The Los Altos United Methodist Church has partnered with the ALICE Training Institute, an emergency-training organization based in Ohio, to host a two-day instructor course at the church on Aug. 15 and 16 designed to teach survival strategies “for those critical moments in the gap between when a violent situation begins and when law enforcement arrives on scene.”
“I operate on preparing people for about a five- to eight-minute event,” said Greg Crane, founder of ALICE Training Institute, in a phone interview. “These events are rare, but, unfortunately, they are real… They are in the news constantly, and people are just more and more asking themselves, ‘Gosh, what do I do?’… There needs to be some very basic knowledge and understanding of what these events really are— not the fallacies, not the hype— but what is one person with a firearm capable of? What are the people who don’t have firearms capable of?”
The church, located at 5950 E. Willow St., has been seeking to prepare itself for “all kinds of situations” for a while, said Jennifer Garcia-Von Ranzor, church administrator for Los Altos United. She said the congregation’s insurance company, Philadelphia Insurance, recently hosted an informational seminar on the ALICE Institute, so it “seemed like the next logical step in preparing our campus for events like this.”
“It’s a little bit unnerving having to prepare for these kinds of events, but I am excited to take the training because it’s informative,” Garcia-Von Ranzor said in a phone interview. “The sentiments are sort of the same— people are excited it’s happening, and they are grateful the church is able to put it on and offer it to anyone who is able to attend, but it’s also too bad that we even have to think about this sort of training.”
People may register online at a cost of $595 per person on alicetraining.com. All are welcome to register and attend the training at Los Altos United Methodist Church.
An estimated 50 instructors with ALICE— or Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate— conduct roughly 10 to 20 classes a week around the country, according to Crane. The institution was founded 16 years ago for a K-12 school in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas. Now, thousands of people a year learn from ALICE.
The program has been implemented in more than 3,000 police departments around the country, Crane added.
ALICE will present the two-day, instructor-level course at Los Altos United Methodist Church by teaching: concepts and strategies in the event of a high-emergency situation; theory-based instruction on a web-based program the institution developed; and hands-on demonstrations, practical scenarios and evaluation drills that assess an individual’s grasp of all the knowledge provided.
Crane said there are four basic strategies for active-shooter events— noise, movement, distance and distractions. He said the idea was to create a more “chaotic environment” for the shooter so operating his firearm becomes more difficult.
“We can’t let these lunatics operate in a very quiet, pristine environment like we are seeing in so many of these events,” he said. “You’ve got to create a dynamic, chaotic environment for the person that is operating that firearm. People think that if a person doesn’t have a gun, then the person without the gun is going to lose. That’s just not the case.”
Crane criticized the typical lockdown protocol for conditioning people to become “passive and static” while waiting for police to arrive.
“If you have a determined attacker in your midst, and all you know how to do is go to a corner or hide under a table, as we’ve seen in way too many of these events, then what are you doing that makes his objective to hurt you with that firearm more difficult?” Crane said. “That is the goal. You have to engage in activity that does not make you an easy target… it’s just too easy for these lunatics.”
That’s why active shooters, who are mostly not experienced marksman or snipers, hit so many of their targets, Garcia-Von Ranzor said, as she learned during an informal meeting with ALICE officials.
“One of the first things they asked is, if there was an active shooter on the campus, what would your first response be?” she said. “Well, barricade yourself, I thought. That’s what I’ve been taught since I was a little girl. And they were like, ‘No, because all that does is make you a sitting duck.’… That’s the important part of the training— it’s learning to not go with that reaction, because that’s what we’ve been taught since we were little.”
She admitted that although it’s resourceful for the church to engage in survival exercises with ALICE instructors later this month, it doesn’t help ease the tension that mass shootings have now become an everyday-type of occurrence.
“I think it’s a survival mechanism. It’s a tool on how to survive,” she said about ALICE. “But coming to grips with everything, I don’t think that you can. I just think you kind of have to hope and pray that it gets better and this stops happening, so we don’t have to have this type of training.”
Crane took inspiration in forming ALICE from his days as a SWAT officer. He always took pride in being someone who was “going to do anything he could to get there on time and make a difference.”
“But Columbine showed me it doesn’t matter how good we are,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how well trained we are. If we can’t get there and get in there quick enough to make a significant impact on the outcome, it doesn’t matter how hard we’ve trained. We don’t get to play. The people who need the skills are the people who are going to be facing this danger. And that’s going to be the people who are going to be inside of that building— not the people coming into the building.”
It all comes down to options, Crane said. He said the program “doesn’t tell you what to do; we tell you what you can do.” Individuals in the midst of a perilous situation need to weigh the best decision based on the circumstances, and that’s not going to be the same for everybody, he added.
ALICE works with organizations to understand what kind of processes are in place to ensure that people are aware of the situation and are as well informed as they can be inside of a building with an active shooter.
“If I’ve got a shooter on the third floor of my building, and I’m on the first floor, my options are different compared to the people on the third floor,” Crane said. “It’s one thing about the lockdown protocol— we have people in the building doing the same thing. Why? They are not all in the same level of danger… There are so many variables that come into play in every situation. You can’t have a “one size fits all” plan because that’s not the way these things occur. You’ve got to be flexible and make determinations on your safety as you understand the level of danger that you are in and understand how the attack is going on.”
ALICE’s recommendations come from personal experiences, he added.
There have been a total of eight incidents involving weapons in which people with ALICE training were present, Crane said. In these events, there were no fatalities, one scenario involved a BB gun rather than a real weapon, and another situation included the stabbing of an ALICE participant, but the perpetrator was stopped during the stabbing before the person was further harmed.
Crane argued that people in any emergency situation involving a shooter or assailant should attempt to stop the situation as quickly as possible, and it doesn’t have to be a person with a gun.
He brought up the example of 17-year-old Jacob Ryker.
In 1998, Kipland Kinkel, 15, shot and injured 23 students and killed two others at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon.
Ryker, unarmed, and who had been shot in the lung during the incident, took the opportunity to run about 15 feet toward Kinkel in the school cafeteria and wrestle him down when he was reloading.
Many news outlets heralded him a “hero.”
“This BS I’ve heard for years that, ‘It takes a good guy with a gun to beat a bad guy with gun.’ That’s a bunch of BS,” Crane said. “When he shot Jake, he shot the wrong guy that day.”
Crane said that ALICE is not about educating folks about new survival skills; it’s about harnessing the tools that people already possess and using them in an “out of the box” way.
It’s about taking control of a dire situation, he added.
“It’s all about people being empowered and authorized and having a little bit of knowledge in seeing what our options are,” he said. “Understanding that the collective always have advantages over the few… We don’t teach fighting. We don’t teach defensive tactics. We teach the use of everyday skills that every able-bodied American possesses… The good guys always vastly outnumber the bad guys. We haven’t taught people what that means, and that’s important.”
More Information
alicetraining.com
losaltosumc.org
(562) 598-2451
