Ep 135: Active Shooter Training Buyer's Guide - Leadership
Episode 135
Published Jul 8, 2026
Duration: 26:45
Episode Summary
In the final part of the Active Shooter Training Buyer's Guide, Bill Godfrey and the team break down what real readiness takes: shared policies, honest debriefs, funding to sustain it, and knowing you are ready rather than hoping.
Episode Notes
After thousands of active shooter exercises, we can tell which leaders actually sleep at night. They all did the same things to earn it, and it is not about tactics. It is about leadership.
This episode is the final part of the Active Shooter Training Buyer's Guide. Bill Godfrey, Jill McElwee, Billy Perry, and Ron Otterbacher break down what leaders have to own to make their organizations, and their partners, truly ready.
They discuss:
- The difference between "I think we're ready" and "I know we're ready," and the hard work that closes the gap
- Why readiness is preparedness, not just training: policies, procedures, funding, and a plan to maintain all of it
- How training, exercises, and repetition each do a different job, and why leaders who confuse them stall out
- Why your readiness depends on your partners, so if your mutual aid, fire, EMS, and dispatch aren't ready, neither are you
If you're a chief, sheriff, fire or EMS leader, emergency manager, or training officer, this episode gives you a practical guide to the leadership behind real active shooter preparedness, not just checking the exercise box.
View this episode on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/qnBdoWeM8_E
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:We've run thousands of active shooter exercises with agencies all across the country. The leaders that sleep at night all have the same active shooter incident management training pattern for their organizations. When you're buying training, make sure it includes these things because it'll save you, and that's today's topic.
Jill, let's start off with you, and let's talk about what are some of the gaps for active shooter training that forget about or don't take care of incident management.
Jill McElwee:
Yeah, these agencies that you spoke about that sleep at night, these agencies have looked at those gaps, the not having all of their partners be a part of that training. By including that interconnectivity that is needed between your law enforcement, your fire, EMS, your dispatch, your EM. Those leaders that sleep at night understood that there has to be policies enacted, policies that are shared among agencies. It's not going to serve me any good to have a solid, stellar policy that my partners that are going to respond with me know nothing about. So utilizing a simple training like our ASIM checklist, utilizing that as part of our policy and sharing that among those that will respond to us during the time of need, and this is no doubt going to be one of those situations where no matter how large your agency is, you're going to need partners.
Bill Godfrey:
Billy, the first couple minutes of an active shooter event, when you've got the first half dozen, dozen law enforcement officers arriving on scene, and quite often, they're not all from the same jurisdiction, how important is it to have everyone on the same playbook, knowing what they're going to do together?
Billy Perry:
Oh, it's critical. But truthfully and frankly, I don't think the majority of agencies are going to be in a position to actually do it correctly. I think the ones that have had good training like you're referencing will, but it is tantamount to having a good end result product. Jill has been talking in some of the other podcasts about knowing the end goal. It's like reading the last chapter of the book. You know what's supposed to happen, and you have to be working to get there, putting the puzzle pieces together. And I think it's incredibly important, and I think just like with we using the 5th Man, using tactical, I think having that, the tip of the spear goes in, makes it happen, and then we automatically set up a command structure so that we're steering it.
Bill Godfrey:
Ron, you've spent a lot of time in command posts in your career, and of course, as we've done training across the country, what's the things that jump out to you that are the common failure modes that leaders forget about or they don't take seriously?
Ron Otterbacher:
When we actually started this program, we realized that all the focus was on tactics instead of the leadership component that went along with those tactics. We realized that if you have a messed up command decision, you can throw all the tactics you got out because you just countermanded those training issues that you've identified. The big thing is having this training and having the understanding that leadership plays a significant role in all of this, and it needs to be included with everything else. And it's not jus leadership from one perspective. It's leadership from across. We talk about unified command. We don't instantly go to unified command, but we have unified command structure there because they're working with each other, and they've all got to understand where we're heading, and if they've never been to the training, I don't care at what level, if they've never been to the training, it won't be successful.
Bill Godfrey:
The training is critical and as we've talked about, it has to include everybody that's going to be there, meaning all the disciplines, police, fire, EMS, dispatchers, emergency management. It's got to include everybody, and it's got to include the mutual aid agencies because there's really arguably no place in this country where you could have an active shooter event and somebody from outside your agency wouldn' show up to that active shooter event. And so the training is critical, and it can go a long way to getting people on a common plan.
