Where is the shooter?!? Simple DIY way that any school can label the places on campus.
Where is the shooter?!? Simple DIY way that any school can label the places on campus.
This low or no cost method can help police, fire, and EMS get to any room or building on a school campus during an emergency. This is a FREE article about how to do it this summer!
When a shooting happens on a school campus, students, staff, parents, and neighbors immediately know there’s a problem. The problem is not lack of notification about a shooting, it’s getting responders to the right place. From listening to 911 calls during school shootings, there are three main ways the response gets delayed:
911 call taker doesn’t understand the school name or address.
911 caller can’t easily describe where they are at the school or the address of the building.
Police officers arriving on campus don’t know where the shooter is or can’t describe the location of the shooter or victims to other emergency responders.
This 911 call from the Covenant School in Nashville highlights these problems.
Companies have jumped on the opportunity to try to solve these problems with products ranging from digital maps of schools, wearable panic buttons, CCTV software that flags a gun, acoustic sensors to detect gunshots, and mobile apps to guide responders through the building.
These different types of products are unlikely to help during an active shooter on campus for some very obvious reasons:
Digital maps: Most police officers are alone in their patrol cars and racing through traffic to get to the campus. They don’t have time to find the map folder on their laptop, find the right school, and then zoom into study the building layout. Right now grab your phone and start jogging down the street while you open google maps and try to lookup the closest school. If that was easy, try it again while sprinting and carrying a rifle, go bag, and ballistic shield. These digital maps are an easy product to sell because they look good on a sales PowerPoint and they will streamline operations during a training exercise when everyone has time to pull up the map before it starts. Once a company sets up the infrastructure and staff to produce digital maps, there is a low production cost that scales up fast by lobbying to require schools to buy them.
Wearable panic buttons: Staff move around throughout the building during the day. If a basic panic button is coded with just the school address or their home room, this is not any more useful than just calling 911. A panic button that tracks the exact location of each staff member during the entire day is very expensive. It’s easy to press a panic button my mistake and when an active shooter alarm goes off, students start jumping out of windows and running from the campus.
CCTV software that flags guns: Most planned attacks at schools are surprise attacks that start inside the building after a student has snuck a gun inside. A school shooter has never been visible on camera for an extended period of time before an attack started. Most shootings on campus are not planned attacks, they are spontaneous acts during a fight when a teen who habitually carries a concealed gun pulls it from their pocket or a backpack. When a gun is visible on CCTV, it’s either too late or only seconds before shots are fired. I wrote about the challenges with how image classification systems work in my recent CNN article on AI and school security.
Gunshot detection: Once shots are fired inside a school, hundreds of people can hear the shots and can call 911. Now that shot detection systems have been used in ~250 cities for 15 years, there is enough data to analyze their effectiveness. A recent study shows that getting an automated gunshot detection alert has a slower police response time compared to a regular 911 call from a person.
Mobile Apps for Responders: Just like the digital maps, a police officer running towards a school while carrying a rifle, shield, and go bag doesn’t have an extra hand free to navigate an app. In the botched response to Uvalde, officers couldn’t even remember to grab their radios much less use a mobile app.
I have a better solution that any school can implement this summer for almost no cost.
Grid Mapping
There is a simple system to label any location with a grid that has numbers or letters that correspond to horizontal and vertical lines across the map.
For anyone like me who grew up before Google Maps, the ADC map books for every metro area in the country were grid maps. When you looked up a street name in the index, there was a map page number with a letter and number for the location of the street within the grid.
These maps are extremely easy to use. When I was a 16-year-old volunteer firefighter, I would get the address of an emergency on an alpha pager and use an ADC map book to quickly get to 911 calls all over the county.
Grid Map of School Building
There is a high-quality overhead image of every school building in the country available for free on Google.
If you overlap a grid on the Google map satellite image, now you have a easy to understand map of the campus.
This map could be annotated with some landmarks (e.g., street name, front door, obvious building like the gym) to help orient anyone to the layout of the buildings within the grid.
