Two decades ago (April 20, 1999), a pair of Littleton, Colorado, students named Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18, carried out a killing spree at Columbine High School that law enforcement experts called a watershed event in the response to active shooters.
Within 13 minutes of the first 911 call, Klebold and Harris fatally shot 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 other people before killing themselves with gunshot wounds to the head. SWAT teams entered the school 47 minutes after the gunfire erupted.
An exhaustive FBI review of the police response at Columbine led to a more rapid response strategy during active shooter situations, according to former FBI agent, Toni Chrabot.
“It changed a lot of things. It changed things in law enforcement, it changed the way schools operated, and it changed a way of thinking that something like this could actually happen,” said Chrabot. “From a law enforcement investigative standpoint, there’s a lot of training to try to understand, how could we have seen this? How can we respond better? How can we respond faster?”
Toni Chrabot was with the FBI for nearly 25 years, and is now CEO of Risk Confidence group. Having been a crisis negotiator and part of the critical incident response group, Chrabot understands the importance of acting fast.
SWAT teams are more often accompanied by negotiators, according to Chrabot. SWAT team members also undergo active shooter training more often.
In 2014 the FBI initiated a study of “active shooter” incidents to provide federal, state, and local law enforcement with data so they can better understand how to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from these incidents.
More than half of mass shooting incidents are still in progress when officers arrive on the scene, with 75% requiring law enforcement to confront the shooter before the threat ends, according to a 2013 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin article.
“To go in, knowing that studies have shown that if you engage the shooter that they will turn their attention away from victims and onto the threat itself -- that is how law enforcement trains,” said Chrabot.
The lessons learned from Columbine led the US Justice Department and other federal agencies to partially fund an active shooter program known as Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training, or ALERRT.