Our Blog: Equipping & Empowering

Situational awareness is important for everyone — every teacher, student, working professional, church attendee, and stay-at-home parent. Granted, it's unrealistic, and arguably unnecessary, for civilians to maintain the same level of acute awareness as people whose livelihoods are based around it. Imagine how exhausting it would be to remain on high alert 24/7, not to mention how much it would exhaust the people around us as well!

U.S. Marine Jeff Cooper developed the Color Code concept to identify different levels of situational awareness and to help people understand how to act as someone who is situationally aware. 

Practical and straightforward, the Color Code is still taught to law enforcement officers today. Let's take a look at it from a civilian perspective...

Rarely is there just one right way to respond in an emergency. Everyone reacts a little differently during a crisis, but through our years of experience in law enforcement and EMS, we've seen some of the same poor reactions repeated in various traumatic events.

It's amazing the things our brains will tell us (or fail to tell us) to do when we're under stress. It's no wonder that people freeze up when they should fight, or that they run away when they're the only ones who can provide lifesaving medical care.

You can never truly be prepared for an active shooter event, but you can increase your likelihood of having an empowered response. Start by being aware of 5 of the most common mistakes people make under stress.

Some people go about their day very attentive to their surroundings, and others are completely oblivious. Most civilians fall somewhere in the middle. We will probably notice the person in front of us in the customer service line yelling at the clerk because they can't get a cash refund, but we may not see the individual to our right wearing a baggy hooded sweatshirt on a 90-degree day.

Being situationally aware doesn't mean you're stereotyping people or assuming the worst about them. It means you continuously observe your environment and notice things that are abnormal, such as people wearing hooded sweatshirts in the heat of summer. 

In order to improve your situational awareness on a daily basis, let's discuss 6 basic practices that people with a healthy level of awareness regularly do.

Two minutes. Maybe three; four if you're lucky — that's all the time you have to treat a serious hemorrhage before it's fatal. The fact that a person can bleed out in just two to four minutes is proof of how important it is to know how to stop massive bleeding.

While reading a blog article cannot adequately equip you to treat a life-threatening injury like severe hemorrhage (you need hands-on, scenario-based training for that), the information in this article provides a good starting point.

Manufacturing jobs present a unique set of risks. The presence of hazardous materials and heavy machinery set the stage for all sorts of workplace accidents, not to mention the ever-present possibility of an intruder entering your facility and committing an act of violence. 

As an employer, it's your job to reduce risk and protect your workers' safety, but with the potential for so many types of accidents, preventing workplace-related injuries is no easy task. However, just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's impossible. Here are 9 ways you can begin guarding your employees' safety:

A place of worship is meant to be a peaceful place where people can walk through the door feeling welcome, safe, and secure. However, events like the Charleston, SC church shooting in 2015 have shaken church goers and ministry leaders, challenging them to evaluate their level of security at their places of worship. 

Countless active shooter incidents since then have reminded us that acts of violence are neither predictable nor rare, and no place — not even religious establishments — are immune to tragedy.

This is why safety planning is vital. With effective safety planning, your place of worship can proactively address safety concerns and be prepared to effectively act in a crisis. Here's how to get started with your church's safety plan:

With every school shooting we hear or read about in the news, we find ourselves asking the same questions: Why does this keep happening? And how can we stop it?

While there’s no good answer to either of those concerns, there are steps your school can take to identify safety concerns and limit risk. Here are 6 questions to consider as you assess how safe your school would be if an active shooter emergency were to occur.

Work can be stressful enough without also thinking about things like the possibility of an armed gunman walking through the front door of your business or place of employment.

However, thinking about the potential risk is your first step to survival if such a scenario were to occur. With workplace shootings becoming increasingly common, we can’t just refuse to watch the news and hope for the best. As much as we resist even the thought of danger, we must admit the risk and take precautionary steps today that could save your life and others.

Here are four ways you can start at your workplace: