This article is reprinted with permission from Tactical Science.
By Pete Blair and Jack Johncox
This article builds on a 2023 study that analyzed how officers are shot and killed during active shooter incidents. The original research covered data from 2000 to 2018. We’ve now extended the dataset to include five more years (2019-2023) and will compare trends between these two periods.
What was the issue?
Responding to active shooter events is inherently dangerous, but how dangerous? The original study quantified this risk by examining how often officers were shot in these incidents. Now, with additional data, we can provide a more complete picture and identify any evolving trends that impact officer safety and training.
How did we look at it?
We analyzed 567 active shooter attacks documented in the FBI/ALERRT dataset from 2000 to 2023. The original study only examined the first 250 attacks (2000-2018). Our sources included official reports, police records, news articles and other verified summaries of these events.
What did we find?
From 2000 to 2023, at least one police officer was shot in 69 active shooter events. That is about 12% or 1 out of 8 events! A total of 136 officers were shot during these events and 31 (22.79%) of these officers died.
When the researchers started to dive into the circumstances of the shootings, they found that 37 (27.2%) of the officers who were shot during an attack were shot at the outset of the attack. Often, they were ambushed while standing a duty post. These officers were also more likely to die. When shot at the outset, more than half (51%) of the officers died. When shot responding, about 1 in 8 officers was killed. The figure below shows the difference in mortality between officers who were shot responding and those who were shot in ambushes at the outset of an attack.
The rest of the analysis is focused on the officers who were shot when responding to an attack. Ninety-nine (99) officers were shot when responding to 56 events. So, even when the ambushed officers were eliminated, an officer was still shot in about 1 out of every 10 active shooter events.
The figure below presents where the officer was when they were shot. More than three-quarters of the officers who were shot were shot outside! The most frequent situation was while moving outside. The next most common situation was that they were shot on arrival, which we defined as in or immediately next to their car.
What’s changed?
First, active shooter response is still the most dangerous call in law enforcement! The ratio of events with officers shot during response is lower (1 in 10 vs. 1 in 8) when we add the last five years of data. If we look at only the 2019 to 2023 data, it is dramatically lower (1 in 20). We would love to say that this is because officers are being better trained and are better at responding, but there are a couple of things that we must address before making that claim.
In the last 5 years, there has been an influx of cases that meet the technical definition of an active shooter event as used by the active shooter working group, but really do not seem like active shootings. In house (at ALERRT) we refer to these as escalated events or walk-by shootings. These generally involve a fight that starts at a bar or a party. One of the parties to the fight leaves the location to get a gun and then returns to the scene, opens fire, and immediately leaves. About 10% of the events in the last five years fall into this category. The escalated fights almost all end with the attacker fleeing.
On top of that, we have also seen a general increase in the number of events where attackers flee the scene. Early on, this was quite uncommon, but in the last 5 years about 42% percent of all attackers flee the scene before law enforcement arrives. If we eliminate these flee cases from the data, about 1 out of 10 active shooter events result in an officer shot during response in the last five years. So the rate of officers being shot appears to have gone down a little bit even when the flee cases are eliminated.
Second, officers who were shot in the last 5 years were substantially less likely to die. From 2000 to 2018, about 16% of the officers who were shot when responding died. From 2019 to 2023 only 7% of the officers shot during response died. That means in the last five years, officers who were shot when responding were 2.25 times less likely to die! Our data don’t allow us to determine exactly why, but it is possible that the increase in medical training that police officers have been receiving is helping to save lives.
Third, a larger proportion of the officers that were shot during active shooter events were shot outside. In the original data, about 72% of the responding officers that were shot were shot outside. Now it is 78%. If we look only at the last five years of data, it is 86%. Officers who are shot outside are also about 3x more likely to be killed (3% killed when shot inside and 9% when shot outside)! This is clearly an area that needs serious attention in training. Yet, if we look at how most active shooter response training classes are structured, much more time is spent on moving inside of structures and room entries than on outside issues.
Let us offer a brief observation on this point. When active shooter response training first began, it was dominated by SWAT trainers. That made a lot of sense at the time. You were dealing with someone actively engaged in committing violence and that was an area that was within the SWAT mission set. What SWAT guys taught was basically a mini-SWAT school for patrol officers. They applied SWAT sensibilities to the active shooter problem. SWAT skills were what they knew, so that is what they taught.
That made sense when active shooters were a new phenomenon, but we now have almost 25 years of data and experience in dealing with these threats. We know that active shooter events are different from SWAT events in a lot of ways. We have made some changes based on this knowledge. We no longer expect officers to wait for a team of 4 or 5 officers to make entry for example. Yet, some of the original sensibilities of SWAT officers still have undue influence on active shooter response training and many trainers are still trying to run mini-SWAT schools. It is time to move beyond the traditional SWAT approach (as a side note, this is not to say SWAT teams are not skillful. Without a doubt, most teams are extremely capable. However, their operational context differs, and their skills do not transfer seamlessly to active shooter training.)
Nearly 25 years of data clearly demonstrate that the outside environment poses significantly greater danger than the inside. Why doesn’t our training reflect this reality?
We are not saying that interior skills don’t matter. They do, but this is not where most officers are being shot and killed. Reflecting on the data, how much training time in your classes is allocated to addressing outside versus inside problems? Do officers start outside and move inside during force-on-force scenarios? Do officers choose where they will arrive or do you choose where they start? Do any of your force-on-force scenarios involve contacting the attacker outside of the building?
If you are doing what most people are doing, your answers to the above questions are obvious. You spend much more time on inside than outside problems. You tell participants where to start your force-on-force scenarios, they start inside, and they never encounter a bad guy outside. What kind of threat picture do you think that creates for your officers? Is that part of why more officers are being shot and killed outside?
Across the policing world, everyone has been saying that they are evidence-based for some time now. If you are being evidence-based, then you must let the evidence drive your training. The data here are clear. The outside of the building is more dangerous than the inside for responding law enforcement officers. Training must reflect that. Because training time is limited, focusing on exterior threats will mean taking time from somewhere else. That is uncomfortable, but being truly evidence-based demands it.
What do you think? Email editor@police1.com.
About the authors
J. Pete Blair, Ph.D., is the executive director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center and a professor of criminal justice at Texas State University.
Jack Johncox is a research associate at ALERRT.