L.O.G. 203 Parking Lot Problems

All right, Greg. Good morning. For today's topic of the day, what we'll be discussing is what I would call, I guess, parking lot problems. This is a kind of a metaphor, if you will, for a number of incidents that we've seen and a number of problems that we've seen. What I mean is you can have the best laid out plan. You could have the best training. You can have the best response measures to something, and there's always going to be something that comes up that can basically be catastrophic to your plan, can make it fail, that you didn't account for.

People like to tell us that's Murphy's Law, you know, anything that will go wrong or can go wrong will go wrong. And a lot of times it's actually not that. It's not some uncertain thing; it's something that's completely avoidable, because a lot of them are the same in a lot of these major incidents. And so that's why we're revolving this around the parking lot. Sometimes that response to an incident comes, and they literally can't get in the parking lot. They can't even get their vehicles in there. All the money and time and resources spent on getting some tool, and it's completely ineffective, not because it doesn't actually work, it's because they're not actually able to use it.

I guess that's sort of one side of the parking lot coin. Then the other side of the parking lot coin I want to talk about is some of the best training I've ever experienced or had or seen took place over 10 minutes in a parking lot somewhere. We'll get into exactly what I mean by that. But it's a very simple kind of thing that sometimes can have the greatest return or hamper our efforts in the greatest manner. There are countless examples of it. So that's all I wanted to hit real quick up front to kind of set the tone for what we mean and what we're talking about. I want to throw it to you, Greg, because we have all kinds of examples of where this happens, where even you have the massive after-action review and investigation, and you're like, "Look, the single point of failure on this one was the parking lot. It's right here the whole entire time." So, I'll throw it to you, Greg, to sort of get started.

It's a great topic, and it's the perfect end to our three-part series about March and April. And because we can't really do it on May, there's Cinco de Mayo, you know. But parking, like parking and parking lot, go together. But parking – where do you put all those responding police vehicles, the fire vehicles, the supervisors, the parents? Parking is hampered and hampers the response and coordinated efforts afterward.

Brian, the reason we want to bring that up is sort of the portal we're going to go into for all the other stuff is that there are countless places that you can find online. One of my favorites, a Colorado STEM shooting (school shooting), try to find a place to walk on any sidewalk, grass, parking lot, anywhere else, because there are just so many emergency vehicles. You have to walk over the hoods of the vehicles to get to the scene.

Now you've trained in Muscogee (Oklahoma), Quantico (Virginia), and A.P. Hill (Virginia), and we've jointly and severally trained in the best mock facilities on the face of the planet. None of them have said, "Okay, for this part of the exercise, we're all having all those vehicles respond, and we're going to clog the parking lot and see what's next. Who's going to be in charge of that?" Yet every incident, whether we're talking about the Las Vegas concert shooting, we're talking about the Florida Pulse, Boston Marathon, Oklahoma City Bombing, every single one of those incidents – Columbine, which is so long ago (reports over 25 years ago) – they say, "Hey, parking is going to be an issue, you better address it." Was Uvalde parking an issue? Of course it was.

Think about this. You and I are on a phone call with somebody who shall, let's not name anybody, but they were on the inside track of the Oxford shooting, which is another recent shooting in Michigan. And you and I had just had this conversation about this podcast and said, "Parking is essential." The minute we say it, everybody that listens in will go, "Never thought of that," and have the epiphany moment and start writing. So a very learned person that we trust and admire has an inside track on Oxford. What did they say about Oxford? They said that people couldn't even get into the scene with their ambulance to get the kids out because it was so overwhelmed with people responding to it.

Yep. And you know what else we don't think about? We don't think that, in addition, first of all, every cop worth his salt is going to want to be at that scene, whether off-duty or going off-duty. You're on vacation, you hear about it on your pack set or your police radio or your emitter, whatever you hear it on. And now you have parents that are also going to respond to that scene because the news media can't shut up or the Public Information Officer (PIO) doesn't give clear directions on where to go. And what do they want? Well, some want to enter the school or enter the mall to get their kids out or their significant other. Some of them just want information. So that's going to flood that parking lot with people standing outside the running car. Brian, do we have issues with people dropping off and picking up kids in the morning at school? Are there not rehearsals for that and protocols for that? Yet for a shooting, we have none. You get my frustration there?

My buddies had a gym. The location for a while was across the street from the Boys and Girls Club in Carlsbad, California. And it was on afternoons when it was one of the most dangerous places I've ever been to in my entire life, and that was parents picking up and dropping off their kids. They were complete... and they're going to be the ones complaining about everything, but they're the worst driving, almost hitting people, stopping, going wherever.

But this goes back to this parking lot idea, this parking lot principle, whatever you want to call it. It has to be what is the test bed. And you could go off on a number of spirals because we're talking about some of the examples we just gave responding to an incident. I mean, I think even the Oklahoma City bombing, when there's like 600 people there helping, that's a significant amount of people that come with all of these problems. You just said everyone's going to want to show up at one of these things, and including the parents now too, after recent events we've seen that where they get an alert that there's something happening at their school, and they all show up there with their own guns, going across the scene. The rule was always supposed to be, "First, do no harm," right? That's supposed to be critical.

It is.

But it never is. It's, "We're all going to go rushing to the scene." And just go to what happens in Israel when a bomb goes off. Everyone rushes to the scene. Well, sometimes that initial one was not the main attack; it was to draw people in. So there's a bunch of reasons why you don't want to do it. But what we're getting at here is how did we look at every movie where something happens? You forget to turn the electricity off, and the dinosaurs get out in the area. Now Jurassic Park, and chaos ensues. It comes down to something, something that was not rehearsed or even planned for or checked, versus the elaborate response system with all kinds of different tools that we're going to use for it. It comes down to some small either human error or lack of planning. And the point we're also trying to make is that it's completely avoidable with that planning.

