NFPA Journal - September/October 2019 - 52

Perspectives

ACTIVE SHOOTERS

THE FIRST
12 MINUTES

ACCORDING TO ONE EMERGENCY MANAGER,
MOST TRAINING FOR HOW TO REACT IN A HOSTILE
EVENT IS MISGUIDED AND DESIGNED TO FAIL.
HE THINKS HE MIGHT HAVE A BETTER WAY.
Interview conducted and edited by Jesse Roman
uring the lecture portion of a
training that Tom Polera leads on
active shooter preparation, one slide
in particular usually hits his attendees with added weight. It shows a
collage of faces, many of them baby-faced teens-
and all of them mass murderers.
"Look at these kids," Polera tells his rapt audiences. "Some of them look like they could be related
to you. One might look like the kid who lives down
the street. These are what killers look like."
Polera, the fire marshal and emergency manager
in Falls Church, Virginia, knows this lesson firsthand. His own daughter went to high school with
one of the faces on the screen; in addition, two of
her classmates at the school were later killed in
the Virginia Tech shootings. The message is unmistakable. "The people in your audience need to

According to the
United States
Center for Homeland Defense and
Security, there were
11 active shooter
incidents in US K-12
schools last year,
the most since
tracking began in
1970.

52 | NFPA JOURNAL * S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 9

understand that there isn't a bubble
surrounding their community," Polera
told me during a recent interview. "You
have to make this real for them."
The ever-present threat of intentional violence in schools, places of
worship, and other community spaces
compelled Polera to create "The First 12
Minutes," a program he launched last
year to train citizens on how to survive
mass shooting attacks. The curriculum
emphasizes self-reliance, including creating barricades to seal off a
room, applying tourniquets and dressing gunshot wounds, and confronting
and disarming an assailant. Polera has
taught the three-hour course about 30
times to nearly 1,000 teachers, religious
leaders, and citizens throughout Falls
Church, a city of about 15,000.
The rationale behind the approach
is simple, Polera says: the vast majority
of mass shootings are over in minutes,
before first responders even arrive on
scene. Research has shown that, when
the shooting starts, the actions that citizens take-or don't take-greatly affect
how many people die in these incidents, a fact that plays out time and
again in the examples that Polera goes
through with his trainees.
"It's really a public education
program no different from the ones
we've done for years in the fire
service," says Polera, who came to Falls
Church in 2012 after a 30-year career
at the Arlington County (Virginia) Fire
Department. "Emergency services have
always adjusted what we do to meet
the needs of the community. From
2000 to today, we're looking at an average of about one active shooter event every 19
days. From that perspective, this is a significant
community need. You can't say it's not going to
happen here."
While Polera's program remains a local effort
for now, it has gained attention from the United
States Department of Justice and from municipalities across the country trying to better prepare
citizens for increasing levels of gun violence and
other hostile acts. Polera has talked about "The
First 12 Minutes" at professional conferences
across the nation, including the NFPA Conference
& Expo in San Antonio in June. He calls the

NFPA Journal - September/October 2019

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