Guest Article: Translating the Uvalde DOJ report into plain language
I put out a call on social media for help translating the 273 recommendations in the 575-page report. Michael Prasad--a certified emergency manager--answered.
This was written by Michael Prasad following out work to translate the Department of Justice report on the Robb Elementary school shooting into plain language that can be understood by parents and school officials.
Here is the google sheet.
When I saw that David Riedman had put together a spreadsheet on all the recommendations from the US Department of Justice’s Critical Incident Review on the Robb Elementary School shooting – and put it together the day after the report was released! – I knew I had to help. David rightly points out that the report is exhaustingly long, chock-full of acronyms, and field-specific jargon.
He quoted a recommendation from Chapter 8 – which is the one I was most interested in reading – which read “Recommendation 7.4: TCOLE should consider revising the SBLE training guidebook based on the recommendations in the CIR.”. I even had to look this one up, and while I am not a law-enforcement professional, I am a professional Emergency Manager. Now a consultant in private practice, I have held governmental and non-governmental roles in Emergency Management. In all of these roles, I have researched past incidents of all kinds – including active assailant ones – to help communities be more ready for the adverse impacts from the next one. Ready to protect against, prevent, respond to, recover from, and mitigate against the adverse impacts that any threat or hazard can have on a community, families, and individuals.
Chapter 8 in the DOJ report covers the abject failures in Preparedness, Response, Recovery, and Mitigation missions. These are all Emergency Management principles. This DOJ report rightly shows that no one was performing professional Emergency Management before, during, or after this incident. In Emergency Management, we have distinct missions, roles, activities, courses of action, etc. in the Disaster Cycle Phases. This is how it flows, every incident, every time:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1a192091-df4e-4ae3-8b02-c19a74b40d93_624x272.jpeg)
I was honored to help David build out his spreadsheet with plain language for the recommendations, especially for Chapter 8, as well as Emergency Management-specific Corrective Actions which every community, every school district can undertake now. The thoughts, comments, suggestions, etc. which I included are my own – from both experience on incidents of scale and my own training and education. One critical element of Emergency Management I want express is that as a profession, we work together and collaborate, coordinate, cooperate, and communicate. Readers will see these words and concepts throughout my commentary in the spreadsheet.
I was greatly pleased to see Emergency Management concepts – even references to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – included in this DOJ report. And as someone who needs to explain what Emergency Management is to non-Emergency Managers, David’s spreadsheet is an ideal opportunity to do so. In the United States we have a standardized framework for managing incidents – which is scalable and flexible, yet consistent for every group and function to use together. While some Emergency Services groups may still operate in siloes, that is not what professional Emergency Management is about – and this is also a running theme in the DOJ report. An Active Assailant (Shooter) incident’s Response and Recovery phases encompass so much more than just Emergency Services group activities; and Chapter 8 covers a large number of those.
In my notes and commentary on the spreadsheet, I frequently refer to the phrase ‘professional Emergency Manager’ – this is very important to non-Emergency Manager readers. If you are an elected or appointed official in your community, hire a professional Emergency Manager and organize them independent of your current Emergency Services departments. Hire at least a team of five of them (one expert in our field states the ratio should be 20 Emergency Managers for every million residents).
We view the full disaster phase cycle for incidents, on an all-hazard basis: sometimes bad things get even worse. Communities need to be prepared and ready for what happens next. Sometimes disasters happen within disasters or cascade from one to another. Here’s an example from FEMA as to how many different aspects of a community can be adversely impacted by any threat or hazard:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcff0a6ee-c775-4a13-9602-6f95a9c4b720_1430x1055.png)
If Emergency Management is a tertiary duty of anyone in Emergency Services (police captain, fire lieutenant, DPW crew chief, etc.) and they are not trained and educated as a professional Emergency Manager, your community or school will fail at all-hazards incident management. It’s that simple. Emergency Management is so much more than guns and hoses in Response Operations. One can see in the DOJ report how the full cycle – the before, during, and after – was not supported and managed properly in Uvalde.
I know David’s spreadsheet will help other communities to be better prepared for the next active assailant attack at a school. This can – and must – be done through the use of professional Emergency Management.
Michael Prasad is a Certified Emergency Manager® , a senior research analyst at Barton Dunant – Emergency Management Training and Consulting, and the executive director of the Center for Emergency Management Intelligence Research. Views expressed do not necessarily represent the official position of any of these organizations.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Iowa Public Radio the day after the Perry High shooting.