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Subscribe to RSSChildren are taught to “stop, drop and roll” if their clothing ever catches fire. Now some authorities want adults to "run, hide and fight” if they’re ever at work when a gunman opens fire.
In an eerie video funded by the Department of Homeland Security, experts offer advice on what safely could be considered a worst-case scenario at the workplace.
"It may feel like just another day at the office, but occasionally, life feels more like an action movie,” intones the narrator as workers are seen holding meetings, making copies, taking coffee breaks or working in solitude within their cubicles.
Suddenly, a man dressed in black and wearing sunglasses takes a shotgun from his backpack and begins blasting away, starting with a security guard standing next to the elevator. (The video is a dramatization, but may be disturbing.)
This six-minute training video was made for $200,000 in federal grant money.
The video, nearly six minutes long, was produced by the city of Houston with money from a federal grant.
“In particular, we wanted to address those early moments, when an individual has the best opportunity to save himself,” said Dennis Storemski, director of Houston’s Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security.
While the frightening video may bring to mind recent attacks on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and movie theater in Colorado, Storemski said the producers had a different model in mind: the 2008 chain of attacks in Mumbai, India, that killed 166 people.
The video promotes a simple, three-step plan to escape danger:
- Run. Always try to escape if possible, even if others insist on staying behind.
- Hide. If you can’t escape, conceal yourself. Lock doors, turn off the lights and silence your cell phone.
- Fight. As a last resort, prepare to battle or throw off the attacker, using a chair, metal trash can, fire extinguisher or whatever else can be turned as a weapon.
Funding for the $200,000 video came from a $3.6 million grant Houston received from the Department of Homeland Security. The video was made in May and became available just days before the deadly July 20 Aurora, Colo., movie theater attack that killed 12 and injured 58.
Nicole Stickel, a spokeswoman for the DHS, said money came from a program funding "law enforcement and terrorism prevention activities, like training videos."
The department offers similar advice in booklet form, without the frightening visuals.
Storemski said the response to the “Run, Hide, Fight” video has been overwhelmingly positive. The video has received more than 1.3 million hits on YouTube and has been shared with police jurisdictions throughout the country. DVD requests also have come in from as far as Germany, Japan and Australia.
However, the video has been criticized over its advice to fight back if necessary. But some security experts say that choice makes sense.
“We used to say cooperate with the robber or whoever is harming you, but the paradigm has shifted,” said Vernon Herron, senior policy analyst for the Center of Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. “If someone has in their mind that they want to shoot and injure and kill as many people as possible, cooperating with somebody like that is not going to help.”
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Why would the video be criticized for telling people they may have to fight back? What should the video tell people to do? Tell people to just roll over and wait to be hurt?
Post #6 makes the most sense - be pro active - that means don't be an @!$%# at work and you won't make your self a target.
Unfortunately most companies have a Good Old Boys club - you can out work everyone at your work and still not get rewarded for it.
We had a suggestion box at work and I put in an idea on how to restructure several departments - the HR person submitted it as her own idea and got all the praise for it - gotta love suck ups.
THe proper response is take cover, draw weapon, aim handgun, shoot attacker. NOT run away and hope the slowere cowrokers distract the shooter long enough to allow your escape.
Neale, you know the pacifists are totally against that approach. They would much prefer that you cower beneath your desk and cross your fingers that the shooter is so stupid he won't think to walk around the desk. After all, the police are only 15 minutes away. I have to wonder, though, how much different things would have turned out for the shooter in the restaurant a few years ago when he was walking around pulling up table cloths to shoot people as they cowered in fear, if when he pulled a table cloth up,someone had a pistol and shot him right in the face. How many lives might have been saved if someone in the restaurant had had a concealed carry permit.
Indeed, your response should be to shoot the guy if possible.