But there's a difference between I think we're ready, and I know we're ready. And if I do a lot of training, I think we're ready. But if I want to be to I know we're ready, then I've got to do the extra work that sometimes gets hard. We have to push pas the training envelope and get into planning, policies, and it's got to be a joint policy. Usually, that's the point at which you want to get emergency management engaged if you haven't already and have them spearhead a regional policy or a countywide policy that everybody can sign on to and legitimately get everybody on the same page.
And the other piece of this is you have to have a plan not only for achieving this level of preparedness, and I use that word instead of training because it's more than just training. W need the training. We need the policies. We need the procedures. We also need the funding to maintain it, and that means you've got to bring in the city managers, the county managers, the providers of grants, whether that's local or state or federal grants. It all has to come together, and that falls to leadership. And it's a lot easier to just let trainers go out and do the training and go, "Yeah, I think we're ready."
Billy Perry:
And I'll one-up the discomfort. It also has to be from an outside source that knows what they're doing. I think we have to get away from incestuous training. We don't teach ourselves karate in the garage. If you want to learn how to fight, you got to go out and find somebody to teach you how to fight. And I think you have to know what it is you want, what are the best practices now, and you have to do open honest, brutal, naked debriefs.
Jill McElwee:
That's it. Yeah. And I'll tell you, as a training chief in the past, one of the things I tried to challenge myself and tried, sometimes successful, sometimes maybe not, was not just doing exercises or training and then, oh, did that, okay, mark that off. Or writing a plan or a policy and shelving it. It's that act of planning or that act of training, that actual act of getting together, that's where we're going to yield the most benefit, and that's the part where we're getting at where leadership plays a large role in that, in ensuring that this isn't just a one-off. We didn't just do a demonstration that we're going to call an exercise. We got brutal with ourselves.
Billy Perry:
Right. An open candid debrief. Not just a high-five and going, "We're amazing."
Jill McElwee:
Yeah, we can do that. There is no easy button for this, for sure.
Billy Perry:
There is none.
Bill Godfrey:
I think it also is important for leaders to understand the distinction between training and exercises, and policy feedback and repetition. And all of those things, I think too many leaders see them as the same thing, and they are not. They're very, very distinct. Training is there to fix a specific problem and prepare people with a skill set. And that can be done from very small drills, very micro drills on a specific task, all the way up to functional training and chaining a bunch of those small tasks together. And at some point, you've got to do a full dressed-out exercise, which in and of itself is not training. It is validating or testing, evaluating where are we at right now. What have we fixed? What hasn't been fixed? What needs to be fixed?
Jill McElwee:
And where are we going to break? That's where we've got to get to. We've got to find out what is our breaking point, because you'll never know your true capacity for whatever the task is until you exercise to that breaking point. And that's where you bring in those additional partners. Once I know where my limitations are, that's when the follow-on questions should occur. Where do I go to get the additional support? Whatever that support is. If it's in the EMS side of the house, if it's in the tactical side of the house. And then when I recognize those, then bring them in, and you start it cyclical. We start back over. Let's start with a, "This is our policy. Let's train the new folks now into this policy, and then we'll exercise again, see when we're going to break again."
Ron Otterbacher:
There's got to be a continual critique and an honest reflection because I may have written a policy a year and a half ago that was applicable a yea and a half ago, but today it may not be applicable. Right? And I've got to go back and look, and it's got to be beyond, say, the CLEA cycle in law enforcement-Right ... is every three years you're reflecting back on your policies. There's got to be a continual- Right ... reflection on those policies to say, "Wait, wait, things have changed. Our training has changed, our capabilities have changed."
Billy Perry:
The threat's changed.
Ron Otterbacher:
Yes, absolutely it has. The battlefieldchanges.
Bill Godfrey:
I think the other challenge for leadership is to lift their heads up a little bit and look over the horizon. The time to start figuring out how to fund an exercise. Look, full-scale exercises are expensive, and it's not the cost of the exercise team that's expensive. It's the cost of all your responders being there on overtime. The dispatchers being on overtime, everybody being out there. The tim to plan for how you're going to fund tha exercise is when you're starting the basic training. Because whether it's six months from now, a year from now, two years from now, depending on the size of your organization, when you're ready for that exercise, that's not the time to start worrying about getting the funding.