Sometimes it's just a talk-through: "Hey, wait a minute, we're going to do all this. Hmm, why don't we practice that on a day where this would likely happen, a day and time when this would likely happen, and drive in and see what it would be like to get into that area?" And now it's like, "Oh, man, this is simply chaos." So we haven't even considered— and this is great, Brian, because I like these kinds of discussions because anybody with a yellow pad— and if you're driving, just remember your notes until you get to where you're at.

Yeah, driving. Post-it. Exactly.

We haven't even discussed like the parking around the emergency room for the incoming casualties. We haven't even discussed, look, let's go back to Columbine and say there are almost 2,000 students and just over a hundred staff at Columbine. Well, some of them parked there. You get what I'm trying to say? So you already have a parking lot that may be flooded with personnel. Then you have 4,000— I guess it would be parents in many instances— that are trying to get to that scene, and then the significant others, another hundred of staff members. If we think of those magnitudes, that'll give us a better idea how to get a handle on it.

And I remember every time that I and Charlie (Shook, former host) try to support Gunnison (Colorado) as much as we can, obviously not only because it's our home, but because we need them and they need us. So when they have an emergency management drill and we show up, the number one thing that they do is about "Who's who in the zoo," right? So everybody's wearing their vest, and the bright colored vests say their title on the front of it. And they stand there with prepared notes and they say, "I am this person and this is what I do." And you get to walk around and see how it goes. So they don't stage, you know, and we've been part of those airplane accidents at the Gunnison Regional Airport, those type of things. But what it is is they're showing how to move big pieces into place without constricting flows of people, traffic, resources, and communications (comms). All the things we're going to talk about today.

But I would go back to, you know, a lot of people when they talk to us, many people that talk about the military quote (James) Mattis. Not a lot of people knew Mattis up close, and some did. I'll tell you one of the things that Mattis did before the invasion when they were going to push out of Kuwait, Mattis went to Legoland and bought every multicolored Lego that they had. He had them out on the beach and had loaders digging trenches and recreating the area from Kuwait all the way to Baghdad and north to Baqubah. And they had, Brian, every single unit represented, every single town represented, and everybody had a speaking role with their Legos or their specific unit and had to rehearse, "What am I going to do? What if you get bogged down? What's going to happen here? Where's my triage? Where's my casualty collection point?"

And you think if a genius like that goes to that length to rehearse something, and granted that's a big move, why wouldn't you want to consider that right now? Like casualty collection points are huge. How many times have we gone and you and I have conducted a vulnerability assessment, and we go, "Where would that be?" And people are like, "Well, why would we need that?" And we have to educate them on the process, which is ridiculous. If you don't already know some of the basic processes, then your agency needs to enlist somebody to go over those things. And the parking lot is the first and the most vulnerable and the most obvious one that you can test your own system with. And go in, go to your significant other or your leaders, "Hey, what do we do when the parking lot gets jammed with emergency vehicles? Wouldn't it be a great place to start?"

I mean, and you know, we're obviously naming and talking about a lot of these catastrophic incidents and events, and that's outside of usually what any person or business owner is going to be responding to, right? That's the role of someone else. But I would even wind the tape back even further. That parking lot and how things go is the first place someone comes to at a business. It's the first thing that they see. It's the most dangerous place you're going to be at is outside that grocery store when you're down and in, running in to grab something real quick, and people are in that parking lot, and your arms are full of stuff, and you're fumbling for yourself.

I kind of started this thing as, you know, metaphorically, but this is very much literal as well, right? Meaning, where do you park in a parking lot? Who typically parks right up front by the business and who typically parks way down in the back? You can have so many of these games, these thought exercises inside and at a parking lot. You can take your small team and go in there and stand and have every one of these discussions: "Okay, who likely parked over there? Do they let the employees park right up at front at the grocery store or do they make them park towards the back of the parking lot?" Well, typically they make them park towards the back so that the customers can park up front. But what do most people want to do? They want to rush right up to the front of the building, park as close as they can, so they don't have to mess around with stuff. Can you tell this person is in a rush going to do the car? They're likely going to dump the cart right there in between the parking spot, or do you think they're going to take the time to actually put it in the return, return it to the cart return stall? Improve your hypothesis and do it through sustained observation.

"Okay, if we're going to come in here right now, what would that look like? How would we approach this situation? Do we need to go around back? Do we need to come over here? Do we have to block this off? Now that we have our plan, what if we have an influx, Greg, and all of a sudden people are going crazy because there's a run on toilet paper again? We get overwhelmed with shoppers. What can we set up? What protocols could we put in place? Do we have just some yellow caution tape to block off certain areas so it forces them to go? How do we manipulate the terrain to use it the most effectively?" These are just very basic things that you can stand there and do and have a discussion, whether it's your family, your SWAT team, your employees. Everything in life takes place in these communal areas that we transit through and we all go to, right? It links a whole bunch of, literally, just a grocery store parking lot links a lot of people together from all different walks of life, who have all different intents for the day, who all have a different purpose for being there. But we all congregate and get pulled into this area just because of simple geographics, right? "Yes, and I have to park my car somewhere."

So this potential spirals of, "Okay, this is a Home Depot parking lot. Okay, well, you know what, the Home Depot is at the intersection of two major interstates. Okay, well a lot of dope deals go on down there. Okay, so who else is in this parking lot?" If I look at that one location in this manner and potential spirals, it opens up kind of the thinking points and application of those thinking points that we talk about all the time in the show, right? This is how I can sit there and do that. I can have that five minutes and talk through any one of these scenarios while I'm standing there to get an understanding of what we mean.

