HARLINGEN — Avoid. Deny. Defend.
With so many public places — restaurants, grocery stores, shopping malls, movie theaters and even fourth grade classrooms — becoming a sort of urban battlefield where ordinary citizens may at any moment find themselves in a pitched battle for their lives, our national consciousness is slowly transforming to a constant state of vigilance.
We’re more on guard, more watchful, more leery — and more protective.
And that’s as it should be, says Sgt. Jesus Sanchez of the Harlingen Police Department, who gave a presentation July 16 at the Public Safety Conference at the Harlingen Convention Center.
His presentation, “Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events” (CRASE), addressed the events in Uvalde, El Paso, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Buffalo, New York.
“A shooter has three things on his mind,” Sanchez said last month. “He’ll either take his own life, law enforcement will take his life, or he’s going to give up.”
The CRASE course is built on the Avoid, Deny, Defend strategy developed by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Team at Texas State University in San Marcos.
TXST is also the home of the Texas School Safety Center which offers, among other tools, the K-12 Standard Response Protocol Toolkit with guidance and resources for incorporating the SRP into a school safety plans, says its website.
The Harlingen school district, under its director of emergency management and school safety Danny Castillo, is implementing those practices as well as those of CRASE and ADD which Sanchez taught at the safety conference last month.
Since then, he and other HPD officers and school district officials have spent long hours making school campuses safe for kids, teachers and administrators.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Harlingen teachers and administrators were trained in dealing with active shooter and other emergency situations.
“A lot of what I have shared so far with our campus administrators so far specifically relates back to our standard response protocols,” Castillo said. “Within the standard response protocols we have five basic emergency protocols that can be activated depending on the type of hazard that’s being encountered or defended against. That can range anything from a power failure to an active threat that can be present within any of our educational facilities.”
Each scenario, whether a fire or an active shooter, has a specific response which teachers and administrators can activate.
“An administrator or a teacher or a staff member on any one of our campuses can activate the appropriate response that we teach all the way across our district,” Castillo said. “That is something that we also share with our local first responders. We instruct and empower our staff members to know how to respond to any of these potential threats.”
Many of the procedures Castillo has been teaching school district staff come from the CRASE training, which Sanchez taught at the Public Safety Conference last month.
Sanchez spoke in depth recently on the need to take a more proactive approach about the “Defend” component of ADD.
“It’s about the mindset of ‘You’ve got to keep on fighting’ when it comes to that point where you have Avoid, Deny, Defend,” he said.
Defend, however, is the last resort.
The most important act is Avoid, and that begins with situational awareness: Keeping note of exits, maintaining vigilance wherever you go.
If you perceive a threat, move away from that threat immediately. The more distance and barriers you put between yourself and the threat, the better your chances of making it home.
“If you see something, say something,” said Sanchez, speaking the mantra declared by the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001.
“When you go out to eat with your family or friends, always have a plan,” Sanchez said. “I’m not saying to be paranoid all the time, but always have an awareness of your surroundings, your exits, because if something were to happen…”
He stopped to point out now that this is just good solid planning for any event, whether it be an active shooter or a fire.
“It can be some type of disaster where you have a plan to set yourself up for success to get out of there,” Sanchez said.
The www.avoiddenydefend.org website says, “Remember that failure to plan is planning to fail.”
Sanchez said shoppers, movie goers, teachers, churchgoers – everyday private citizens going about their business — should report anything that just doesn’t look right.
“Let’s say you’re at a business and all of a sudden you see an unknown person just walk in and it’s not normal,” Sanchez said. “You know you have that feeling. But a lot of times we’re afraid to say something because, ‘Who’s that?’ You’re telling yourself ‘Who is that? Who is that person in our business, they don’t belong here.’ But a lot of times we are afraid to say something.”
Say something. That’s not to say everyone who is a little eccentric or behaving in an odd manner is a threat. It just means look into it.
“A lot of times you have that gut feeling,” Sanchez said. “It doesn’t mean that person’s a killer. It just means that something’s not right. If it’s something out of the ordinary, if it doesn’t seem right, it’s good to say something.”
Narratives from several active shooter incidents reveal that people heard gunshots but thought they were tires backfiring or fireworks popping.
“That’s like the denial phase,” Sanchez said. “Let’s say you are in your place of business. All of a sudden you hear a loud bang, and you say ‘What is that? Is that a firework?’ Our natural reaction is to downplay it because you really don’t want to think those are gunshots. That’s just normal.”
In these times we have to vigilantly investigate such sounds.
“You need to start the process of setting yourself up for success. You need to start to avoid that situation because it may not be fireworks,” he said. “It might be gunshots.”
In these situations, it’s important to remain calm.
Sanchez referred to people’s stress response and heart rate. The normal rate is about 60 beats per minute, but when it speeds up to 120, 150, 175, we go into what Sanchez called a “black condition.”
“You experience overload, you freeze, you don’t have control of your motor skills,” he said. “You can’t think. You can’t function. You can’t see around yourself.”
In this mode, exits may be right in front of us and we don’t even see them. The important thing here is to breathe deeply and focus on that breathing. It is in this moment of mindfulness and control in the face of madness that we can see more clearly our situation and opportunities for survival.
We might see the exits now, the escape routes. And if we don’t see those, we must do the last thing, the dreaded thing, the only thing to save ourselves and others. Hiding under a desk or playing dead doesn’t work anymore.
“That’s not going to cut it,” Sanchez said. “You’re gonna have to do whatever you can to survive, because at that moment you’re in survival mode. So when you have a bad guy like that, you don’t fight fair. You do whatever it takes to go home at the end of the day to defend your family, defend your kids, your coworkers.”
Consider that attackers look for large groups of people, such as those at Pulse night club in Orlando in 2016. In a room full of 100 people and only one shooter, the best thing might be just to rush him. True, some people will get shot, but others won’t.
“That’s a tough mindset, but at that moment it turns into survival instead of everybody getting in a fetal position and just hoping they don’t get shot,” he said. “At that moment you’re going to have to defend yourself. You’re going to have to fight. That’s what this course teaches you. That mindset. You’re going to have to fight. You’re going to have to defend yourself.”
