Given the surprise active shooter drills that are becoming popular with various police departments, what would the legal repercussions of a citizen getting the drop on the ‘bad guy’? If the actor wound up seriously injured or killed by someone who thought the situation was real, what would happen to those that took him down?
I’m not advocating hunting perps, but if I had an opportunity to stop an event where I had a tactical advantage, I’d try to take it.
“Surprise shooter drills”? Can you give an example?
This one happened in a Florida middle school, but they also happen at the Naval Air Station where I work.
Various institutions I’ve worked at have a ‘shooter protocol’ just like you would have a ‘fire protocol’ and test it’s operation in a fire drill.
I suspect most, if not all ‘shooter drills’ analogous to ‘fire drills’ do not actually have a shooter (read: actor playing a shooter) present.
Police departments might conduct the kind of drills you’re talking about, but I suspect they conduct them on private ranges where the public would not be confused.
ETA: sorry - simulposted. Yeah, from the article it sounds like there wasn’t an actor playing the prepetrator in this incident, but people thought it might be real rather than a drill due to the uniformed police officers walking around with more weaponry than usual.
Maybe they should also do fire drills by setting a wing of the building on fire.
My kid’s school is just starting to to active shooter drills, but it’s not like they surpise them with a masked guy with a gun, they just pretend there’s someone in the school and have them go through the motions…just like they do with a fire drill. Come to think of it, back when I was in high school (94-98) we had intruder (and bomb scare) drills as well. Again, they didn’t actually have someone intrude, they just gave the code words over the PA and had the teachers go through the motions.
I’ve never heard of anyone using an “actor” in a non-controlled training event. I would need to see a cite. Sounds very dumb if it does happen.
As for the OP, if the person is acting in good faith and he reasonably believes he is acting in self defense or in defense of others I don’t see how he can be found criminally liable. If anything I could see a civil suit against the department for setting up a dangerous situation like that.
The NAS had an active drill this summer with a model perp. It also was no surprise to anyone as it was announced a couple of times beforehand with explicit instructions to anyone not a responder to not attempt to engage. Certainly this is more closely a Cop’r Canyon training exercise than the schoolful of terrified tweens. No, I don’t have the announcement memo to share.
My local school district is using the ALICE protocol. Part of one drill they did at the high school last year did involve having an actor (an off duty policeman) with a bright red plastic gun enter a classroom, so the kids could have fun throwing water bottles and backpacks at him. The drill was announced in advance to parents and students, including the fact that an actor would possibly be entering a classroom.
My kid is just about to start ALICE training. They just told the parents what it’s all about and how they’re going to introduce it to them. Being a grade school, it’s going to get introduced very, very slowly, starting off with asking the kids how to handle a fellow student having a nervous breakdown and working up to telling them what to do if someone shows up in the classroom that doesn’t belong there. They’ll tell them to throw things at them, but I don’t think they’ll actually have them do it. Having someone traipse around an elementary school with a fake gun might be a little traumatizing for some kids.
This ALICE thing is a radical shift from what we were taught. I understand it, but I wonder how it’ll work in practice, many people will freeze right where they are when a gun is pointed at them. I suppose you’ll have some ballsy 3rd grader with enough nerve to whip a stapler at the gunman.
For those that haven’t been through this, the idea is that instead of just sitting and hiding they now want the kids to essentially fight back*. The hope is that if you can break the gunman’s concentration it might give the police a few extra seconds to get there or a high school kid the opportunity to run up and tackle him.
This is as opposed to ‘sitting there and waiting to be killed’.
*For the record, they’re not saying you should go and find the guy, but if he’s sitting in your room with a gun pointed at you, and it’s either die now or throw your pencil case at him…maybe throw your pencil case at him.
So is the question then, what would happen to a member of the public who injured or killed the person role-playing the perpetrator in the ALICE training or on on-base at the Naval Air Station? I’d guess that in the first instance, a reasonable person would know the bright red plastic gun poses no threat, and charges would be filed, while in the second instance, an unauthorized armed civilian on a restricted-access military base would also be in for legal trouble, possibly over and above injuring or killing the actor.
That said, there may be ways civilians are permitted on military bases. When I worked at NAS Pt. Mugu, they permitted access to civilian surfers to use the beach… that was before 9/11, though, so things may have changed.
Well that is not a surprise drill. The one mentioned in the cite in post #3 was a surprise but there was no one playing OPFOR. To meet the criteria in the OP it would need to be a surprise, there would need to be members of the public involved and there would need to be an actor playing the bad guy.
You could still run the drill and have the Bad Guy use an obvious toy gun.
I could see someone with a concealed carry permit shooting a wino going through the dumpster.
Fighting back is actually the last resort. They should try to evacuate if possible - if your classroom is right next to an exterior door, and the intruder is at the other end of a large school, why stay? Then do your best to prevent an intruder from entering the room - there are a bunch of tricks they teach them to keep a door well and truly shut. But in the worst case, if he gets into the room - yeah, scream and shout and throw stuff at him. Apparently when they did the high school drill, some of the instructors shadowing the “intruder” had to pull the kids off him before they broke something vital.
If you run around with a fake gun, acting like an ‘active shooter’ and get hurt, the person who hurt you will walk away free and you’ll end up maimed/dead.
If you charge into a high school, open your trenchcoat, start to pull out a blaze orange rifle and some 200 pound jock smashes your face into a drinking fountain, puts you on the ground and twists your arm behind your back until the cops get there, you probably won’t win the civil case against him. He was acting in self defense.
If you run around with a fake gun, acting like a bad guy, just because you have a fake gun doesn’t mean you’re not going to hurt anyone. If you’re making terroristic threats, you might have another (real) weapon in which case it’s reasonable for someone to fight back or subdue you and you may get hurt.
If you’re going to do ALICE training, we can do it without surprising people with a bad guy roaming the hallways. If you want to have the kids/workers practice what to do in the situation, setup a controlled scenario and have them do it. But a surprise attack just doesn’t sound like a good idea. People panic and people get hurt.
On top of that, what if the ‘fake bad guy’ ends up with a stapler to the eye because that’s what these kids are taught?
Like I said earlier, we don’t set the building on fire to do a fire drill, we don’t need to send an active shooter in to do ALICE training. Just go through the motions and hope it works.
"Built like a linebacker, he just kept shouting I’M COLOR-BLIND! I’M COLOR-BLIND!"
Here is a drill that could have gone terribly wrong. The Sheriff and attendees were told just before the drill, but the city police responded thinking it was a real hostage situation.
So, the OP’s question would be ‘what would happen if a CCW holder shot the hostage takers thinking they were real?’ My guess, the DA wouldn’t prosecute unless there was some negligence on the part of the shooter. In the case above, listening to a scanner and rushing to the scene with guns blazing would be asking for trouble, but being in the meeting and not knowing it was a drill would be understandable.
Two US Army soldiers were shot in 2002 by a local cop who didn’t know that the soldiers were playing a roleplay war game as part of their training. One died. There were no charges.
There is always the risk that if the CCW shoots the cop pretending to be a terrorist that the other cops participating in the exercise or just monitoring from the sidelines might shoot the shooter under the assumption that he is a danger to them.