Law Enforcement Active Shooter Prevention · Last Updated April 2026 · aspppro.com

How can law enforcement prevent active shooters before an incident begins?
Active shooter incidents average 10 to 15 minutes over before the first unit arrives. The only winning strategy is prevention before the incident begins. The PRO Model™ by Active Shooter Prevention Project, LLC Prevention. Response. Options. gives law enforcement the behavioral threat assessment capability, community partnership infrastructure, and anonymous reporting culture to intercept threats before they become events. Adopted by the DOJ and DOD. Three documented saves. Built by a former police detective who survived an active shooter event. aspppro.com/contact-us

Active Shooter Prevention Project, LLC  ·  aspppro.com  ·  Post 10 of 12

Law Enforcement Prevent First

The incident averages 10 to 15 minutes. Law enforcement averages longer than that to arrive. The only strategy that wins is the one that happens before the call ever comes in.

By Chris Grollnek  ·
Retired Police Detective · Former U.S. Marine · Nation’s Leading Active Shooter Prevention Expert  ·
aspppro.com  ·
chrisgrollnek.com  ·
Last updated April 2026

I have been a police officer; I know what it feels like to get that call.

The radio goes off, the address comes through, and somewhere between the moment you accelerate and the moment you arrive, you do the math that no officer wants to do: how long will this take, and how long has it been going on?

That math is the problem. Active shooter incidents average 10 to 15 minutes from first shot to resolution. Law enforcement response time, even with everything going right, rarely beats that. The fastest agencies in the country are still arriving at something that is already over, or nearly so. And the officers who trained hardest, who responded fastest, who did everything right, they are still cleaning up something that prevention could have stopped entirely.

That is the conversation law enforcement needs to be having in 2026. Not how to respond faster, but how to prevent it from ever starting.

The PRO Model™ Prevention. Response. Options. was built by a law enforcement professional for exactly that purpose. Not to replace response training. Not to diminish the heroism of officers who run toward the sound. But to give the officers, the chiefs, the sheriffs, and the communities they serve the infrastructure to make the response unnecessary.

That destination is #NEVERHERE™, and it is achievable, right now, with tools that already exist.

What the Research Has Been Telling Law Enforcement for Years

The FBI and U.S. Secret Service have been building the case for behavioral threat assessment for decades. Their research is unambiguous. Eighty-one percent of school shooters leaked their plans beforehand. Forty-four percent of mass casualty attackers communicated their intentions to someone before acting. In virtually every major incident, there was a trail of observable behavior, expressed grievances, and communications that were seen or heard by someone who either did not know what to do with what they observed or did not have a safe pathway to report it.

This is not a failure of intelligence; it’s a failure of infrastructure, as the warning signs were there. The people who saw them were there. What was missing was the system, the behavioral threat assessment capability, the anonymous reporting culture, and the trained multidisciplinary team that turns observation into intervention before a single shot is fired.

DHS data from their Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention grant program tells the same story. Between 2020 and 2023, TVTP-funded programs led to nearly 1,200 interventions. Ninety-three percent of those interventions were handled by behavioral threat assessment teams and did not require referral for criminal investigation. A RAND analysis showed those interventions cost a fraction of what a criminal investigation, trial, incarceration, and community recovery from an attack would have cost. Prevention is not just the right thing to do. It is the most effective and most economical public safety strategy available to any law enforcement agency in America.

Behavioral Threat Assessment and the PRO Model™

Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management (BTAM) is now recognized by the Secret Service, the FBI, and DHS as a mission-critical capability for law enforcement agencies. It is not new science. It is the discipline of identifying individuals who are on a pathway toward targeted violence based on observable behavior, communications, and situational factors, and intervening before that pathway becomes irreversible.

Police1 research from a retired San Jose Police Department lieutenant makes the point precisely: patrol officers are being placed in high-risk environments every day, such as schools, places of worship, domestic calls, and workplace incidents, without a clear operational roadmap for identifying behavioral warning signs. California’s SB 553 and SB 906 signal a broader shift: law enforcement agencies must adopt BTAM as part of their core investigative and patrol competencies. This is not optional. It is where the profession is heading, and the agencies that build this capability now will be the ones their communities trust most.

The PRO Model™ was built around this principle from the beginning. Prevention. Response. Options. in that order, because the goal is always to make the Response and Options layers unnecessary. The Prevention layer is BTAM in action: the training to recognize behavioral indicators, the anonymous reporting infrastructure to capture intelligence from the community, the multidisciplinary threat assessment team to evaluate and act, and the physical security layers that deny threats the opportunity to reach the intervention point.

The Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office built exactly this model with DHS TVTP funding after Parkland. They paired trained officers with mental health clinicians, built a co-response team, and created a task force of more than 150 local, state, and federal analysts who meet every quarter. They have successfully averted multiple threats of mass violence. Their captain said it plainly: We owe it to our communities to keep them safe, and prevention is the way to honor that obligation.

The Community Partnership That Makes Prevention Work

Law enforcement cannot build this prevention infrastructure alone. And it does not have to. The PRO Model™ was designed as a community partnership model from the beginning — because the intelligence that prevents active shooter incidents almost always originates outside the law enforcement agency. A teacher who noticed something. An employee who heard something. A family member who saw something. A neighbor who felt something was wrong.

That intelligence only reaches law enforcement when two things are true. First, the person who observed it has a pathway to report it anonymously, safely, and trustingly. Second, the organization receiving the report has a trained multidisciplinary team capable of evaluating it and taking appropriate action. When both are in place, the intelligence flows. When either is missing, the warning sign dies without reaching the people who could act on it.

This is the partnership the PRO Model™ builds. Not law enforcement doing more with less. Not asking officers to be therapists or teachers. But creating the infrastructure, the reporting system, the threat assessment team, and the community training that brings the intelligence that already exists in every community to the people equipped to act on it.

The unified command research from Police1 makes the same point from the response side: coordination before the emergency pays dividends when agencies must operate under pressure. The agencies that have established working relationships, shared plans, and practiced together arrive at an incident with far better outcomes than those that meet each other for the first time at a crisis scene. The same principle applies to prevention: the relationship between law enforcement and the communities they serve is built before the incident, not during it.

What #NEVERHERE™ Means for Law Enforcement

#NEVERHERE™ is not a slogan. It is a destination, a measurable outcome, where the active shooter prevention infrastructure of a community, an organization, or a jurisdiction has been built to the standard where active shooter violence is prevented before it ever starts.

For law enforcement, it means this: the threat assessment team evaluated the report, the intervention happened, and the pathway was redirected. Nobody was harmed. Nobody made the call. The most dangerous 10 to 15 minutes in American public safety never occurred because the work was done before anyone needed to respond.

Three times the PRO Model™ has documented exactly that outcome. A manufacturing facility where access control stopped an armed threat at the door, nobody was harmed, and law enforcement response was unnecessary. In a corporate environment, an anonymous report led to an arrest before a planned attack; the suspect was in prison, and law enforcement was part of the prevention, not just the response. A service company where a reporting culture and physical security gave the organization time to act, everyone went home, law enforcement was a partner in the prevention infrastructure rather than the only line standing between the threat and the outcome.

That is #NEVERHERE™. That is what the PRO Model™ was built to deliver. And that is what every law enforcement agency in America can be part of building right now, in their own community, with the tools and the training that already exist.

The PRO Model™ was adopted by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Defense. Chris Grollnek delivered the national standard to all 115,000 DOJ personnel. It is the highest government-validated active shooter prevention standard. And it is available to every agency regardless of size, budget, or geography through aspppro.com/contact-us and chrisgrollnek.com.