Category Archives: Hospital Security

Former Nurse Commits Suicide in Hospital Bathroom at Valley View Hospital

RISKALERT INCIDENT REPORT # 574 – Suicide in the Hospital Bathroom

August 6, 2014

Former Nurse Commits Suicide, Fires A Single Shot to the Head, Locked in a Public Restroom at Valley View Hospital, Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

A hospital staff member reported Eric Knurr dead in a bathroom stall a round 11:30 a.m. Monday, morning, August 4, after maintenance had to be called to unlock the door to the men’s restroom off the emergency department. The former male nurse had been formally admonished by state regulators for brushing a patient’s teeth until they bled, and also slapping the patient, who was in restraints at the time of the incident in 2005. He had applied for a job at Valley View Hospital in 2012, but was not hired.  In similar incidents:

  • In January, 2014, a man locked himself in the hospital bathroom at Cherokee Medical Center in Iowa, and committed suicide.
  • In August, 2013,   62-year-old man committed suicide in a public bathroom at the Veterans Affairs hospital campus at Fort Harrison, Montana, after locking the bathroom door and killing himself with a single shot.
  • In August, 2012, a similar incident happened at an Oklahoma hospital when a Oklahoma State University employee committed suicide in a public restroom off the emergency room.


LESSONS LEARNED

(1.)  Hospital staff should IMMEDIATELY report any locked bathroom door in a public restroom.  In several of the incidents, housekeepingdidn’t want to bother securitywhen they found the bathroom door locked, so they waited another two hours before reporting the problem, and by then it was too late.

(2.)  Not having any form of metal detection allows people to bring guns into hospitals, lock themselves in bathroom, and commit suicide.  Metal detectors or wand detectors can prevent a tragedy.

CHECK OUT:
     In December, 2010, The Joint Commission Issued a Sentinel Event Alert on Suicide Risk Outside Psych Units in Hospitals, including medical units, surgical units, and emergency departments.  (http://www.jointcommission.org/assets/1/18/SEA_46.pdf).

“It is noteworthy that many patients who kill themselves in general hospital inpatient units do not have a psychiatric history or a history of suicide attempt – they are “unknown at risk” for suicide.   Compared to the psychiatric hospital and unit, the general hospital setting also presents more access to items that can be used to attempt suicide – items that are either already in or may be brought into the facility – and more opportunities for the patient to be alone to attempt or re-attempt suicide.

“This Alert presents strategies that can be used and suggested actions that can be taken by general hospitals to help better prepare their staffs and their facilities for suicidal patients and to care for both their physical and mental needs. Suicide has ranked in the top five most frequently reported events to The Joint Commission since 1995. The Sentinel Event Database includes 827 reports of inpatient suicides.  Of these events,  14.25 percent occurred in the non-behavioral health units of general hospitals (e.g., medical or surgical units, ICU, oncology, telemetry),  8.02 percent occurred in the emergency department of general hospitals and 2.45 percent occurred in other non-psychiatric settings.”              


           Stay Alert and Encourage Hospital Employee Awareness!

RISKAlert® is a publication of Risk & Security LLC at www.riskandsecurity.com
 

Psychiatrist Shoots Mental Patient who Killed His Caseworker at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital

Psychiatrist Draws Gun in Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital and Shoots the Mental Health Patient who Killed his Caseworker by Shooting Her in the Face.  Witnesses near the scene reported hearing screaming and gunfire, as suspect and mental health patient Richard Plotts confronted his caseworker, Theresa Hunt, and then drew his gun, and killed her.  Another bullet grazed a doctor, adjacent to the scene, but the doctor had a gun of his own, and he shot Plotts 3 times in the torso.

The doctor, identified as Lee Silverman, was treated was  treated for a head wound and released after being taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.  The shooter, Richard Plotts, of Upper Darby, Pennsylvania,  who had a long criminal record, was undergoing surgery Thursday night at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. If he survives, he will be charged Friday with murder,  said Delaware County District Attorney Jack Whelan.

There is a Lesson Here KEEP POTENTIAL SHOOTERS WITH WEAPONS OUT OF HOSPITALS.

A is for Access Control!  Once a potential shooter brings a weapon into a hospital, everything is much more difficult to control.  Keep them out.