Schools already have wall signs for every room in the building. With a $10 label maker, any school could add the grid number for each room.
When there is an emergency, if a student, teacher, or staff member tells the 911 operator their grid number, any responding police officer should be able to look at the school map and know the general location to go.
Grid Map of Multi-Building Campus
If a school campus has multiple buildings, the grid system works too. It is very unlikely that a responding police officer is going to know where ‘Building A’ at Saugus High School is. Meanwhile, it’s very easy to describe and find C4 on the grid.
If a school wants to add more detail for a large campus, there can be secondary maps within the large grid just like the ADC map books of streets.
If a school building has multiple floors, a floor number can be added before or after the grid number (e.g., floor 1 = 1A1, floor 2 = 2A1, floor 3 = 3A1).
School ID Number
In the 911 call from Nashville (video above), the callers can’t remember the street address of the school and the 911 call taker has trouble finding that address.
This problem can be easily solved by giving every school in the district a unique number (just like a fire station or police station). A second number could be added for multiple buildings on campus.
With a $10 label maker, the door sign for any classroom can have a school number, building number, and grid number that any student, staff member, parent, and visitor can easily relay to 911.
How to make this happen
By using PowerPoint and Google Maps, anyone can produce a grid map of a campus and label the key landmarks in 10 minutes.
Parent and student volunteers could add labels to the classroom doors and stuff copies of the maps for every school in the district into a binder for each police car, ambulance, and fire truck in the area.
The maps could also be printed on laminated notecards with a ring so that police officers could hang it in the front seat of their patrol car and grab the card for reference as they run inside.
I first had this idea when I was at a very disorganized music festival and the event staff had no idea where the named locations in the venue were because the grounds didn’t have any signage or waypoints. A simple grid system with temporary signs showing the When a shooting happens on a school campus, student, staff, parents, and neighbors immediately know there’s a problem. From listening to 911 calls from during school shootings and mass shootings in public, there are three main ways the response gets delayed:
911 call taker doesn’t understand the school name or address.
911 caller can’t easily describe where they are at the school or the address of the building.
Police officer arriving on campus don’t know where the shooter is or can’t describe the location of the shooter or victims to other emergency responders.
This 911 call from the Covenant School in Nashville highlights these problems.
Companies have jumped on the opportunity to try to solve these problems with products ranging from digital maps of schools, wearable panic buttons, image classification for CCTV to the flag location of the shooter, acoustic sensors to detect gunshots, and mobile apps to guide responders through the building.
These different types of products are unlikely to help during an active shooter on campus for some very obvious reasons:
Digital maps: Most police officers are alone in cars and racing through traffic to get to the campus. They don’t have time to find the map folder on their laptop, find the right school, and the zoom into start studying the building layout. Right now grab your phone and start jogging down the street while you open google maps and try to lookup the closest school. If that was easy, try it again while sprinting and carrying a rifle, go bag, and ballistic shield. These digital maps are an easy product to sell because they look good on a sales PowerPoint, they will streamline operations during a training exercises when everyone has time to pull up the map, and after a shooting is over, they help forensics organize the crime scene. Once a company sets up the infrastructure and staff to produce these maps, there is a low production cost that scales up fast by lobbying to require schools to buy the digital maps.
Wearable panic buttons: Staff move around throughout the building during the day. If a basic panic button is coded with just the school address or their home room, this is not any more useful than just calling 911. A panic button that tracks the exact location of each staff member during the entire day is very expensive. It’s easy to press a panic button my mistake and when an active shooter alarm goes off, students start jumping out of the windows and running from the campus.
CCTV software that flag guns: Most planned attacks at schools are surprise attacks that start inside the building after a student has snuck a gun inside. A school shooter has never been visible on camera for an extended period of time before an attack started. Most shooting on campus are spontaneous acts during a fight when a teen who habitually carries a concealed gun pulls it from their pocket or a backpack. When a gun is visible on CCTV, it’s either too late or only seconds before shots are fired. I wrote about the challenges with how image classification system work in my recent CNN article on AI and school security.