Bill Godfrey:
And so one of the responsibilities that I think leaders often miss in this, no, you don't have to be the training officer, Mr. or Mrs. Leader, to go out there and do the hands-on training. But you got to pay attention to what's needed. Where are the policy and procedure gaps? Where's the funding gaps? How are we going to maintain this? What are we going to do for the exercises? And oh, by the way does my boss, as the city manager or the county manager, understand that this is not a one and done?
Jill McElwee:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
I'm going to do an exercise. We are going to find out that there's gaps. We're going to need to repeat the training because repetition is what fixes this. And then we're going to need to do the exercises again. And oh, by the way, even when we do get it right, we still need to come back and do it again to maintain it.
Billy Perry:
I was about to say correct repetition.
Bill Godfrey:
Yes.
Billy Perry:
Because we have to keep correcting it, doing it correctly, and then if we mess this up, we do it correctly.
Ron Otterbacher:
And again, that exercise has limited impact on your agency for those on duty at that time. When you've got the rest of your organization that isn't involved, they just hear about it, or the rest of your county that aren't involved because they weren't working that day. So it affects the small number that are there. Even though it's a large exercise, we still got an abundance of people that weren't involved. Right? So how do they learn? We've got to continue to do it. That's why I like the simulation that we do is because you can run multiple exercises in one day where if you have a full-scale exercise, it's one, like you said, one and done, and then that's it for the next year probably. Where we can run 11, 12 exercises on a rapid succession, and everyone can learn from those.
Jill McElwee:
When you guys were just talking, I reflected back on this topic is, as a leader, how do I know that my organization is ready? And that word is a very current tense word. And so being ready is not, and I think you just said it, Ron, it's not a one and done Being ready is a continual process. So if as a leader, you are continually ensuring that your entire organization, and when you presented this topic earlier, you said organizations, and I appreciated that because just because my organization's ready doesn't mean everyone else is ready. And if everyone else isn't ready, guess who isn't ready?
Billy Perry:
You're not.
Jill McElwee:
I'm not ready.
Bill Godfrey:
I was just going to say, I'd take that a step further and say you may think your organization's ready, but if you didn't also make sure that your fire department, your EMS agency, and your other mutual aid law enforcement partners are ready, you're not ready.
Billy Perry:
You're not ready.
Bill Godfrey:
Not ready, because what's going to happen on game day?
Billy Perry:
Right. Every failure.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. It may not be committed by your team-
Billy Perry:
But it's your team
Bill Godfrey:
... but it's your team.
Billy Perry:
Right. Your incident.
Jill McElwee:
Define team.
Billy Perry:
Right.
Jill McElwee:
Good point.
Bill Godfrey:
I'm digging for my sports analogy metaphors. But you bring in the bench players. I like to use the analogy of the all-star team. The all-star teams are supposed to be the best from across all the teams in the leagues. If they don't practice together, if they don't learn the same plays togethe what's their likelihood of success on the field at the all-star game? It ain't good.
Billy Perry:
Nil.
Jill McElwee:
Okay, but that was a home run of an analogy. I just wanted you to know.
Billy Perry:
See what she did there?
Jill McElwee:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
And let it reflect that that's when the podcast went off the rails.
All right. So, let's go around the room then. What are the big things that leaders need to be thinking about? Billy, I'm going to ask you to talk about the tactical side. Jill, let's focus on the medical fire EMS piece of this. And then Ron, I'm going to ask you to bring us home on the overall incident management, emergency management side of this.
So Billy, from an overarching tactical perspective, no one department, what are the key things that the leader needs to be aware of and make sure that their people are doing? What are the questions they need to ask?
Billy Perry:
Are we capable of ending this immediately? Are we honest and open in our debriefs And that includes everyone, because we've all been around agencies and teams that do things horrifically wrong and still give each other the high five and think they're amazing. And I call it an incestuous training because they just keep training themselves, and they don't get outside things. And I think having an open, legitimate, honest assessment and being able to do the job in the opening minutes, that is tantamount.
Bill Godfrey:
Other things that would need to be on the list. So obviously, basic contact team movements.How to link up multiple teams, how to manage multiple teams deploying how to work with rescue task forces.