Weapons should be checked at the hospital entry points and no-weapons signage should clearly indicate that weapons are not allowed, and that should be followed up with either stand-alone, or wand metal detectors which give staff members a initial level of protection.

usa-shooting-pennsylvania

Bernice Ho, a spokeswoman for Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital, said Thursday it was against hospital policy for anyone other than security guards to carry weapons, so there are questions about why this doctor disregarded the policy, although Donald Molineux, chief of the Yeadon Police Department, said “If Silverman returned fire and wounded Plotts, he without a doubt saved lives.”

District Attorney Whelan described how the meeting among Plotts, Silverman, and Hunt abruptly took a violent turn.  Plotts and Hunt went to Silverman’s third-floor office shortly before 2:30 p.m., Whelan said. Plotts was apparently armed, and people near the room soon heard shouting.

Concerned, a hospital employee “actually opened the door, saw him pointing a gun at the doctor,” Whelan said. The worker shut the door quietly and immediately called 911.     Plotts then opened fire.  According to Whelan, he shot Hunt two times in the face. The psychiatrist then ducked under his desk, retrieved his gun, and came up shooting, striking Plotts three times.

Keep Weapons Out of the Hospital to Dramatically Reduce Violent Incidents!

Aventura Hospital Patient Strangled in his Room on July 1st,, 2014

RiskAlert INCIDENT REPORT 565 –

Patient Strangled in Aventura Hospital, Florida

32-year old Behavioral Health Patient found Strangled to Death
in his Hospital Room

32-year old Alex Paloumbis diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia at a
young age, had been in the hospital for two weeks. He was on the fourth-floor psychiatric
ward when he was attacked by the patient in the next bed. 

The other patient in the room, identified by police as Alexander T. Jackson, 31,  was
charged with first-degree murder and remained in Miami-Dade County Jail on Monday
with no bond. Jackson, who is homeless, was admitted to the hospital around 10 a.m
Thursday,  the day of the murder, which occurred about 3 p.m. the same day. He was
put in the same room with Rios, according to the arrest report. 

 LESSONS  LEARNED:  

Behavioral health patients require extra controls including
live, continual camera monitoring, use of appropriate
medication and possible use of restraints.

Patients may pose a danger to others, as they did in this tragedy,
and should be under continuous supervision.

Rios was last seen alive at about 2:45 p.m. Thursday. At 3:36., a hospital
housekeeper found him face down on the floor.  “The defendant admitted
to killing the victim by strangling him with his hands and a bedsheet,”
according to the report.

While administrators declined to comment on the security procedures at the
hospital, IAHSS 
(the International Association for Healthcare Security & Safety)
President Marilyn Hollier said psychiatric floors generally have lock-down
procedures, metal detectors, seclusion rooms and cameras at the access
points.  It is not known whether any of these security controls existed at the
hospital.  Hollier also stressed that security officers need specialized
training to deal with behavioral health patients.

Aventura Hospital, located near I-95 north of Miami, Florida, has a large
behavioral health unit with 46 beds.  The victim’s mother said her son was
never violent. “He never, never, never raised his voice,” Paloumbis said.
The mother was summoned to the hospital Thursday. She was told come
quickly and then was ushered into a room where police officers and detectives
were waiting. Though she had limited English skills, she understood that
her son was dead and initially thought that he may have died from a heart attack
or other natural causes.

Stay Situationally Aware and Continuously Monitor Behavioral Health Patients!

 RISKAlert® is a publication of Risk & Security LLC at www.riskandsecurity.com

How Risk-Based Security Can Reduce Violence in Healthcare

reprinted with permission from www.securityinfowatch.com

Using Risk-Based Security to Stem the Tide of Violence
in Hospitals and Healthcare


Created by:   Caroline Ramsey Hamilton

Date: May 22, 2014

Hospital and healthcare security is experiencing a major increase in violence,
instigated by patients, patient families and even healthcare staff.  Just last year,
there was an active shooter incident in Reno, Nev., in which two physicians were
shot, and in Houma, La., 
a hospital administrator was shot to death by a terminated
nurse. As recently as Easter Sunday in California, two nurses were stabbed at the
hospitals, where they worked.  One was stabbed in both the upper and lower torso
and is in critical condition. These two incidents add to the more than 100 
violent
incidents in 2013 and the first half of 2014.

Since 2010, violence in healthcare has skyrocketed. As a result, the Joint Commission has
issued a “Sentinel Event Alert” on the issue and contributed to numerous articles on shootings
in U.S. hospitals. The Department of Homeland Security and a consortium of state and local
hospitals recently released 
a standard for active shooters in healthcare. These all point to the
conclusion that the current law enforcement-based hospital security model is not working.

