Active Shooter response has been pushed to the forefront of Emergency Preparedness in the last several years with increasing amounts of Active Shooter occurrences throughout the world. The nature of an Active Shooter situation is that of uncertainty, with the main question being how to respond. And with hundreds of incidents to reference, it has become apparent that the response time of Emergency Responders is also a major concern as many Active Shooter incidents end before Emergency Responders have even arrived on the scene.

With that in mind, it becomes clear: our thought process on this type of threat needs to evolve. We need to understand that in most of these types of scenarios, the actual first responders are not necessarily the Emergency Responders like Law Enforcement and Emergency Medical Technicians. In fact, the true first responders are often times actually those already onsite, such as building/facility managers, security, or even tenants themselves.

It's this mindset that lead Prepare Protect Defend, LLC (PPD) to start thinking outside of the box when it comes to Active Shooter incidents and helping potential victims become trained First Responders. Comprised of former Navy Seal and Law Enforcement officials with vast experience in Special Ops and responding to various Active Threat situations, PPD set out to use their knowledge and experience to better prepare the likely First Responders to do just that. This preparation is built upon a system of 5 F's: Focus, Flee, Fortify, Flight, & First Aid. In their program, they teach participants how to recognize the threat and take action (Focus), create distance from a threat (Flee), block entry points (Fortify), protect themselves and defend others (Flight), and lastly, stop bleeding to save lives (First-Aid). By enlisting their services, they can bring their program to any large scale school campus, commercial facility or high rise building and fully prepare critical staff members on how to be First Responders.

In conjunction with their program, they have developed a tool for the new First Responders. This tool helps streamline communication between Emergency Responders and facility occupants, effectively painting a picture of the scene from the inside-out. This solution is called Lifespot, a mobile application created with one important theme: the simpler, the better. The program delivers real-time information to en route or onsite Emergency Responders, as well as pertinent building staff so they can direct their people accordingly - all from a device that everyone, in this day and age, most certainly has on their person: a mobile phone.

The main purpose of the app is to alert emergency responders of where and when an Active Threat is occurring. This is done by hitting one in-app button, which alerts all local Emergency Responders of the incident and provides them with a simplified map of the location and facility where the report was made. At the same time, all facility personnel with this app will also receive this information. Once the alert is acknowledged, all users of the app can view a real-time map noting areas that are of concern in the facility in relation to the Active Threat - these noted areas of information are added to the map by trained First Responders. This information can be anything from the location of a gunshot victim to even the current or last known whereabouts of the shooter within the facility. With this information, arriving Emergency Responders can save precious life-saving time by not needing to sweep an entire facility in search of the offender (which can take hours in some cases), and focus on the area of the facility where the offender was last seen.

PPD's new training program and coinciding mobile app empowers the true First Responders to react more efficiently to an Active Shooter incident, with the potential to save many lives in the process. The 5 F's training is available now with the Lifespot app set to be opened to new customers in early 2017. More information on the 5 F's and Lifespot can be found at www.prepareprotectdefend.com. 

Additional information and resources are also available on the BOMA International website.