Texas Lady- remember that McDonald's shooting in the early 90s or late 80s? The Texas state sillhouette handgun female champ was in there with family. She obeyed the law, and did not carry her .44mag revolver with her. She later testified that had she disobeyed the law OR been permitted a CCW, she could have killed the shooter before he killed the second person. She regularly shot 1ft diameter steel targets at 100 yards. The shooter was at less than ten. She lost her parents to a stupid law. She said they could arrest her, but they'd never find her unarmed again.
You're thinking of the shooting at Luby's in Killeen.
Thanks, GB. It HAS been a long time. I thought it was a McDs. Thanks for the refresher!
This looks like a job for an office linebacker!
first rule of thumb pay attention for any suspicious looking white man. this has been a whites only crime and any wouldbe victims should be aware. secondly if possible keep some type of weapon with you even if its a taser.
MEWORLD: So Seung-Hui Cho was white?! Why don't you put your head back where it was and let the adults discuss things now. :)
Why not just shoot him with your own gun? That should be the first option.
Point well taken, we also should always be vigilant towards our black neighbors since they commit much more black on white crime than vis-a-vis. But don't take my word for it. Look it up in the FBI crime statistics. Having faced that unpleasantness directly, I still have hope for my fellow citizens of all races and colors.
That arab army psychiatrist wasn't White either meworld.
Fighting back should always be an option in situations like this - they don't call it a fight or flight response for nothing.
and notice the order. FIGHT or flight.
I think that's what the video recommends.
Or you could live and let live, don't gossip behind the back, don't bully (Unless you're online) or belittle their work. That could be more effective than run, hide and fight.
Ironic that this comment would come from 'The roughster', but it's one of the better points made here so far this morning.
With office and workplace shootings, the killer is not, as the article suggests, trying to 'kill as many people as possible'. He is trying to injure and kill the people he feels have wronged him.
A good preventative strategy is to not be one of the people a possible workplace killer feels have marginalized or victimized him so you're not on his list of people to 'take out' when he decides to avenge himself. There have been a number of mass killings where the killer spared people who had been good to him.
If you're a colleague, common courtesy to everyone goes a long way. Be proactive in reaching out to people and do your best to 'play well with others' by doing what you can to make people feel welcome there and like they belong. Ignoring people and focusing only on your own work all the time can contribute to some people feeling alienated. If you're the boss, it's especially important to treat your subordinates with respect and to be extremely tactful in your interactions with people. Try to be positive instead of negative in your conversations, focus on actions and results instead of personalities and making things personal. It is very important to give credit where credit is due, and to do it as often as possible. Egocentricism and greed may very well paint a bullseye right on your chest when someone passes their breaking point. It would be very good indeed if none of the employees reach that breaking point because of the workplace environment they spend so much time in.
That is an assumption on your part TiGor. Your are trying to put rational reasoning in place for someone who is acting irrationally. My ex-husband was shot in the parking lot where he worked about 15 years ago. Some crack addict opened fire with a shot gun just as my husband was waiting for a break in traffic to pull out on his way home. When asked by the judge what he was doing, the guy responded, "I was high." This attack was not directed at management but was a random act of violence. My husband did survive, but that was a fluke. The buck shot perforated both the artery and the vein in my husband's neck. He bled out of his artery and it was picked up by the vein and pumped back to the heart. Just a fluke injury.
No, that is not an assumption, Texas Lady, it's how bona fide workplace killers operate almost 100% of the time. They're not at all irrational, they're extremely angry and have planned out exactly what they're going to do because of it.
I am sorry to hear about what happened with your husband, but as you state several times, that incident was 'a fluke' and 'a random act of violence'. In his case, it had nothing to do with him being at work, other than he was coincidentally in the parking lot leaving his place of employment. He wasn't shot by another employee, the shooting had nothing to do with how he or his work affected anyone else there, and it could have just as easily happened in the parking lot of a grocery store or at a gas station. For all practical purposes, this is NOT an instance of workplace violence of the type the video described in the article addresses.