And that way, when I have my plan— because I know you've seen it too before— where I've seen people do some amazingly detailed plan and they're super focused, but they're super focused on what they do, right? They're really, really good at that, and with their team, that team is really, really, really good at what they do. And when things fall apart is where it's like, "Well, when my team has to get integrated into an overall situation where it's not just our team," meaning it's a whole bunch of people that we have to work with now. So it's not so much in us internally, or, you know, those tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) are generally either really good or good enough for what you need to do. It's when I have to then go integrate into some other team with other people. And those connection points, those seams and gaps, that's where everything falls through. That's where the plan wasn't there for that seam and gap. That's where we all know the enemy likes to hide, and the terrorist criminals and insurgents, they hide in the seams and gaps of the battle space because that's what they can exploit because that's where they know things go wrong.

So rather than taking all of that time to focus on just what my role is and my team's role, I have to be able to do this. I have to be able to do it within this broader picture of things. We have to focus on those connection points, right? You always talk about it as, "Yeah, it's great, your team's awesome, but it's a piece of velcro, and it has to go connect. It has to go connect to other pieces seamlessly, and then come apart to go attach to another piece of velcro." So, do you kind of see what when I'm trying to take this big picture, this perspective, of just also keeping it anchored in a geographic location of a parking lot?

I would say drill down. Here are some good thought exercises. First of all, parking lot, let's stay with that theme for a couple of moments here and take a look. Have you ever considered who's responsible for plowing the snow and creating a safe parking lot for your vehicle when you go to a store? Well, it's those stores and the realtors that are leasing those stores or the people that own that parking lot. So if you slip and fall, somebody's responsible. But we don't think in those terms; the parking lot just is a place we park to run in somewhere.

Now, law enforcement can't stop you or write you a ticket, for example, in a parking lot because it's an area open to the public, but it's privately owned by somebody else. Now, that doesn't apply for what? For handicapped parking. Handicapped parking takes precedence. Cops can come on and tow your vehicle and arrest you if you block that. So what I'm saying is there's a level of detail. I'll give you a perfect example: Shelley (Williams) did a lot of security planning for Vail Resorts. Shelley and I were both at Vail in '99, we did that, but even afterward, all the way up until the Avon times and Beaver Creek and Lone Tree and Singletree and all the other things up there, Shelley would come out and do these different plans. One of the things that we found out when we were going to the different type of radios and what would work in these parking structures and what wouldn't, it was how parking lots are paid for. So there would be a ski shop, and that ski shop would own two and one-half parking spaces inside of that parking lot. And Brian, parking spaces at those ski resorts go for a million dollars a year.

I bet.

A million a year per parking spot. So when somebody comes out and goes, "You're going to have to move your car or the vehicles will be towed," and you look at that and you go, "That's a dick move." No, it's not, not when you're paying a million, 2.5 million for the two spots, you know, and the one that you share with the other business. So why am I saying that? Because Columbine is over 25 years ago, and the SWAT team during the review said, "Look, we commandeered a Brink's truck to drive to the scene so we wouldn't get shot and offload into the cafeteria through the windows. And we couldn't get through the phalanx of all the parked and abandoned vehicles that were there."

Now, two days ago, we heard from somebody that was from Oxford. The female paramedic said, "I'm so frustrated. I lost it at the scene because here we are in the ambulance, the emergency vehicle, trying to get close enough to pick up the victims, and we couldn't because of all the parked and abandoned vehicles." So Brian, things have to change. And things do. But what happens is we're worried about the parking blocks and the asphalt and making sure that there's no trash or rubble and no ice, when we should be thinking what happens when we're on the "X" now and these things are just raining out of the sky. What are we going to do with them?

Look, I know that some places during the COVID (pandemic), people sped, people were driving fast because they knew there were less cops that were around. But some of the delivery vehicles that were trying to even pull into areas where places were mobbed couldn't get close enough to make the delivery. And now you're going, "Well, where's my delivery?" "Well, it's only 400 yards that way." Yeah, but it's never going to make it to the back of your loading dock, Brian. Those are real things that we need to talk about. Look, stuff like a guy trying to open the airplane door at 35,000 feet, that's a physical impossibility, but I hear an article about it every week.

But this, talking about the parking lot. For example, you have cameras in your parking lot that look for thievery. I have cameras in my parking lot and two separate driveway alarm detectors. Why? Because I want to be alerted when something is different. I want to look for that anomaly. I want to see that person dragging that backpack full of bombs and guns into the business. But when you're not actively scanning, you'll never see. So when you're not role-playing parking lot, you're not going to see it.

And I would add this to the flip side of that coin. Look, we use chalk, sidewalk chalk, and boxes and chairs so many times to create where we are about to go into, and did it two parking lots over just before we were going to see the raid to make sure everybody was on the same sheet of music. How many times did you do that? And we know as conference (attendees), we did it all the time. And the military does that all the time. Why? Because you don't want something to pop up and scare you or surprise you, or, "Oh no, that access door, oh, that's been blocked," or, "That was built over, that's now an awning and a porch." Brian, you don't want surprises, man, not during that emergency.

