investment over a return on regret.

The same mistakes

And yet, the mission of the Active Shooter Prevention Project has never changed. Destination #NeverHere™, but neither has the hard part. As I was quoted as saying in Time, and as I ended my BBC interview in the days after Uvalde, we keep making the same mistakes, and if we do not address them, we will be back here for another uncomfortable conversation. This whole mission is to address the locations and make them as active shooter resistant as they are fire resistant.

Why I do not retell these stories

When I think about The Covenant School in Nashville, I think about restraint. We do not recount these tragedies; that is not our work, and the families deserve far better than to have their worst day turned into anyone’s content. Our work is to prevent the next one. The only reason I mention Uvalde at all is that the misinformation around it has been so thick, for so long, and because Uvalde, of all of them, shows there is a way to defeat these events, if we are willing to look honestly at how they actually unfold. Every honest look lands in the same place: the building.

Why do I keep talking about the inside of our buildings?

Since 2022, on national and international stages, I have argued that we are dangerously blind to what happens indoors. Think of a home alarm: a family buys it, pays to host it, and pays the police to respond to it. Indoor mapping works the same way. The building owner builds the data and feeds it back, through public-safety answering points, onto the dispatch screen so the people responding can finally see what they are walking into before they walk in. As an executive in the private sector, that is the future we are building: digital twins and indoor mapping as core life-safety infrastructure. It is the same conviction behind the Program of Instruction I created for the U.S. Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.

On the words people use

I should say plainly that I did not come to this from a conference room. I am a retired U.S. Marine and a retired police detective, and I was directly involved in an active shooter event in McKinney, Texas, in 2010. When our community and our partners describe this work, the words that come back are humble, mission-driven, integrity, heart, and soul. I do not get to claim those words. I only get to try to live up to them every day, and to be a little better than the day before. I have been fortunate to be invited into the national conversation more than 1,200 times, on networks here and overseas, but none of it matters as much as the next life we keep off the list.

That standard has traveled farther than I ever expected to Dubai, where I was honored to keynote the World Police Summit at the Dubai World Trade Centre in March 2023, on a personal invitation extended in the name of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.

So this is the invitation; come sit in on a meeting, bring your hard questions and your better ideas. There is far more return in prevention than there will ever be in regret, and it’s time. We’re ready, come build with us.

Chris Grollnek, Active Shooter Expert & Active Shooter Prevention Expert  |  chrisgrollnek.com · aspppro.com  |  #NeverHere™