What we're talking about is targeted violence perpetrated by someone who knows their victims very well. They virtually always will have a mental list of who they're going to try to kill. Notice they never kill the janitor, a guy or two in the mail room, a secretary or two, and then run out of targets and flee or (more commonly) kill themselves. No, they target their immediate coworkers, either present or former, their supervisor, and often the company senior management if they can get to them. It's retribution. If they were strangers, it wouldn't be happening. It pays to mind oneself in one conducts business as it can most certainly come back in a very unpleasant kind of way.
We are so worried about hurting someone's feelings these days. Somehow the acceptable response is to go postal, right?
I was picked on all the time when I was younger. Funny how I didn't think it would be alright to "end" anybody because of the offenses. I guess jails were less friendly back then.
Thank you Houston, TX. Money well spent! Far too many people don't have any idea what to do. This should help people understand that they CAN help themselves.
It's a sound enough strategy.
But where's the training video for managers- the one defining reasonable expectations versus gratuitous abuse?
Where's the video on conflict resolution, communication, and anger management tactics?
An ounce of prevention is, after all, worth a pound of cure. Shootings are rare indeed at places with good management.
The common meme that responsibility starts at the bottom and authority starts at the top is just a way for managers to avert ownership of problems created by not listening to the advice of those in the trenches.
If you work in a business that has no suggestion boxes or vertical channels of communication, that's generally a sign of incipient failure, unless that company enjoys a virtual monopoly- and a field free of competitors.
The reality is far simpler: both authority and responsibility are required for efficiency and effectiveness, and only the scope of that authority should change as one moves up the chain of command.
Personally I would fight back cause you can not outrun a bullet !!
It's about time. Just as we have fire drills, people need to be sure of what they must/can/should do in the event of an emergency. Roughster and FeO2, great comments. These type of shootings don't seem to happen in places that are good to work in, i.e. doing good business, developing employees, actively managing, etc.
The TiGor, , you seem under the assumption that it is only from working conditions that someone would ever enter a workplace and start shooting. However,many times it has nothing to do with the actual work place itself, but someone choosing to enter it for another reason unexpectedly.
Recent past shootings include: Estranged spouses who entered workplaces after following their partners from parking lots and shooting them, along with other employees who tried to intervene; people who were chased into a salon and then subsequently shot along with employees working with customers; employees shot due to other random crimes being committed; someone stalking a person at work and shooting multiple people to get to that person; and someone who went to the wrong business because they were losing their home, could not get their mortgage refinanced and their spouse had left them, taking the children with them.
So, having a plan is important, not just trying to be a positive employee who understands how to work effectively with others and the public at large. But it will never remove the element of random chance. And choosing to stay and try shooting someone is not the wisest choice if you can run. Since shock and adrenaline can cause aiming a gun and hitting a target to become nearly impossible. No matter how close that person may be. Law enforcement personal can validate this. Last, run some practice drills, just to see how people respond. God forbid something ever happen, but even a mock drill can reveal potential problems.
You like to read into things that which is not there, don't you?
It's not 'many times', it's 'sometimes', in the context of what we're discussing here, which is the workplace violence addressed by the video and what the mainstream news coverage focuses on: office and workstation violence. It might not be an office per se, but a location the employee is more or less assigned to in order to do their job and where one could expect to find them most of the time. Mostly these occur where one employee, or ex employee, is targeting one or more coworkers or superiors, and it's in a place that is not open to the public where just anyone can walk in. The video was produced in Dallas and meant for people who work in many of the high rise offices and large facilities there. Its target audience was not likely retail and hospitality workers, though that would have been nice.
In reality, the greatest exposure to workplace violence is retail and the typical scenario is where women at work are being stalked and killed by their exes. The first thing is that this does not get the news coverage that the office/workstation types of shooting get. I suspect this is because people who work in offices and at some type of workstation (usually more technical types of employment) are more educated, tend to work 9-5 Monday through Friday, and are prone to actually watch network news. It hits home with these folks. The networks know which demographics are paying attention to them. People who work retail tend to not pay much attention to network news, or read newspapers, and often they're working when network news would be broadcast. Spending time on shootings in salons, gas stations, bars, and retail stores doesn't seem to help the major news outlets, so they give it little or no mention when it happens.
