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Safety Has Become an Expectation
When parents send their children off to school, and when teachers and faculty arrive to educate students and manage their institution, they should all have the peace of mind that everyone entering the building will be safe. The protection of everyone, along with confidence that if a situation occurs there is an emergency plan supported by emergency response technology and clear emergency communication, is expected.
We don’t like to think about the worst-case scenario, especially during natural disasters or when emergencies unfold, but we can’t pretend they don’t exist. Too many stories in the news involve a known high-risk student entering a school and opening fire on students and staff members, leaving a wake of destruction in their path.
In these tragic examples illustrate how quickly disaster strikes and response efforts can falter.
In these stories, nothing seems to go according to plan. Human error prevents alarming the proper codes, radio frequencies get bogged down, and emergency responders struggle to communicate efficiently. Delayed video footage, which law enforcement officers were relying on for situational awareness, made it difficult to coordinate emergency response efforts or provide critical information quickly. This is heartbreaking, especially when improved emergency response technology, resource allocation, and efficient communication could have made a meaningful difference.
Prime Secured has worked alongside Jerry Wilkins PSP® NREMT®-EMR, a professional active-shooter emergency plan operations expert from Active Risk Survival, Inc. Wilkins has extensive experience reviewing footage to help organizations strengthen safety strategies, improve situational awareness, and support first responders, emergency personnel, and other agencies. Insights from the Virginia Beach and Parkland shootings helped identify best practices for integrating digital solutions and advanced technologies into your emergency response plan.
“One of the most difficult aspects of watching the footage,” Wilkins said, “is knowing that responders were working from video that was 20 minutes old. By the time it was used for situational assessment, the shooter had already left the area.”
This highlights how emergency management tools, public safety systems, and better emergency communication can save lives.
As a society, we can do better — and your security provider can help by ensuring your emergency plan leverages data, uses reliable cellular networks, and provides access to real-time information
Your Safety Plan and Security Strategy is Just the Beginning
The good news is that more organizations are developing emergency plans than ever before, driven by natural disasters, emergency services requirements, and homeland security standards. Schools, businesses, and communities recognize the need for coordinated emergency response and emergency management practices.
However, many plans are created once and then forgotten — uploaded to folders, buried in directories, and never integrated with digital technology, emergency response systems, or the devices and infrastructure needed to respond when disaster unfolds. In many cases, staff are unsure how to act, how to communicate, or how to coordinate with first responders, emergency vehicles, or police departments.
At the heart of plan failures are three core issues that affect responders, school administrators, emergency services, and the general public. These challenges must be addressed to ensure your plan provides crucial support and protects lives
"The good news, is that we see more organizations creating emergency plans than ever before, probably largely due to active shooter situations in the news. It is seen as a serious and urgent need to do whatever is possible to ensure the safety of employees, students, residents, shoppers, tourists and everyone in between. "
At the heart of emergency plan limitations are three main aspects that are letting down people and teams when an emergency happens. This article will help you determine whether your plan is effective or failing and provide a list of steps to turn your good intentions into an active, safety-supporting tool.
3 Tips to Enhance Technology in Your Safety Plan
1. Harness Technology When It Really Matters
Involve Your Technology Partner from the Beginning
Technology transforms how we monitor, assess, and take action when emergencies happen. Modern emergency response tools — such as access control systems, emergency communication solutions, federated video, and monitoring technology — improve situational awareness and aid emergency responders, search and rescue operations, and medical assistance.
The problem, Wilkins pointed out, is that many organizations fail to coordinate ALL their technologies into one unified emergency response system. They rarely integrate digital solutions, emergency personnel actions, and emergency services protocols into a comprehensive operating plan.
This coordination is essential for disaster response, natural disaster response, and public safety.
A strong technology integrator can:
Connect various technologies into one coordinated system
Improve decision making by providing accurate information
Help agencies communicate across departments
Support emergency responders with critical infrastructure access
Ensure systems work on multiple devices, including every mobile device used by call takers and responders
Failure to coordinate technologies and human actions can lead to injury, liability, and preventable loss of life — especially when responders must react while disasters strike.
Your plan should follow recognized standards like NFPA 3000™, align with homeland security guidelines, and support efficient communication across emergency responders and public health teams.
“Because lack of coordination can directly lead to injury and loss of life, it is critical to make sure your technology integrator is part of your emergency team from the beginning and throughout the plan’s implementation. An emergency-trained technology partner can collaborate with all other members of your team to determine the best technology tools for your unique situation, and then work with your team to connect the dots based on your needs."
Once technology is in place, an integrator can educate the team about all the capabilities of the technology and ensure you are taking full advantage of every time-saving, life-saving inch of your tools. In fact, if you are NOT taking full advantage of the technology at your disposal – as well as coordinating it effectively with the human part of your plan – your organization could be held liable. There are many examples of court cases in which an institution is deemed negligent because they did not plan properly or communicate the plan to those affected.
The General Duty Clause is a common way of determining what you should be doing to guard against liability claims. What would a “reasonable person” expect to be in place to protect him/her when at your place of business? If you have the reasonable tools and steps in place, then you are more likely to be protected from liability claims.