No, and it's because we get focused on, we focus on the wrong thing. So you brought up the military example and how to rehearse concepts. Like, when these high-profile things happen, like the Bin Laden raid, they used satellite imagery and every sensor they could to rebuild his compound. And so they went and trained on a mock-up of his actual compound. And so it wasn't that we found out that things went wrong when the raid happened; the raid was still successful because they had planned for every contingency. Everyone's going, "Oh my God, we have stealth helicopters," but they were already thinking, "What if? Well, we got to blow this thing up because it landed and crashed and we can't get it out of here." So like, every possible contingency had been planned for. Now, obviously, that's a special missions unit within the U.S. Department of Defense, so the funding stream there is pretty significant. But it's not about that. It's not about, "Look at the sexy gear and all these wild stuff they had." It was the months, months prior, the mock-up, the walk-through, the talk-through, and going through it, the rock drills, the rehearsal of concept. And what you just said right there, but you can do that same thing in a parking lot with the stores closed and you've got chalk and cardboard boxes and your own vehicles and shopping carts to simulate everything. Everything. You want to do as much simulation training as possible. That's simulation training, right? You simulate what it's likely going to be. And you can walk it out on foot. You can do a scale size. This is such simple, low-calorie, low-cost stuff that those are the things that save lives. Those are the things that prevent you. That's when someone goes, "Hey, wait a minute, we're going to fit all that over there?" And then everyone goes, "Ah, I didn't even think of that." And those are those are the speed bumps that are going to come up. It's not going to be, "Did you get your weapon out of the holster fast enough?" You've already trained to that standard. You're good enough at that. It's not, "Did I get there? Is this vehicle fast enough to get me there in time?" Yes, it already is. There's no— we look at all the wrong things sometimes.

So let's talk about that chalk for a minute, Brian. Here's one for free for everybody that's out there that's ever driven a police car in a pursuit ever during your life. One of the things that Shelley and I would always do, we'd go to our little local Rite Aid or whatever the place was, and they have, no offense folks, but they have what's called the "shitty toy aisle." You were that half-drunk uncle or aunt that went there to grab that birthday card, and you went over, "Oh, I feel targeted right now. I feel like you're talking about me." Instead of going to the real place, you went to that place and you grabbed one of the dollar toys, you know, the super ball or the jacks or whatever that they have there, and the paddle with the ball, and you thought, "Okay, you're great." And the kids are all going, "Ah!" But what they had there is they had these exploding. It looked like a super ball, but it was made out of chalk, and you could throw it and it would break and it would powder everybody, and it was hilarious, and everybody loved it. And then in the Bed Bath and Beyond aisle of that same store, for under a dollar, they had these bags of three or four bath powders that you threw into your bath, and they would dissolve.

Yeah, bath bombs.

Shelley and I both carried Ziploc bags with bath bombs that were within arm's reach in our bag on the passenger seat because we both worked alone many of the times. When we were with a partner, we made sure that they were in the ashtray. Cars used to have ashtrays, folks, right in the center console of the car. Why? You're pursuing a vehicle, all of your focus is on a vehicle in front of you, not crashing, coming in second, you don't have to be first in a pursuit. And then all of a sudden, the person starts chucking drugs out the window or they throw a gun out the window, something comes out the window. How do you mark that spot and identify clearly when you're going 75 miles an hour down a side street? Grab your bomb, you throw it out the window, it crashes on the cement, and you tell a unit, "Hey, listen, I just threw a blue bomb. The item is going to be to the left of that or ahead of that." And now it gives you a starting point. An investment of a dollar saves countless times, and you get artifacts and evidence back to use in your subsequent prosecution or testimony.

The idea is that simple things work, Brian, and if you rehearse them... I'll tell you what, we have felony stop classes all over the United States, and that's fantastic. But the times I've seen people do a felony stop and actually say, "Okay, stop now, we're going to initiate the felony stop protocol," are slim to none. Or what about a stop that now you're at the termination point of a short-duration pursuit? Do you turn that into a felony? You're not sure what you have. Did you coordinate with the Royal Oak unit that comes sliding up or the people from Novi? Thank God, shout out to Novi, I know we got some fans here. But you get what I'm trying to say, Brian, your response to assist me is wonderful, thank you for covering my six, but if you don't know my tactics, if you don't know my procedures, if you don't understand what I have available to me... How many times have you seen somebody try to put a set of flex cuffs or handcuffs on when they're carrying a long gun? It's not your job, you go back there and cover me, I'll do it. And so we're not going to get into TTPs, but the idea is this is how you find out which TTPs you need to be successful. This is how you find it out by walking that parking lot, by looking around, by saying, "Hey, what if it happens right here? Where's my next position to cover?" Can I get a wrecker in here? What's the biggest vehicle that I can have make a turn radius in here? A lot of the vehicles (Vics) that they shipped into Iraq during the most kinetic portion went down some of the streets. Remember the Strykers, Brian? They had to take the RPG shield off the side of the Strykers because they couldn't fit down some of the roads. Those are things that I'd like to know today for tomorrow.

No, it was that you know, the one team you were talking about that, "Okay, you're out there training and practicing, like, hey, what's the turn radius on that vehicle?" "What do you mean, what turn radius on that vehicle? Because we're planning right now to do that." "That street isn't that wide. That won't even work." And it's like, "Damn." Like, remember those? You know, someone knows what they're doing, and it's like, "Okay, I'm trying to fit my way of doing things into an environment where that's not going to work." And now what we have too is all the collection of all the data and information you could ever possibly get your hands on. You've got cities with shot spotters and crime reports, and it can show you geolocation of everything, and over time. So it's like, "Okay, well, I only have to focus on this area and play the 'what if' game there because this is where it's going to happen next based on the past reports. This is likely where things are going to happen." You're not going to know the exact time, place, and what the incident is going to be, but you don't need to, right? The whole point is how do we use this information and then go, "All right, well, given this set of circumstances, we know it's likely to happen in this area. Well, let's talk through it. How would we respond to that? How would it happen?" If we think it's going to happen relatively soon because we have some information or intel, where would that likely occur in this geographic area of operations? Okay, there's only so many, and maybe I don't get down to the specific, but I take it from 15 possible places to three. That's a win, right? I know it can only happen here, and I know it can only happen in this manner. So how can we take what resources we have, apply it to that type of situation that may take place, and then plan for a better outcome? How do we then mitigate that or box someone into a certain area so they can't do that second spiral of a pursuit that leads to this?