Changes in Healthcare
The changes in healthcare, including the increase in insured Medicaid patients and increased
traffic to emergency departments, highlights the fact that very well-intentioned people are
working with an outdated security model that hasn’t evolved to address a changing healthcare
environment. The change in billing and reimbursements for healthcare organizations, such as
tracking of readmission rates, has squeezed hospital profits causing reductions in funding in many
security departments at a time when violent events are steadily increasing.

A new risk-based model for hospital security is emerging that is less linear and more cyclical.
It uses technology to a greater extent, employs forecasting and statistical models to predict the
likelihood of future incidents, and is proactive instead of reactive, focusing money and energy on
preventing events instead of simply responding to them. This model also uses risk assessment
formulas to quickly assess the current security profile of a hospital, clinic, hospice, or behavioral
health facility, factoring in heightened threat-risk environment, not only for the facility in question,
but also adding in the wealth of healthcare data that’s now available.

Risk –Based Security Focuses on Continual Assessment
A major focus of this model is the continual assessment and evaluation of preventive security
controls, which are reviewed quarterly, semi-annually, or annually to discover gaps in controls,
and to fix gaps as soon as they are identified. This dovetails nicely into the assessment models
already required by the Joint Commission, OSHA and new CMS standards.

Looking at recent high-profile security events that took in place in hospitals shows that incidents
happen because of exploited gaps in the existing security of the healthcare facility. In the past,
security officers successfully worked hard to reduce response time so that often officers could
arrive in under two minutes, but it’s still too long.  In the Reno shooting, response time was under
two minutes, but that was long enough to kill two doctors.

Focusing on prevention makes sense for healthcare, much in the way the Joint Commission
focuses on patient safety, by continually assessing controls, reducing discovered gaps in controls,
and mitigating gaps by reassessing and tightening security, which creates a cycle of continual
improvement in the healthcare security environment.

Taking Advantage of Technology
The healthcare risk-based security model takes advantage of technology. Instead of waiting
for manual recording of security incidents every day, software programs allow hospital security
officers to enter data at the end of each shift, and that means security directors can map what’s
happening in the hospital or facility on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis.  This can go a long
way to identifying trends early and help facilities make appropriate changes in controls so that
negative trends can be reversed 
quickly and both patient and staff security is increased.

In addition to automating incident collection and analysis, the healthcare security risk assessments
must be automated too.  Risk assessments are too time-consuming and labor intensive to be done
annually.   
By the time the risk assessment is over, the environment has changed again.  By
automating the risk assessments, including environment of care and hazard vulnerability,
it produces data that can be used instantly to analyze and recommend the most cost-effective
controls, and rank them by their return-on-investment (ROI).

The role of security in hospital and healthcare organizations is changing too. Security organizations
should no longer be isolated without intensive interaction with others in the organization, including
the human resources department, the facilities managers, safety managers, and the emergency
management staff.

New DHS Guidelines for Active Shooters in Healthcare
With DHS issuing new guidelines for active shooters in healthcare, hospital emergency managers
are now required to prepare for active shooter incidents, as well as storms, hurricanes, tornadoes,
power interruptions and other events related to natural or man-made disasters.  This creates a
natural partnership between the emergency management staff and the security program,
because the skills of both functions are needed to properly prepare an organization for any disaster.

Instead of existing in a vacuum, healthcare security directors and managers should cheer at
this development because it expands the importance of security inside the hospital or healthcare
facility, and underscores its value in protecting the organizational assets –  the physical facility,
patients, visitors and staff –  to proprietary information, including the HIPAA mandated PHI
(Protected Health Information), vehicles, security systems, high-value healthcare equipment
and the healthcare provider’s reputation.

Security budgets have always suffered because security costs are seen as operating
expenses, not an income source, but by tying the security expenses more closely to loss
prevention and protection of the organization, it creates a cost justification for hospital and
healthcare security.

Risk-Based Security Links to Hospital Compliance Standards
A risk-based security model also links security to myriad compliance standards that affect healthcare
and this also supports and justifies the costs related to security. For example, hospitals are required
to have a variety of security controls in place related to tagging of newborns, posting of no-weapons
signs, and environment of care issues. Any healthcare organization accepting funds from Medicare
or Medicaid must comply with the new mandate for annual security risk assessments. 

OSHA 3148 also requires hospitals and healthcare organizations to do annual workplace violence
assessments, and more than 33 states also require enhanced protection of hospital and healthcare staff.