Billy Perry:
Sure. Which is everything you're describing is in 2026 is the basics.
Bill Godfrey:
The basics.
Billy Perry:
The basics. And Advanced is the basics mastered.
Bill Godfrey:
I like that.
Jill, what's on the list for leaders, whether it's a law enforcement, fire, EMS, emergency management, doesn't really matter. What's on the list for leaders that they need to make sure is being done on the fire and EMS side?
Jill McElwee:
So when you were talking, Billy, I thought about in the fire EMS side, it's kind o the alpha and omega of an active shooter incident. Fire EMS has got to be involved initially with those first contact teams knowing exactly what it is that we're responding to. So you've got to have that involvement with those responders, the other agency that is going in with that tip of the spear, and I've got to have involvement there. I've got to have involvement in training and making sure my teams are ready with whatever triage method we've used. A solid triage method that's going to appropriately triage the patients physiologically by their injuries, where their injuries are, to prepare them for transport. And then my fire EMS side has also got to be very well-versed and trained in how we're going to transport these patients. That's going to demand interaction with our local facilities, our local hospitals. Where are we taking these patients? How are we making that connection? Are they ready for us?
So my readiness is going to depend on their readiness as well on that fire EMS side. So the fire EMS readiness is a full spectrum of readiness and interagency involvement.
Bill Godfrey:
I'm going to add one more.
Jill McElwee:
Okay.
Bill Godfrey:
I think it's really important for leaders to have an open and honest conversation about their ambulance transport capability. And I say that without regard to whether it's a fire-based EMS system, if it's a county third service EMS system, if it's private EMS, hospital EMS, I don't care. But I know this, in most places in this country, there are barely enough ambulances on the road to handle the calls that they get. There's not a plethora of ambulances-
Jill McElwee:
No, there are not
Bill Godfrey:
... sitting around idle. And so if something bad happens, how are we going to handle our transport capability? How do we scale up? How do we make that work? And as a tangent, if you happen to be in a community where EMS is separate and your fire department has no medical training or very limited medical training, now you've got the real question of how are you going to manage your rescue task forces without taking your transport ambulances out of service? And so I think that there's a couple of add-ons there for- leaders on the fire EMS side.
Ron, I'm going to pivot to you on the inciden management side. What are the key things that leaders need to be paying attention to and making sure their training folks are hitting on so that they don't have an incident management gap?
Ron Otterbacher:
As a leader, I set the tone for the agency, but the agency should expand beyond just my agency. I should set the tone for all my partners too, and they should join in that tone. I give expectations, but then I've got to give the ability for the people that work for me to carry out and meet those expectations. And with that, I've got to provide them the support they need to be able to hold these training sessions. If they don't have the money in their budget, I need to find the money in the budget so that they can accomplish the task I've set forth.
Bill Godfrey:
Sure.
Ron Otterbacher:
As a leader, I think that I can do al those things, but I have to understand, I can't lead all that stuff. I can provide leadership, but I can't actually go out there and do all the physical training and everything else that everyone else is doing. So I've got to provide them the support. I've got to set the goal, but then I've got to have the right people on the right seats in the right bus to be able to carry out that entire situation in a respectful and successful way.
Bill Godfrey:
It is a lot of moving pieces. Ron, you opened it this way. It's the reason that we created the Active Shooter Incident Management program, because we recognized that there were organizations doing tactical training, there were organizations that were doing rescue task force training, and yet every time they went to put it together, it blew up. It just didn't work well. It didn't have a good outcome because we weren't dealing with the integration of the response, meaning both disciplines and organizations, and we were not managing the event effectively.
Ron Otterbacher:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
And so for those leaders out there, I would say if you're not really sure how to get this done we've given you a playbook that you can go by. The Active Shooter Incident Management checklist is a complete process. It's got everything you need to be able to implement it. It's also got your back in that it was endorsed by the National Tactical Officers Association as the national standard.
Ron Otterbacher:
Right.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. There's a reason that this has persisted for over a decade, tha it continues to be adopted like wildfire and continues to be used. But just understand, it's not a magic bullet. You've still got to do the work.
Ron Otterbacher:
Agreed.
Jill McElwee:
That's the key.
Ron Otterbacher:
And let your people do the work.