It won't happen. How do we mitigate it? Exactly. And that type of brainstorming works in business. This is not just—

Yeah, well, that's just, yeah, it works anywhere.

So I'll give you an example: the number of SWAT teams that were at Columbine would amaze you, and how they made entry and what their roles were. But let's just talk about something simple. The one most experienced team that was on the ground, the last information they had was before Columbine switched and did a build-out and abandoned some of the biggest buildings and turned the auditorium into classrooms and the classrooms into a lunchroom and built and added things on. So when they went in, the rooms that they were convinced they were going to were on the other side of the building, where they got the information of, "Hey, the shooters were last seen in the cafeteria, Brian," was on the other side of the building. So they make entry at a point, and now they've got to clear everything between them and the active shooters. Look, you only know what you know, and you can only do what you've rehearsed. So you have to rehearse with the Halligan tool failing. You have to rehearse with the temporary restraints, the handcuffs, not being available. You understand exactly what I'm talking about.

So something as simple as alarm codes. Why does that matter? Because there's a way to shut off alarms for schools, and when shooting starts, the school alarm goes off, and all alarms are designed to do what? Not just warn you, but to force you out of that area. They're so obnoxious that they make frequencies. It's very annoying. It's meant to be annoying. The light is so bright, it's obnoxious. It's supposed to be obnoxious to get you the hell out of that area. You want to get away from it. It went on all day in Columbine. All day with all that response blaring and the flashing lights inside the building, the warning lights went on for days afterward because nobody knew how to shut them off. Nobody knew the code. So wouldn't you think that part of your rehearsal was, "Well, look at Uvalde, Brian, is the door locked?" "Well, I don't know, we haven't checked." "Well, who's got the keys to that door?" "Ah, crap, I think it was Jim." And then Jim said, "No, it was Joan." And then it was Bill.

Some that simple, buddy, that's a perfect case. That situation is a perfect example of what we're talking about. All right, someone didn't have the right key. So you didn't have the right key, and I don't mean key as it has to be an actual physical key. I mean a key in the sense of how to open a door, right? You didn't have the right tool or thing to get the door open. So you had all that response, you had all these people here with all this kit and equipment and all that going on. And this goes to that communication and everyone rushing to the scene, that was a breakdown. Everyone goes, "Oh, you know, they're a bunch of cowards." Shut up. No, first of all, shut up. This was stupid. Why wouldn't they go in there? Well, I can tell you from a human behavior, human performance perspective that that wouldn't have happened if there was only four of them there. But there weren't, there were 400.

Exactly.

So the more people you add to that situation, the problem doesn't get better, you hit it, because it's more complex. It turns— you get, so one sucks, two is great, maybe four's peak, and then everything after that your performance starts to go down. Why? Because you now there's too much for everyone to handle, and who's in charge and what's happening? We, "Did you have that? I thought Bill had that." Where if it's just two people trying to figure out a situation, they're going to come to a solution pretty damn quickly. And so that's just people not understanding decision-making, decision-making under stress, how organizational communication, how that stuff goes catastrophic. The basic mirror neurons and how we react in a crowd. So you see all the shitty commentary, and we don't focus on those little things. What could it have been, right? At what point sooner could we have made this call?

I mean, like Virginia Tech was that one with Cho (Seung-hui). Cho killed his— was his roommate and it was the girl that they never knew, never knew she was his girlfriend, right? So, and then there was some time in between that happening and then when he went to Norris Hall and killed all those people. But no one was alerted. They didn't take that initial part seriously enough to think that, "Well, oh, it's a homicide, you know, maybe this is a lovers' spat." Like, you do, okay, whatever. But you don't know what if he's going to continue on with that? And he did. And so there were initial reports there, people weren't notified. So those little things like that is where these things become catastrophic. It's at those failure points. It's never going to be in, "Did I choose the right weapon system for my department to handle these?" That's never going to be a problem. It's just—

Exactly. What you have is good enough.

Okay, it's these operational problems that arise from a lack of thorough planning. I would say, does that make sense? Like, and no, no, it's right.

I'll give you a perfect example of that: the dangerous Dan de Meester calling out a good cop from back in the day, also known as Toucan Dan because he couldn't hold his liquor. But let's talk about the multiple shooter fallacy. Back where Shelley and I lived in Warren, Michigan, there was a Buscemi's (convenience store), and there was an armed robbery at the Buscemi's. He and a cop that's long since dead, Henry Melavolt, he showed up at the same time. They pull up at the scene, and what happened is the people from inside the armed robbery, Brian, ran out one door, and the armed robbers ran out the other door. And so it was a running gun battle with people holding their sub sandwiches and pizzas on one end and real people holding the bag with the money on the other end. Why? Not because the bag holding your pizza and the bag holding the money, and the guy inside saying, "Hey, they're running out now." Now what we have is multiple shooters. There were only two. But everybody got shot up, everybody got rounded up, and it ended up in a case where you could study months and months and months.

Well, the cops were overwhelmed by the information that was coming in at the scene and didn't have a plan for, "Okay, how do we slow time down? What's the gift of time and distance here to figure out who actually is the bad guys?" Why do I bring that up? Multiple shooters were reported in Columbine, Uvalde, the Pulse Nightclub, the Route 91 concert shooting. I could go back through all of those, and you know, in combat that happens all the time. "What do we got? Well, we're up against a squad." "What do you mean you're up against a squad? It's one dude with an SKS (rifle) that's firing over his shoulder every couple of minutes." Why did that happen? Well, first of all, your brain wants to survive. Second of all, what happens is the guy on the roof that's fixing the air conditioner and just happened to be a bad day, or the school resource officer (SRO) that fired a shot, now becomes an additional shooter, the cop. Brian, look, has it happened with legal gun owner civilians being shot because somebody thinks that they're a perpetrator rather than the good Samaritan? Well, if that happens on the street, and it happens every week, why wouldn't that same thing happen in a high-stress incident like a school shooting or the Las Vegas shooting? So what happens is we have to take that into account too. That can play right into SROs.

