In the Eye of the Storm Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts recalls the chaos and courage he witnessed when an active shooter opened fire in a crowded shopping mall 14 days before Christmas. At 3:30 in the afternoon on December 11, 2012, I thought the most difficult part of my day was behind me. We were just wrapping up an emotional meeting with a woman whose husband had been brutally murdered earlier that year. We had solved the case and arrested the suspect, and she wanted to thank everyone who had worked so hard to get us to that point. As we were talking, I noticed that a detective sitting at the table was looking down at his pager. There were several more pages, then cell phones started ringing. Somebody said, “We’ve got an active shooter at the mall!” While I rushed to link up with the incident commander, our response was already well underway. Along with officers from 11 other jurisdictions, my deputies were pouring into a 1.4 million square-foot mall that includes more than two miles of corridors. Their mission was to confront a man armed with a rifle who had already shot three people — killing two of them. While they continued their search, I was standing in a mobile command post, listening to radio traffic and coordinating our response with other agencies. At a moment like that, when there is nothing you can do to directly affect the outcome of an event that will be remembered long after you retire, you’re grateful for every good choice you ever made as a law enforcement executive: every time you signed off on additional training for your front-line folks, in spite of a tight budget. Beyond that, you’re grateful — so very grateful — for the people who show up and do the job every single day, ready to put their lives on the line to protect the community. We have been praised for our swift and professional response to this incident, but embedded within that are a thousand stories of personal courage that no one will ever know. For example, it’s been widely reported that our first unit arrived on scene 72 seconds after the call was dispatched. What only a few people know is that the first unit was a motor patrol deputy, so he didn’t have a long gun available. Armed only with his pistol, he ran into the mall to confront the suspect, who was reportedly equipped with an assault rifle and a bulletproof vest. Another deputy encountered a citizen who told him he had seen the gunman seconds before in a utility corridor. Along with his fellow officers, he prepared to make entry through a set of double doors. Afterwards, he told me, “I knew that the moment we opened those doors I was going to be shot.” He went anyway. A terrible tragedy Of course, along with the enormous pride I felt at the job our folks were doing, I recognized that I was witnessing a terrible tragedy that would affect many people for the rest of their lives. The families of the two victims who died that day were ripped apart by this event. I never had the opportunity to know either of them — but I wish that I had. Cindy Yuille, 54, was a nurse with Kaiser Permanente, who co-workers described as a fierce advocate for the patients under her care. She enjoyed the outdoors, especially hiking and cross country skiing. Cindy left behind a husband and two children. Steven Forsyth, 45, was an entrepreneur who owned his own marketing business and graduated from a local high school. Friends remembered him as a gregarious man with a magnetic personality. He was survived by his wife and two children. Like me, he coached youth sports. There was another victim, as well: Kristina Shevchenko, a 15-yearold student, was shot while fleeing from the gunman when he opened fire in the food court. Only after escaping from the mall with a friend did she even realize that she had been wounded. One reason that this tragedy was not much worse was because of the heroic actions of many mall employees, who put their own lives at risk to protect shoppers — shepherding them to safety in the back of their stores and locking the metal gates used to secure them after hours. In several instances, employees actually left the safety of their stores to grab a shocked customer standing frozen out in the open and pull them back to safety. Along with the effective emergency response plan that the mall had in place, the good sense and heroism of these ordinary citizens made a real difference. Remarkable courage was also shown by people just going about their lives that day, some of them off-duty medical professionals, who tried to aid the victims. With no way to know where the gunman had gone or if he might return, they stayed in the open to perform CPR on Cindy Yuille after determining that Steven Forsyth was beyond help. We have identified several of them, but there are others we can see on the mall's closed-circuit television system who have never come forward. I hope that they will, so that I can thank them personally for their bravery. Learning Lessons, lessons learned One of the reasons that we were able to respond so effectively to this incident is that, along with law enforcement agencies around the country, we have learned the lessons of past mass shootings. The Columbine High School massacre in Jefferson County, Colorado, was crucial in the development of what we refer to today as the “active shooter protocol.” Prior to that incident, on April 20, 1999, the standard law enforcement response to a gunman inside a public building was to establish a perimeter and wait for specialized tactical units to arrive. At Columbine, that meant 47 minutes elapsed between the time that the shooting started and the first SWAT team entered the structure. By then, the perpetrators had killed 13 people and wounded 21 more. Following that terrible tragedy, it became clear that we had to develop an entirely new approach to this type of critical incident. Now, the first officers who arrive on scene form up into small teams called “hunter cells” and immediately seek out and engage the attacker. This approach marked a huge shift in law enforcement thinking, and it means that police officers everywhere must be prepared to immediately put their own lives at risk to protect the lives of the citizens that they serve.