Whoever said it wasn't?
If you work in the kind of environment where the video is generally relevant to you, the preventative aspect of this is extremely important. The first goal is to try to keep someone you work with or who works for you from wanting to come in and shoot the place up. The second goal is barring that, at least make it so you're not one of the people being targeted. There are absolutely no guarantees in life, but this is something that can be done that you have complete control over and could very well make all the difference.
And random chance is the one thing you have basically no control over whatsoever and can't do a whole lot about other than just to react. Which is probably why the video doesn't cover it.
Video: pull out 44, line up sights on gunman's chest, squeeze trigger, call for cleanup. 30 second video.
No, we put up signs outside buildings that say "no one inside has a gun to protect themselves" (no guns allowed). So not only are guns not allowed, it is advertised to any criminals walking by it is safe for them to commit violent crimes inside this building. NOT ONE CASE OF A SHOOTING SPREE HAS HAPPENED IN A POLICE STATION WHERE EVERYONE IS ARMED. Just wondering if anyone else noticed this.
I'd rather be fired by one than carried by six. While the company certainly has the right to ban firearms on company property, I will never accept a job in such a building. If I already worked there, and they changed the rules, well, I don't have to accept being ruled into helplessness. I'd continue to carry while looking for work elsewhere.
Actually there was a shooting spree in a Detroit police station in which 4 officers were shot before the suspect was killed.
"... before the suspect was killed."
How many people in addition to those four do you think would have been killed if the officers were unarmed?
FeO2...I completely agree with you; however, we cannot make companies and their management "Do the right thing". That being said, may I just say that my first thought upon reading this story was "What a sad state of affairs that one must protect themselves in their everyday lives". Peace has been ever-forgotten. This is so disheartening.
We are taught at a very young age to protect ourselves in our everyday lives.
Look both ways before crossing the street. Do not run with scissors. Some things need the assistance of an adult. Don't play with matches. Buckle your seat belt. Don't get in vehicles with strangers. Use the handrail while climbing or descending the stairs...
Accidents in the home are very much a leading cause of injuries and disabilities, and sometimes even result in death. They usually happen when we lose sight of basic safety rules that we learned when we were very young, or else we fail to exercise common sense in our activities.
There are parts of the world where there is some racial or political instability and violence is commonplace. People who live there learn very quickly that there are some things that one just doesn't do unless you want to find yourself in a heap of real trouble, real fast. There are even some neighborhoods here in the US where you best watch what you say to whom and try not to get anyone upset at you, because it won't end well if you do.
In most workplace environments, the more important thing is to make a point of staying aware of what's going on and having a plan to react (such as escape) when bad things happen. This has always been true for fire, tornadoes, sometimes power failures, so it's not unreasonable for one to also have thought about what to do if someone was to launch an attack in the workplace, whether it be with guns, fire, gas, bombs, or whatever.
lets not advocate a legally armed response. That's just crazy. We all know how effective a trash can is.
I'm not going to throw anything other than shots.
I saw this Dumb Propaganda video 2months ago.Stupidest production I've ever seen, and another bad acting alert.They forgot to include what else to do in a small working environment and small areas of the work place.So where do you run, hide,fight in a situation like that?What if the would be perpetrator sneaks up on everybody,in that work enviroment? What if who ever or what ever,has a gun to your head?Run Hide Fight eh?
Perfect BS production brought to buy homeland security,your friend, yeah right, for all the American Sheep to buy into.
Hey with friends like that who needs enemies.
Sorry I do not buy into any of the BS Propaganda your friend homeland insecurity throws out there.
However if you want to,feel free.