We can go down the list from Parkland to many of the other situations where the school resource officer was on the scene and didn't go in. Never fired a shot even though they could have been the first responder and ended it. We have just as many where the school resource (officer) is hired, the best trained guy on the ground, Brian, but he was at lunch and was off property during the incident, and now it's caught up responding. We have other situations where the person negligently discharged their weapon when there was no danger. So adding the more players you add into a situation, directly to your point, can complicate the issue in ways you probably haven't considered, and those ways are important, right? It's important to know why, why does the military spend so much time beating into the standard operating procedure (SOP) where your ammo is, where your personal first-aid kit (PFAK) is, where your equipment is? Because they know that during those highest stress incidents, Brian, you're not going to delve into your critical thinking as much. Why do we spend all of our time in training talking about critical thinking so we can bridge that gap?

Yeah, no, I mean, you're, you're, this is, you're kind of hitting on the basics of almost Game Theory, right? Of course, the amount of people going into there, I increase the amount of interactions, I increase the amount of things that could potentially go wrong. I can increase the complexity and increase the number of potential outcomes. So sometimes we don't need that. And that's something you can train to. I mean, you can, "Do we need to send everyone in?" That's an important one. And I go back to, this is why I talked about it at the beginning too, is that parking lot plan might be the most important part of the plan, and it might be the most important part of the way or the easiest way for you to train for that, right? We can sit there and have the discussion we're having right now, and once you start doing that, as long as people are coming up with logical, likely, potential things that could happen, you're solving most of the problems as you're talking through them. You're either adjusting or modifying your plan, or you're at least creating file folders for everyone, because when that situation occurs, it's not going to be a non-standard observation. You're going to fall back on what you know. You had that conversation where you talked about this, and you came into it, and I just thought of a perfect one.

When I was doing some mission planning for my team one time, I put up my plan. We had a very simple process on how we did it given the place we were in. We had these three slides to show, "This is what you're doing, that's where you go because it's going to be part of something else." That's it. That was the framework. So you could submit your concept of operations (ConOps) and then get approved, and then whatever. And so I'd always tell my assistant team leader, "Hey, we've got to show them how to do all this stuff and make sure they're spun up on it," right? And so by the end of the deployment, they're doing all of that, and they should be because they're going to be taking that over. So I go, "All right, hey, I'm going to submit this. Why don't you take a look at this and see what everything, just I want you to understand this is the considerations, how we do this. I'm going to start showing you how to do this pretty soon." He goes through it, takes a look, and he's like, "Yeah, but this doesn't make sense right here. Why we would take this position if we're doing this, and based on past history, wouldn't it be more advantageous to go over here?" And of course, I was like, "All right, good job. I threw that curveball in there for you to find that."

Yeah, you did. Yeah, you did.

I was like, "See? So how would you change that?" I was like, "Good. Here we go. Now we can submit that. Hey, I'm glad you found that. Really good. You're spun up on this. We're going to get started this right away." And I walked, I was like, "Man, I'm glad I showed him that plan before I submitted it because it would have gotten approved, and then we maybe thinking, 'Well, but—'" But it's a simple way. Your accountability uncovers and discovers something that happens all the time: information, misinformation, flood of information, wrong information, wrong set of circumstances, not knowing what the weather is going to be. So now, all of a sudden, we had a barricade once, Brian, where the weather turned bad. And so the teams are out on the ground, everything's fine, sunny day, "We need sunblock." By that night, everybody, "Well, I need to get back to my vehicle to get a jacket." "Yeah, well, you're on a roof of a house with a rifle looking across the street towards the barricaded gunman. How are we going to swap you out?" We don't think of those things, and we need to think of those things: protracted time on the ground, weather changing on the ground.

You know, Columbine was an unincorporated area of Colorado. Everybody that talks about where it was, well, it wasn't in a specific jurisdiction, it was in multiple jurisdictions. So when people called 911, it went to their call center. You know what most people don't know about Uvalde? Uvalde School District has its own police force. They've got the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police. So when people were calling 911, some of the calls were going from Robb Elementary to the Uvalde Police Department. So that's good because we want to encourage you to call 911. But two things happened there that happened in every critical incident you've ever heard of. One, comms got jammed, Brian. Nobody could get in 911. Everybody with a cell phone was calling in, right? And the second part of that is they called the wrong places. They didn't know. And now you've got on the ground, you've got the Uvalde School District Police Force, you've got the Uvalde Police, you've got U.S. Marshal Service, you got the U.S. Border Patrol, numerous other local agencies. Everybody within 90 minutes of Uvalde was responding. And you had a history of false starts where other people were reported or there were other pursuits that were going and there were lockdowns.

Brian, all you need to do is take a look at how murky that was. And when I hear the same thing that you were just talking about where they go, "Those cops are cowards," and you read the same thing that I did, "Every one of those cops should be looking for a job. They should all be fired." Yeah, keyboard warrior, you're going to get out there and do it. No, they're not. But you know what they could do? They could play a brain game. 2,000 kids at Columbine, many of them never saw or heard the shooter or heard the pipe bombs going off, so they didn't know what was going on. 538 kids at Uvalde and hundreds of staff members. Brian, you have to understand what it was like contending with those people, and where does it go? To the parking lot. If somebody goes, "Hey, the parking lot's a mess out there today," that just complicates everything. So when you're looking at your "left of bang" timeline, and you're looking at the events that occurred before, once you get to "bang," it's too late to make big arm movements, isn't it? So those big arm movements better be something that you consider well in advance. So a run on your business because you're having a giveaway of a product is just as important as a school shooting when it comes down to managing humans and managing comms. Those are the two biggest things you're going to be doing at the scene, so you better be ready for them now. And everything that you thought is going to be overwhelmed. Everything. So the phone system is going to be overwhelmed, cell phones overwhelmed, radios, 911. Everything is going to be overwhelmed. And what's your backup plan? What's your PACE plan (Primary, Alternate, Contingent, Emergency) for those situations?

