Optimizing Civilian Response Strategy Under an Active Shooting Incident

Abstract

Active shooting (AS) violence poses a serious threat to public safety. Most importantly, this number is increasing at an alarming rate over the last few years. Unfortunately, the knowledge base on attack detection and civilian response strategy under an AS incident are very limited. Such a lack of understanding hinders the development of effective training modules, response, and mitigation strategies (for both civilians and law enforcement officers) for an event that is highly unpredictable and unfolds quickly (typically in less than 5 min). To fill this gap in the literature, this article proposes an innovative mathematical model which captures several important features (e.g., capacity of the facility and individual choices, heterogeneity of individual behavioral and choice sets, restriction on choice sets depending on the location of the shooter and facility orientation, and many others) which are essential for appropriately characterizing and analyzing the response strategy for civilians under an AS exposed environment. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model by implementing the effectiveness of the RUN.HIDE.FIGHT. program in an academic environment. Results indicate that cognitive delay, the initial distribution of the civilians, and building configurations (e.g., location and number of entrances/exits) play a significant role in the safety of civilians under an AS incident.