At least someone has done something to give even the basic of information. People tend to freeze up when stuff happens and more people die because of indecision or making the wrong choice as opposed to the actual threat itself. Who cares if the acting was good or not? It gives people something to think about and hopefully people will make plans ahead of time instead of off of the cuff. Also if you are in a small office and someone has a gun to your head the only thing you can do is try to fight him off or just kiss your ass goodbye.
$200,000 in federal grant money? That's the reel crime! Gee, a man in black walks into an office building wearing sunglasses and carrying a back pack. No suspicion there!
Peace but with preparation. I firmly believe one must take control of their own safety. Get your license to carry concealed and take as much professional training as you can afford. If you carry insurance on your house and car, you are in the right mindset. Spending money learning how to protect yourself is money well spent. Along with that any reputable tactical school is going to emphasize avoidance and escape. When those options are not possible, fight and fight to win. Removing the gun free zones is the only option to having real effect on these incidents.
great video! but dont u think a potential assasin is going to get ideas on how to protect himself after watching that video? bottomline-use your head,stay calm if u can and I feel there should be a designated gun holder in the office/workplace
Uhhhh.... Didn't they kind of have this in the form of a security guard?
Agree with Andy2961992. Si vis pacem, parabellum!
I would suggest not to F--K with anybody to start with then he has no beef with you. If he is one of those totally gone nuts then you will have to run. Try to keep other people between you and the shooter thus using them as a screen to allow your escape. Don't try to play dead unless it would be a last resort. Offer him sexual favors from some of the other victoms. If he gets you cornered run right at him throwing anything you can pick up you will be harder target he will have to hurry his shot. If you get to him and are still alive and able grab him by the B-LLS and squeeze with everything you have. Do not let go no matter what. Try to crush them in your hand.
Yeah, I'd feel real secure if everyone in the building was armed. Can see some of these water cooler discussions turning violent really fast. Soon as the guy came in, that security guard should have been on him, going thru his backpack, instead of schmoozing with some gal over by the elevator. All these people on this board with their action hero bravado would probably be wetting their britches if something like this actually happened to them. This video offers more practical advice because, this isn't the Wild West anymore. The majority of people are unarmed when they go out in public, so yes, their series of flight, hide or fight makes sense.
Speak for yourself.
Great points, Warren. Of course, most people in this situation WOULD "wet their britches." But what are you going to do after that? You can stand there in a puddle, or you could take out that pistol that you hoped you'd never have to use, and maybe put an end to the slaughter. If you freeze, you die just as quickly as somebody without a gun, but if you don't, you may just be the person to save some other folks (and yourself).
While we can't know how much "deterrence value" there is in the bad guy not knowing if there are concealed weapons carriers out there, there is factual evidence that people's lives have been saved by the good guy who shot the bad guy. You can put your head in the sand and hope that the police will arrive before the bad guy gets to your desk, or you can hope that someone has the intestinal fortitude to carry a gun he's trained with and puts an end to the evil.
Shoot back!
Seems like a wasted effort, not everyone will respond the same. Some people panic and freeze, you dont know how you will react until your put in that position. But before it happens it seems like common sense to run, hide or fight.
Being armed doesn't make me more likely to go off. That just isn't reality. I am less likely to go off as I am law abiding and have too much to loose. Knowing the consequences that come with being armed makes me a safer more aware citizen, not a shooting waiting on a conflict. Licensees are statistically the most law abiding of the populace. Getting a license shows we actually want to follow the rules.
Heh... if being armed increased the likelyhood people would be shot, why aren't gunshows drenched in blood?
When was the last massacre at a gun show?
I did get 2 valuable points out of this video. First is to turn your cellphone off to prevent possibility of becoming a target if unable to readily dial 911. The second was that the first response team is not there to help victims but seek out the shooter and to cooperate with them when encountering. Thanks for the heads up and forethought!
we needed a video to tell us to take cover? no, I thought we should offer the gunman a cup of coffee.
your government dollars at work
roll up in the fetal position on the floor and pee on yourself. thats what most people would do.