And Brian, I've got to throw this in, and I know it's non-sequitur, but yesterday I sent you the thing about OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act). Stop trying to make fetch work, okay? John Boyd was a fighter pilot. Fighter pilot, he was a genius, okay? But he had nothing to do with school shootings. What you're trying to do is cobble together this Frankenstein stitching of logic. Oh, shut up. Well, it's because people are, "Okay, well, I know this concept, how do I make this work for here?" Or it's like, you're overthinking the problem here. I mean, think of everything we just talked about. How much money, time, and resources would that take to do a walk-through in a parking lot? That's why I go back to the parking lot. Get out there, stand in your vehicles, go do the hood brief, and stand there and point and walk around. That's rather than talking about energy maneuverability theory, Colonel Boyd.

Yeah, I mean, if you're, if you're maybe if you're an airplane designer, I think Boyd is a genius. He's a pleasure to read because he's a brilliant guy, every aspect of his game. But even today, Boyd would not like the Russian MiG versus the drone, the forcing down, all that other stuff. I would love to go to John Boyd and go, "What do you think about that?" But Boyd would not have the reference, he wouldn't have the context for it in this moment. Now, would he be able to think through? Yeah, if we were able to get some of the greatest thinkers in history back up, they'd get up to speed pretty quick, Brian. But the first thing they'd say, "Hey, I like to stay in my lane." Okay, I don't know these things. I don't know about the type of weapon systems, so stop doing that.

And the simplest things always work. Look, you can add stress after stress after stress into your shooting game in your system and all that stuff. But years ago, stress inoculation didn't work, and it doesn't work now in the manner that we're using it. So when you add stress to your brain or your muscles, your brain and your muscles grow. That's why we increase and change weights at the gym. That's why you vary speed when you're running. Those things work, Brian. But saying, "Okay, so we're going to throw this loop in there, and you're not going to know what to do on it," that doesn't help anybody because if you don't have a clear outcome, if you land on a blank file folder in your brain, you're actually doing damage rather than doing a benefit. So that's why your white belt theory, your "go to the parking lot prac" (practice) app is so ingenious. I'll tell you, I'll be using that all week long, you know, "Go back to the parking lot," because it's just like me saying, "Go back to the white belt," or "Go back to the things you can influence right now."

Well, that's, you know, when we talk about different scientific principles too, you always do the what? All right, I'm going to street it up for you. Yes, that's it. Let's do, let's go out to the parking lot and test this theory right now. Let's walk out here and do it. You have the space, you have the time, you have a realistic location where something is going to happen. Patrick Crusius (the El Paso Walmart shooter) said to park his vehicle and load his AK (rifle) and walk from the parking lot in Walmart into the store. So everything, everything critical takes place in that confluence of people, vehicles, time, and events where that coalesces, is that location. It really is. And then everything goes from there, because if I want to go into the school to kill kids, I have to park my car somewhere. I got to get there. I'm not walking down the street with all that stuff in my hands because I might get caught before I get there. So if I look at this one location and think of all of those spirals, and then flip it on its head and use it, you just literally stand there and go out. I mean, that's, I mean this in a literal, metaphorical sense. Yes, that's everything. That's everything happens right there because why? Because that's where the people are. The people are there, so that's where things are going to happen. What happens when the concert's over or the game's over and everyone leaves? It takes you 30 minutes to get out of the freaking parking lot before you can even get on the freeway. So simple, so simple. And that's the perfect balance. Look at those two things held up, so that's streeting it up, Brian. You know that in your own life. So if you know that in your own life, magnify that by a hundred or a thousand for that critical incident. You're spot on again. You know that.

But add to this too, okay, I would add bathrooms to this. So you look at parking lots and parking and means of transportation. So Fairchild Air Force Base shooting, the guy that drove the shooter to the base said, "You know, I knew something was wrong. I thought it was a gun." So he actually felt so bad. Guy going to the bathroom says, "I look in the stall next to me and I see the outline of a gun." It's the styrofoam packaging. The kid brought the gun in the package, had to take it apart, put it together, load the magazines. And he goes, "I knew right away something was wrong," so he made the call. But you as a trainer, you as the instructor, have to help me put those threads together. You have to help me put those stepping stones together, because if not, Brian, what I'm acting on is information in the blind, and I'm not thinking of the big picture. So as you say, what could happen in a parking lot, and what happens most frequently? Fender benders. Somebody has a baby in a parking lot. Heart attack. Guy coming back carrying his groceries. Armed robbery in a parking lot. Brian, if you're going to prioritize something, prioritize how you are going to respond, how you're going to plan for these events, not a singular event. You get what I'm trying to say? So the parking lot, whether it's just a snowy day or whether there's an active shooter or an active killer, are just as important for you to consider, and those are the things where you're going to get the best bang for your buck, the best return on your investment.