As security incidents continue to increase and violence in healthcare escalates, making the
switch to a risk-based security program will provide better protection for hospitals and healthcare
organizations, making more effective use of existing security personnel, as well as justifying and
expanding healthcare security budgets.

 

For more information:  contactCaroline Ramsey-Hamilton at caroline@riskandsecurityllc.com

 

RISKAlert – May 2014 Shooting at VA Medical Center, Dayton, Ohio

RiskAlert         INCIDENT REPORT 552 – HOSPITAL SHOOTER

Terminated Employee Shoots Staff Member during Card Game
at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio

Allowing terminated employees to have access to a hospital or facility where they
worked before is a questionable decision, because not only anger at the organization,
but also a
nger at individuals and former co-workers may turn into an incident as this report
explains.

In early May, a terminated housekeeper at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio came back to the hospital to play cards in a hospital break room with a group of current VA staff.   The perpetrator, Neil Moore, had also brought a handgun to the hospital.  Neil was upset because he thought another VA staff member was having a relationship with his wife, so he pulled out the gun, and as a result, one person was shot in the ankle.

It was not a typical active shooter scenario, but it does point outVAMC-DaytonOH
the access control problem in hospitals, and also questions the
ability for anyone to walk into a hospital with a loaded gun
.

LESSONS LEARNED:

 1.  Access to former employees should be prohibited or at
least limited on a case by case basis.

 2.  Visitors should not be allowed to bring guns into a hospital.
      Metal detectors should be used to screen for weapons.

 

Moore, a former employee at the Veterans Affairs hospital, told police that he was going to a regular card game with
his former co-workers.  He said he went to the hospital Monday intending to brandish the handgun to intimidate two former co-workers he believed were involved in relationships with his wife and daughter, both of whom reportedly work at the hospital.  Moore planned to “hold the ex-co-workers at gunpoint while he punched them with his right hand,” according to court documents.

The hospital complex has beds for about 450 people and provides veterans with medical, mental health and nursing home care. It doesn’t have metal detectors at its entrances, but it does have its own security force.

VA spokesman Ted Froats said the force conducts active shooter training four times a year and showed outstanding response Monday. He said in a statement Tuesday that the hospital will consider additional steps to ensure safety, while making sure that any new measures won’t impede the hospital from providing care to veterans as quickly as possible.

RISKAlert®  is a publication of Risk & Security LLC at www.riskandsecurity.com

RiskAlert Incident Report #473 – Hospital Admin Killed at Home

RiskAlert  INCIDENT REPORT 473 – ACTIVE SHOOTER 12-27-2013

Oschner Hospital Administrator Shot to Death in his Home in Active Shooter Spree

Dateline:  December 27, 2013   pm

A Louisiana man attacked his former in-laws, his current wife, and the Administrator of a hospital
where he’d worked, killing three and wounding three others before killing himself, authorities said.

The shooter, Ben Freeman, 38, was found late Thursday night in his car along a highway,
dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

The shootings happened at four locations in two parishes about 45 miles southwest of New Orleans
on Thursday. The first report came about 6:40 p.m., when Lafourche Parish Councilman Louis Phillip
Gouaux, who was shot in the throat, called 911 from his home in Lockport, Houma, La.

The suspect, Ben Freeman, 38, was the ex-husband of Gouaux’s daughter Jeanne, Lafourche Parish
Sheriff’s Office spokesman Brennan Matherne said in a news release.

Gouaux’s wife, Susan “Pixie” Gouaux, was dead when deputies arrived.  Louis Phillip Gouaux and his
daughter, Andrea Gouaux, were injured and taken to Interim LSU Public Hospital in New Orleans.
Both were in critical but stable condition, Matherne said.

About 20 minutes later in Raceland, Ochsner St. Anne General Hospital Administrator Milton Bourgeois
was shot and killed at close range at his home
.  
His wife, Ann Bourgeois, was shot in the leg, and taken
to the New Orleans hospital, where she was listed in stable condition.  Raceland police said Bourgeois
was shot at close range and his wife was shot in the leg.

Houma,LA Shooter

 

Freeman had been employed at three area hospitals over the last few years, including Oschner St. Anne Hospital, where Lafourche Parish Sheriff Craig Webre said he had been a registered nurse before he was fired in 2011. All three hospitals were put on lockdown for a while Thursday.

Freeman’s wife, Denise Taylor Freeman, was found dead in the couple’s home in Houma in Terrebonne Parish. Matherne said her cause of death was not immediately known.

 

  RISKAlert is a publication of Risk & Security LLC at www.riskandsecurityllc.com.

