Wait for Backup?

Publication

Martaindale, M.H., Sandel, W.L. & Blair, J.P. Wait for backup or not? How police officers view their role when responding to an active shooter event. Journal of Experimental Criminology (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-023-09592-8

What Was the Issue?

This study looked at how officers view their duties when responding to an active shooter. It was inspired by a previous study which found that a sample of police officers thought that it was appropriate to wait for backup before entering an attack location. One of the problems with the previous study was that many of the scenarios failed to provide a clear driving force indicating that there was ongoing violence. In the absence of a driving force, waiting for backup is what officers are taught to do. This study attempted to correct this shortcoming by providing scenarios with a clear driving force.

How Did They Look at It?

This study used a relatively complicated research design called a factorial survey to assess how officers viewed a hypothetical officer’s response to different active shooter scenarios. In this type of research, several factors of interest are identified. Each of these factors has several values (called levels). In this study for example, one factor was the location of the event. This had the values convenience store, grocery store, and large mall. The other factors in this study were armament of the officer (pistol or pistol and rifle), time until back-up arrived (less than 2 minutes, 2-5 minutes, or more than 5 minutes), scene characteristics (calm, chaotic with people fleeing, or chaotic with bleeding people and fleeing), gunfire (none or rapid), and the officer decision (set perimeter and wait for SWAT, wait for backup, or enter). The factors and their levels are then combined to create a universe of possible scenarios. In this study, there was a universe of 324 scenarios. Rather than make each participant in the study assess each possible scenario, which would take a long time and be exhausting, each participant instead assesses only a small number of randomly selected scenarios. In this study, participants assessed 10 scenarios.

An example of a scenario is presented below. The levels of factors are in bold and vary from scenario to scenario.

On a Saturday at 3:00 pm, a police dispatcher broadcasts across the radio that there is a shooting in progress at a convenience store (max occupancy 20 people). About 3 min later, a patrol unit armed with a pistol arrives on scene. As the first unit arrives on scene, radio traffic indicates that additional backup units are more than 5 min from arriving on scene. The scene is somewhat chaotic, with several people running from the main door of the building. Continuous, rapid gunfire is heard coming from the building. The decision is made to establish a perimeter and wait for a SWAT team to enter the building.

After reading the scenario, the participant indicated how appropriate they felt the first responding officer’s actions were. They also indicated what their preferred action was. Almost 800 police officers from more than 43 states responded to the survey providing 7394 scenario evaluations. These evaluations were then submitted to a sophisticated statistical analysis (mixed-effect logistic regression) to assess the impact of both individual factors and combinations of factors (call interactions).

What Did They Find?

In a nutshell, the participant officers were very sensitive to whether there was a driving force. Participants were much more likely to approve of the first responding officer’s decision to enter when there was a driving force or to wait for backup when there was not. This is not particularly surprising given that officers have been trained to do this for more than 20 years.

So What?

This research is valuable in that it corrects a misperception that was created by a previous paper that officers were not willing to enter active shooter situations without backup. This previous finding not only contradicted what officers are trained to do, but also ignored the many active shooter events that solo officers have successfully stopped. This study shows that officers are sensitive to the circumstances of a scene and choose actions accordingly.

However, this sensitivity is not universal. The table above presents the participant’s preferred action when gunfire was present or not. As you can see, almost 88% of the respondents chose immediate entry when gunfire was present. Yet some still chose to wait for backup and a few preferred establishing a perimeter and waiting for the SWAT team. Some of this variation may be due to the participants being sensitive to the scenario circumstances. For example, the backup for some people who chose to wait for backup may have been less than 2 minutes out and they might have viewed this brief delay as being inconsequential. Some of the variation might also be due to local differences. For example, maybe a particular police department has a policy that constrains the officer’s actions in specific circumstances. But this variation might also indicate that these officers do not agree with the general concept of entering a scene when there is active gunfire. This should be an issue of concern because, as we have seen in previous events, a single officer failing to act can send a signal to others that also prevents them from acting. This social contagion can cost lives.