The NFPA has a formal standard for emergency plans. The NFPA 3000™ — Standard for an Active Shooter/Hostile Event Response (ASHER) Program. We suggest you assign someone in your organization to review it – and make it available for the entire team to use as a template to ensure you are doing everything you can to keep people safe.
“Keep in mind that NOT making a decision is in itself a decision that can come back to haunt you,” Wilkins said. “Your emergency plan should cover as many potential situations as possible, so your team knows exactly what needs to happen, why it happens, and when to take action.” That’s the next question you need to answer: Once you have an air-tight plan, how can you ensure everyone knows what to do? The answer according to Wilkins: regular training.
2. Technology is Only as Good as Your Training
Responders Rise Only to a Level They’ve Practiced
In more than one active shooter situations, technology did not perform as expected. In addition to the panic button that wasn’t pushed because no one could find an authorized person, for example, there have been situations when doors were locked down, keeping victims inside when they might have escaped. In those instances, technology failed. The problems might have been solved if staff simply had been trained to activate contingencies.
Wilkins said the key is to make sure training doesn’t happen just once. “You need to revisit your employees’ knowledge of the system on a regular basis, and the training should be required for all new employees.” After the El Paso Shooting, management discovered even though they had talked about their emergency plan, no one remembered what to do because it had been too long and only certain people had been briefed. Therefore, no one took steps that actually did exist in a written plan.
A good technology partner will know how best to ensure your staff has the technical knowledge they need to spring into action at the right time. Prime Secured offers training sessions on installed technologies, that we hope more people will take advantage of.
Some organizations undertake training on their own, but often, because staff members are not experts in safety technology, they fail to train correctly. In one active shooter situation, Wilkins discovered an organization had used video footage after an incident for training, when video should have been a part of the original training process.
“Some organizations DO practice their plans, but I’d be willing to bet most don’t. When things hit the fan, people will perform to the level of their training – they won’t rise to the occasion all of a sudden and know what to do. They’ll fall back to what they know.”
In addition to ensuring that practice happens regularly, Wilkins suggests that training must include role playing and involve a level of stress that simulates what might happen in a real situation. “You have to create some sort of urgency,” he explained. “You can’t just go through the motions, or when the time comes, your training is likely to let you down.”
With technology changes, staff turnover, and other situational changes, it is important to continually refine the plan to fit the circumstances. “Our environment always changes,” Wilkins explained. “When you practice the plan, you need to take into account anything that has changed or is expected to change in your environment.”
A well executed emergency plan – both human and technology aspects together – is a beautiful thing. One of Prime Secured’s clients has multiple emergency lockdown readers throughout their building, everyone has been trained on when to use them, and when they see a masked gunman enter the building, whoever sees him can tap the card and immediately initiate a lockdown sequence.
3. Don’t Keep Your Emergency Plan to Yourself
Public/Private Cooperation is Essential
As one could imagine, when emergencies happen, the scene is chaotic in spite of everyone’s efforts to be organized and desire to resolve the situation. When official law enforcement and medical responders arrive on the scene, you don’t want that moment to be the first time they’ve ever seen your building or read your plan.
Like your technology partner, first responders should be part of your plan from the beginning. They can use their extensive expertise to help you decide how to weave the parts of the plan together to minimize the chaos and achieve better outcomes.
It comes down to this, Wilkins said: The faster they can get to the right area, the better chance they’ll have of neutralizing the threat quickly. Familiarity with your plan will help save time, and so will using technology to get the right information to the authorities.
For example a solution we support, Genetec, gives law enforcement officers access to see real-time streaming video in their own dispatch center (this is called federating footage), as well as lock down and unlock doors to get to the right place fast. Dispatch officers can brief responders while they are on the way to the incident, so they can act to save lives the instant they arrive.
Kansas City is one metro area that has made a decision to install this system, and it’s amazing how much faster they can respond when they have the video and access tools they need. This public/private coordination is critical because seconds matter. We have to think about this from a community standpoint – it’s our responsibility to work together to keep everyone safe.
Don’t Wait to Take Action to Improve Your Crisis Response Plan
If you believe your organization is falling short in any of these three areas of your organization’s emergency response plan, there is no time to waste. Wilkins encourages planning personnel in any organization to begin by studying the NFPA 3000 standards and/or completing the assessment questionnaire, then putting together a team to write a plan, organize regular training, and collaborate with city officials.
“After an incident, wouldn’t it be better to know you’ve truly done everything you can instead of just guessing?” he asked. “Get your integrator, trainers and city officials on your team to build confidence in your plan, so you don’t have to be one of those looking back at heartbreaking videos of how things went wrong.”
For more information and resources for implementing technology in your emergency response plan, contact the Prime Team at: 402-289-4126 or sales@primesecured.com.
For more resources on improving your emergency plan & security strategies we recommend the following topics:
- Workplace Violence: Policy, Plan, Practice Leads to Prevention
- Enhancing Speed and Reach: Advancements in Mass Notification Systems
- Ensuring Student Safety: 3 Technologies to Improve School Security
- Empathy in the Workplace: A Tool for Security Challenges
- De-escalation Techniques for Teachers: 8-Step Process