Get Management’s Attention for Security – Shooter Kills the Hospital Administrator

Every Security Officer I’ve ever met has mentioned how difficult it can be to get funding for additional security!  It is a never-ending mission, to get the budget for a security program that will truly protect an organization.

Hospitals are no exception.  They have suffered their own financial problems and because security is not seen as a ‘clinical’ or ‘patient care’ issue, it is easy to take money from security and put it somewhere else.

But there’s one sure way to get management’s attention for Security — having a security incident.  And if you don’t have one at your organization, high profile security incidents at other facilities will all grab management’s attention.

In my Risk-Pro Security Incident Report today, a shooter killed four, wounded three, and then killed himself.   What was unusual about this incident was that the shooter went to the Hospital Administrator’s house and shot the administrator dead, and then shot his wife who was taken to an area hospital.

AdministratorHome-Louisiana

 

 

 

Most executives and administrators think about security as sort of an abstract concept, that doesn’t directly affect them.  But it might, and by sending your management a copy of our Risk-Pro Incident Report, you’ll get their attention this time!

(Subscribe to the Risk-Pro Incident Report program by sending an email with the word SUBSCRIBE on it to info@riskandsecurityllc.com)

Joint Commission Reports on Shootings in Hospitals

Some of the most horrific shootings we see occur in hospitals.  Because most people still think of hospitals as “places of refuge”,  it is always a big shock when some kind of violence or shooting occurs in a hospital, especially gun violence.

With so many active shooter incidents in the US in recent months, the Joint Commission recently released information about the number of shootings in hospitals, and found that,

They analyzed a total of 154 hospitals shootings, which took place between 2000 and 2011.  They found that 59% of the incidents took place inside the hospitals, and 41% took place outside on the hospital grounds.

Of the 59% of incident that happened INSIDE the hospital, not surprisingly, about 30% took place in the Emergency Department, and 19% in the patient rooms.   We all remember the John Hopkins incident that occurred in a room where the shooter shot his mother’s doctor, and then locked the door and killed his mother and then committed suicide.

Of the 41% of incidents that took place outside, but on the hospital’s ground, 23% took place in the parking lot, which underscores how important it is to have a designated manager for the parking facilities.  We have seen stories about a man in Tennessee who had a meth lab IN HIS CAR in the hospital parking garage, and the poor baby tossed off the roof of a parking garage.

The 154 hospital shootings resulted in a total of 235  people who were Injured or who died in the incident.   The most common
victim was the perpetrator (shooter) and that accounted for 45% of the people injured or killed. 

Another 20% of the victims were the hospital employees, including physicians (3%) and nurses (5%).

hospitalhallway2-tiny
Another interesting highlight of the report, was that 50% of the shootings that took place in the
emergency departments were the result of the shooter taking the security officer’s gun!
The dramatic increase in Active Shooter incidents, including the Washington Navy Yard Shooting, the LAX
shooting and the Sparks middle school shooting all illustrate that the trend is moving toward more incidents per year, and more people dead or injured in each incident.
For example, from 2000 to 2004, there was, on average, only 3.8 active shooter incidents per year.  Then,
from 2005 – 2010, the average number of incidents per year increased to 11 incidents a year, and from
2011 to 2013, it jumped again to an average of 17 incidents per year, which is over a 300% increase from 2000.The statistics clearly show the trend of increasing gun violence in our society, and until society can find a way to reverse
the trend, hospitals will be looking at the possibilities to stop the violence at the door to their emergency department.

 

Source for hospital shooting data:   Hospital-Based Shootings in the United States: 2000 to 2011 by Gabor D. Kelen, MD, Christina L. Catlett, MD, Joshua G. Kubit, MD, Yu-Hsiang Hsieh, PhD

 

Planning an Active Shooter Drill, Why Once is Not Enough

Almost every day I get a note that a hospital or corporate facility is planning to have an Active Shooter Drill.  That is always good news because it is a critical part of preparedness that protects not only against an active shooter incident, but also prepares the staff for other emergencies, but it may not be enough.

I’ve found that to be really effective, drills need to be supplemented with short training sessions, and also awareness programs that teach staff to be on their toes, or “situationally aware”.   Security awareness training doesn’t have to be a full time job and it doesn’t have to be expensive.

One of the best ways to create an on-going security awareness program is to make a 12-month calendar, with an activity for each month, or better yet, every two weeks.   Here’s a list of activities I use:

1.  Start with a one page newsletter.  You can have the marketing department help, or use WordPress to design your
own newsletter and email it out to all the staff.  Whether your staff is 100 people or 6000 people, it’s a great way to promote the security program.