Bill Godfrey:
Yes.
And I also want to say, even though this is a conversation about leaders, let's talk about the leaders that are in the middle of the pack, the training officers that are in leadership roles, first-line supervisors, things like that. It's really easy for you to take the position of, "Well, we can't possibly get this training done. I need them here for eight hours, and the chief won't let me do it. They won't budget this. They won't give me block training time." I Understand. Been there. I agree with you. It's a challenge. But if you tell me that you cannot get effective micro-training done in 15 minutes, I got to call you on that.
Billy Perry:
Agreed.
Bill Godfrey:
Because there is things you can get done. Now, is it a pain in the butt? Yes. Is it going to take forever? Yes Is it better to get started than to do nothing?
Ron Otterbacher:
Yep.
Jill McElwee:
Will the benefits far exceed that work? Yes. I mean, the benefits of doing that, of putting in that hard work, it's immeasurable.
Ron Otterbacher:
We used to call it hip pocket training.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah.
Ron Otterbacher:
We used to have a number of things that are ready, and if the right opportunity presents itself, you do it right there, right then, and it's a continual process that you have to do as a leader. I don't care what level of the organization. It's a learning opportunity. You got to be prepared to step in and teach.
Bill Godfrey:
I think as we wrap up, the other thing to point out here is not all of this training is hands-on tactical using equipment. There is a lot of this that is a thinking game. And at the risk of taking the sports thing too far, I was watching my grandson's baseball team the other day on the field, and while they did some good things, it was very clear to me that there were some basic things that they didn't understand, like when to throw to first versus when to throw to second or when to throw home when to go to the cutoff man. There was like these just basic strategy things that they didn't know the rules to. And there's some of that here as well. This is a thinking person's game because there's so many things moving at one time.
If you're on a contact team, you're likely to have a singular task. Get the bad guy, secure the hallway, secure the casualty collection point, secure an ambulance exchange point. And that's great for you, one task. But what about tactical, who's trying to manage five different contact teams that have five different tasks, and triage that's trying to manage three or four rescue task forces. Some of this is true discussion and giving them mental scenarios to jump through, and it is the kind of stuff you can do at a roll call briefing.
Ron Otterbacher:
100%.
Bill Godfrey:
It doesn't even have to, if you do an honest and true critique or debrief, then you may find tha that five-minute discussion you have during that debrief was more beneficial than any five-hour training that you had at your training cente because everyone learned what actually happened, and it's fresh in their mind, and some of those are the best opportunities to teach people.
Jill McElwee:
That's the formal versus informal adult conversations. I think research has shown that we remember many more informa conversations than we do formal.
Bill Godfrey:
Correct.
Jill McElwee:
And that's that informal training, just getting those fundamentals out.
Bill Godfrey:
I got an email this morning from a listener, a longtime listener of ours. He's communicated with us a few times. He's a first-level supervisor in law enforcement, and he, part of a large organization, was struggling trying to get them to adopt stuff. So he got his team together and said, "Okay, this is how we're going to do things." One of the things that he noticed is when they got on scenes that were fairly fast-moving, the call sign, their day-to-day call signs was confusing people. And so he simplified and said, "Okay. You're going to be a contact team. You're going to be contact one. You guys are going to be contact two. I'll take this role of tactical, and here's how we're going to play this out." And he did all of this just in roll call briefings with his guys before they went on shift. And he emailed me this morning and said tha they'd had an incident the night before, and it really went much more smoothly than anything tha they'd ever had before because he had just put the very basic of organizations to it.
But the thing that tickled him more than anything else is the other supervisors that responded in second and third pulled him aside after the event was done and said, "Hey, what was that thing you guys were doing on the radio?"
Jill McElwee:
Love it.
Billy Perry:
You know why? Competency is contagious.
Jill McElwee:
Yeah. Love it.
Bill Godfrey:
And ladies and gentlemen, we're going to end right there. Thank you for talking about these important topics. This is the conclusion of our four-part sequence on this. We got a lot more good stuff coming up. Please like and subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss out on anything.
Thank you to our producer, Karla Torres. If you have any suggestions for topics, or questions, or challenges in your organization, send them to us. You can call the office or email them to us at info@c3pathways.com. That's I-N-F-O @c3pathways.com. And until next time, stay safe.