Wouldn't you agree, from a training perspective, you're going to get your best return for the cheapest cost, and that's obviously what we focus on because we focus on all those factors, one that you can't control. Let me say that again: focusing on the things that you can control. You know that what you do through team. I mean, how many times do people use different excuses? "Oh, we don't have time for this," or, "No, we can't get funding to go to here." It's like, yeah, and when has that, when has that not been the case? When has anyone ever just been like, "Yeah, let's throw some money at it, see what happens?" That doesn't happen anywhere because that's irresponsible of an organization to even think that way, right? I don't care if it's a government agency or a private business, whatever it is, you don't just go, "Yeah, let's pull it." No, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis, and you might not be part of that, but it's, it's, you can do all of those things. We go for the simplest, lowest calorie things: street it up, make it a parking lot. And that's, that's where those things come out. That's where the really good tough questions come into play too because you're in the moment looking at it going, "Well, wait a minute, I thought our response was this, but would that make sense here?" And then everyone goes, "Ah," they scratch their head and go, "Man, we might need to change that plan, or we might need to change some of our SOPs because they're not as general, they're not general enough to fit every situation. They're too specific sometimes."

Is a perfect example, ladders. You know me going off on ladders. So I've been on probably, I don't know, a couple thousand burglaries that were roof jobs where people went to a business, broke through the air conditioner, kicked through roof panels to drop down in to avoid the alarm system, and went out the same way. Some of them were resolved because the person killed themselves trying to do the entry, fell down to the floor and died inside the building, or were captured after breaking their legs or their back. Folks, don't try it, it blows getting caught in the chimney or in the air conditioning system. Brian, you see those all the time. I watch cops flip out and they go, "Holy, it'd be great if we got up on that building." Well, they're not going to get on the building the way that the snake thief did, because they might slip and fall. So they go, "We need a ladder." And I see these cops and I stand back and I watch and they go, "Ladder? Holy crap, there's a True Value right down the street." So they go down and they back their car into the fire door to pop it open to burglarize the local True Value to get a ladder to get up on the building. And I go, "Hey, what about the fire department?" And they go, "That's even a better idea." They call the fire department. The fire department goes, "Dude, I don't know if we can let you on our ladder." Okay, think of the coordination to find one ladder. And Brian, how long would it take us to sit around with the next city council meeting and go, "Hey, if we need a ladder, how do we get one?" That's what you're talking about, you're talking about lowest calorie intervention. Okay, now for the event that we can predict later, are we going to need a ladder? Brian, we're also going to need a boat. Who's got the boat? Does the boat need a trailer? Those are the type of things that we talk about now, not when the flooding occurs. Folks, this is not rocket science, but it is science. You know, that's, come on, you can do this.

Yeah, I don't know. I think that's, that's right, we kind of covered a lot here. But, you know, sticking around that same central theme of where these things take place and how to deal with them and how to play a good "what if" game, right? And you have to "what if" your own policies and procedures, and you have to "what if" what actually occurs in these events. And that's a problem too, is, you know, we constantly try to address what are the key factors, what are the actual takeaways from all of these past events that I can learn from? I don't care what the person's skin color, upbringing, type of clothing they were wearing or something like we go into this ad nauseam, what kind of weapon system they had and how that played into it. It's like, those are the variables that are going to change with each one, and so it's unnecessary. It's, "What are the core elements?" Well, they had to gain access here, and everyone had to come to the parking lot first, or, you know what, they had to drive. We were talking about Kehoe (Andrew Kehoe, the Bath Consolidated School District bomber) the other day. Where did he set off his vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED)? Right in the parking lot at the school at Bath Township, Michigan, 1927. And trying to drive that VBIED right up to the folks, and they saw him through the window before he detonated. That's magic, Brian. If it's been around, it's going to recur. So stick with what you know and stop trying to rebuild the exact incident. You don't have to rebuild the exact incident. What you have to do is build certain points of challenging complexity that force you to critically think an outcome. And once you've got that, if you're a training person in a small agency or a big agency, stop spending your money on ridiculous, and start doing that parking lot, Brian. I totally with you on that.

Yeah. All right.

Anything else you kind of want to add on this one?

Yeah, so I'm involuntarily dog-sitting.

You are.

So I've got the psycho "Java" the mutt that's going through PTSD, but I love her. And then I've got kids, Shetland pony, that's called "Ember," that her head goes to my shoulder. And we have four feet of snow on the ground outside, and it's snowing, and last night we had that snowy wind where it iced up, so it's almost impossible to get out of any door without falling down. And so they're right now looking at me going, "What's up? Go out there!" But there's nowhere to go.

Yeah, you can't go anywhere.

Hey, we're all running for a fall here, Brian, I'm telling you too. If next time we log on, I'm wearing a helmet and an eye patch, you'll know why.

Yeah, that's why. Well, we appreciate everyone tuning in. Don't forget, we do have our Patreon side where we have even more. Reach out to us at [The Human Behavior Podcast] gmail.com so we can answer any questions that you might have. And we do appreciate everyone listening in and sharing the episode with your friends, right, to get the message out.

Yes, please. If you liked it or if you have any questions about it again, reach out to us and we can go in-depth more. And we go in-depth behind the paywall, Patreon. It's only a few bucks, but there's a ton of stuff on there. And that allows us to kind of even get into some more detail about it. It's just a little barrier to entry we put up. Barriers to entry are good, and they keep some of the riffraff out. So that's what we're trying with that. So yeah.

No chugs, no trucks, no Chads, no trogs allowed. I think it's on my business card.

It should be. Say hello everybody. Say hello, idiots. Come here. Wait. I don't know if you can see them. Come here, you guys. Yeah, the moment, the moment I do it, nobody's there. There's Java, and there's the horse in the background. Oh my gosh. Here, I can't turn so much. And they're all excited. They don't know why, though, Brian.

No, that, that's, that, that's, uh, that's great. The Patreon site, Brian, we've got the textbook that's coming up. We've got a big month in April where we're going to be traveling and teaching in person. Yeah, and look, folks, just telling somebody about an episode you heard or tuning them in on how to find us, that really helps us out a lot. And that's what we want to do. All right. Well, we appreciate everyone tuning in and don't forget that training changes behavior.