Police learned about how to identify and handle potential “active shooters” at a training session Wednesday, the day after a gunman was arrested at a DeKalb elementary school.
The training, led by the FBI’s Atlanta office, taught about 200 law enforcement leaders how to find potential shooters ahead of time and coordinate emergency response when they act.
There’s no demographic profile of what a shooter looks like, but they often express anger beforehand, have suffered a recent loss and practice firing weapons, said Ray Johnson, the FBI’s Atlanta coordinator for the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.
Family members, friends and co-workers can tip off police and social service workers about unstable behavior and potentially prevent an incident, said Sean Ragan, assistant special agent in charge for the FBI’s Atlanta office.
“These people usually don’t wake up one morning and say they’re going to do a mass shooting,” Ragan said. “It’s usually a series of events in their lives that might lead up to it.”
The training also informed law enforcement, firefighters and medical personnel how to coordinate their efforts in the chaos following a shooting.
The training Wednesday in Canton, Ga., is the third training session in Georgia so far this year in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn.
About 1,000 Georgia officers have been trained so far this year.
Federal legislation passed in January authorized the FBI to provide assistance in response to mass shootings.
All 56 field offices in the nation are holding two-day conferences for executive management about best practices and lessons learned from previous shootings.
The conferences cover topics including behavioral indicators, evidence collection, crime scene management, crisis management and victim assistance.
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