Gunshot detection: Once shots are fired inside a school, hundreds of people are hearing the shots and can call 911. Now that shot detection systems have been used in ~250 cities for +10 years, there is enough data to analyze their effectiveness. A recent study shows that getting an automated gunshot detection alert has a slower police response time compared to a regular 911 call from a person.
Mobile Apps for Responders: Just like the digital maps, a police officer running towards a school while carrying a rifle, shield, and go bag doesn’t have an extra hand free to navigate an app.
I have a better solution that any school can implement this summer for almost no cost.
Grid Mapping
There is a really simple system to label any location with a grid that has numbers or letters that correspond to horizonal and vertical lines across the map.
For anyone like me who grew up before Google Maps, the ADC map books for every metro area in the country were grid maps. When you looked up a street name in the index, there was a map page number with a letter and number for the location of the street within the grid.
These maps are extremely easy to use. When I was a 16-year-old volunteer firefighter, I would get the address of an emergency on an alpha pager and use an ADC map book to quickly get to 911 calls all over the county.
Grid Map of School Building
There is a high quality overhead image of every school building in the country available for free on Google.
If you overlap a grid on the Google map satellite image, now you have a easy to understand map of the campus.
This map could be easily annotated with some land marks to help orient someone to the layout of the building.
Schools already have wall signs for every room in the building. With a $10 label maker, any school could add the grid number for each room.
When there is an emergency, if a student, teacher, or staff member tells the 911 operator their grid number, any responding police officer should be able to look at the school map and know the general location to go.
Grid Map of Multi-Building Campus
If a school campus is multiple buildings, the grid system works too. It is very unlikely that a responding police officer is going to know where ‘Building A’ at Saugus High School is. Meanwhile, it’s very easy to describe and find C4 on the grid.
If a school wants to add more detail for a large campus, there can be secondary maps within the large grid just like the ADC map books of streets.
School ID Number
In the 911 call from Nashville (video above), the callers can’t remember the street address of the school and the 911 call taker has trouble finding that address.
This problem can be easily solved by giving every school in the district a unique number (just like a fire station or police station). A second number could be added for multiple building on campus.
With a $10 label maker, the door sign for any classroom can have a school number, building number, and grid number that any student, staff member, parent, and visitor can easily relay to 911.
How to make this happen
By using PowerPoint and Google Maps, any can produce a grid map of a campus and label the key landmarks in 10 minutes.
Parent and student volunteers could add labels to the classroom doors and stuff copies of the maps for every school in the district into a binder for each police car, ambulance, and fire truck in the area. Schools can also post the gird map in a display case by the main doors because this is a useful reference for both emergency responders and visitors (or substitute teachers).
The map could also be printed on laminated notecards with a ring so that police officers could hang it in the front seat of their patrol car and grab the card for reference as the run inside.
I first had this idea when I was at a very disorganized music festival and the event staff had not idea where the named locations in the venue were because the grounds didn’t have any signage or waypoints. Temporary signs showing the letter-number of the location on the grid would make it easy to anyone to navigate the venue.
This is a simple solution that can solve some fundamental and recurring problems with emergency responses at schools for almost no cost.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—and checkout my interview on Freakonomics Radio and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
Retired school principal here: I sat through hours of Incident Command trainings, security reviews, sales pitches for new locks, badges, drills….
In my experience, this is the best, most basic, real and achievable suggestion for school safety and quick response to an active shooter that takes basic human nature into account.
Staff, students, volunteers, parents, maintenance guys, substitute teachers, lunch ladies…. Very few people on a school campus know the address, and internet access in an emergency is unreliable in many spaces of a school. This low cost, low tech system could be taught and implemented anywhere by every school at any level. In fact all public spaces could benefit.
I will share it with friends still working in schools.
Thanks for all you do.