2.  Send out very short emails highlighting news items about security incidents at other companies, especially ones in your industry, for example, hospitals.  If there’s a terrible incident at another hospital, cut and paste the story and email it to everyone.  In fact, if you’re an IAHSS or ASIS member, their publications have great stories about different security situations.

3.  Use seasonal reminders.  Now that it’s late October and daylight savings time is almost over, send an email reminding staff how to stay alert when they leave the facility after dark and head for their car.  How to use the escort service, if that’s available, or how to use your keys as a weapon in a potential incident.

4.  Buy posters to put in the cafeteria, or in the elevators that serve as reminders about the concept of staying alert and aware of your surroundings at all time.

I have interviewed more than 8000 staff members in the last 10 years, and they welcome these reminders and feel more secure just because you are keeping awareness up.   Remember, it also reminds everyone that there is a Security Department, and that is working every day to keep them safe.

The Department of Homeland Security also provides free brochures and charts you can print out and give to employees, or you can email them for the staff member to print out and put in their purse.  There are wallet sized cards, and lots of other great information you can use in your own active shooter awareness program.

Check out the preliminary OIG Report, which was leaked to Time Magazine on their swampland.com site at

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/09/16/exclusive-navy-yard-dropped-its-guard-pentagon-inspector-general-says/#ixzz2f6qWCshc

 

 

What’s Your Active Shooter Risk? How to Assess the Threat!

Just the idea of an Active Shooter in your organization, whether you’re a military base, like Fort Hood, and the Washington Navy Yard, or a school like Sandy Hook, a beauty shop, a cracker factory in Philadelphia, a retail mall, a movie theatre, a grocery store parking lot, or a hundred other places, is a terrifying thought.

I lived about 3 miles from one of the shooting sites, a gas station, used by the Beltway Snipers back in October, 2002.  They killed ten people, totally at random, and critically injured three others.   Both of the snipers were sentenced, and John Muhammad was killed by lethal injection in 2009.

If you lived in the DC area, do you remember how scary it was just to pump gas into your car,  people were huddled against the side of their cars in the gas stations, and hidden by their shopping carts at the local Home Depots.

The fear of the Active Shooter comes from the seeming randomness of the action, which means there’s no way to prevent it, unless you give up, stay home, and hide under the bed all day.

But there are things you can do.  Instead of thinking of an Active Shooter incident as a totally unique situation, it’s really a form a Workplace Violence, Gas Station Violence, Parking Lot Violence and other related forms of random violence.   In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has identified quite a few steps you can take to keep yourself safer if you are in the vicinity of an active shooter (http://www.dhs.gov/active-shooter-preparedness).

Most of the shooters are mentally ill.  Normal individuals do not enjoy planning and killing strangers, and it is usually a last ditch effort, with the suicide of the shooter as the grand finale.   Their actions can sometimes be identified early, and the police can be alerted, or the Human Resources group at work, or even the local Sheriff can intervene before it gets to the actual shooting.

Signs that someone is having trouble negotiating their life, especially if that someone is a gun fanatic, with their living room full of AK-47 assault weapons and hollow point bullets, is not hard to spot, because these individuals often leave lots of warning signs, like:

  • Irrational Posts on Facebook or inappropriate tweets.
  • Threats made against friends and family.
  • A dropoff in personal hygiene, as the person gets more obsessed.
  • Problems negotiating their personal life.
  • Demonstrating signs of isolation and groundless paranoia

Organizations can protect themselves from an potential active shooter through a combination of specific controls that include elements like access control, continuous monitoring of cameras, employee awareness and training programs, clear cut evaluation routes, regular active shooter drills, and hardening of facilities, to name a few.

One of the best preventive measures is to conduct an Active Shooter Risk Assessment, which is similar to other security analyses, except that it is focused on a particular set of threats related to an Active Shooter Incident.   As part of my annual Threat Trend Reports, I’ll be releasing a new set of threat data about the Active Shooter, to help organizations calculate their risk of
having such an incident.   For example, did you know that the number of active shooter incidents has jumped from 1 in 2002
to 21 incidents in 2010?

ActiveShooterIncidentsbyYear

 

 

 

 

 

 
Locations have changed, too, and we found that

About 25% of active shooter incidents occur in schools,
About 25% in retail locations, and
About 37% in workplaces.

In future blogs, we’ll be looking at each element of the active shooter incident, and providing more information to keep
your organization safe.