Ep 48: Interview with TEEX's Jesse Watkins

10/11/21 • 39 min

C3 Podcast: Active Shooter Incident Management

Episode 48: Interview with TEEX's Jesse Watkins

On this week's podcast we have our sponsor of the Active Shooter Incident Management Advanced and Intermediate courses, TEEX's Jesse Watkins. In this episode we talk about the courses and training available to the first responder community.

Bill Godfrey:

Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. We have a special guest with us today. Today, we have Jesse Watkins, the director of operations for NERRTC. That's the National Emergency Response and Recovery Training Center over at TEEX out in Texas. Jesse, thanks for joining us today.

Jesse Watkins:

Oh, it's my pleasure Bill. Thank you for having me.

Bill Godfrey:

So obviously NERRTC and TEEX are the sponsors of the Active Shooter Incident Management advanced and intermediate courses that we developed that is DHS funded. And people who've heard me tell this story before, it's a little convoluted, the money flow, but it DHS to NERRTC to or, DHS to TEEX NERRTC, then over to ALERRT and then over to us to go out and do the classes. But Jesse, it's actually a little more complicated than that, isn't it? Tell everybody a little bit about how the structure works and how the pieces fit together.

Jesse Watkins:

It is a little bit more complicated than that. For those of you that don't know a whole lot about who TEEX is or who NERRTC is, TEEX is an agency within the state of Texas or for the state of Texas, and it's within the Texas A and M University System, which is comprised of 11 universities and now eight state agencies. And our primary mission is an extension. And within that extension, training, and in some cases, exercise. Back in 1998, as a result of the Oklahoma City bombing, we solicited Congress as a part of an organization called the NDPC, National Domestic Preparedness Consortium, for funding to go out and do online security training around the country. At the time that funding came on to DOJ and then after 9-11, it moved under Homeland Security with FEMA being the oversight organization, it was the checks and balances for what we do and how we spend the money that being said, NERRTC proper, National Emergency Response Recovery Training center, has 73 courses that we've developed under our funding to go out and train first responders, elected officials, a whole host of organizations.

But you know, our primary mission is incident management, cyber security, critical infrastructure, and several other areas. I won't go into all of them, but a lot of resources, put it that way, that we pour towards going out and doing training at no cost to participants or to the jurisdictions that's requesting it. As a result of that, a few years back, we started looking at the active shooter situation that was going on in the country. Obviously, Bill, you and I had conversations at the time. Steve, in a different capacity, and I had conversations at the time and agreed that we would like to be able to fund doing some active shooter training around the country. And you obviously had the course resources in terms of going out with the materials, going and doing the deliveries. We had some funding that we could put behind that, but it's under our DHS funding.

And what was born out of that is this relationship where we have now in which we subcontract to ALERRT and then ALERRT in turns, subcontracts to you. That being said, the relationship works. It is a little cumbersome. You know, when you stop thinking about how many different organizations it's taken to get this done, but we have figured out a way to make that effective and efficient over the years. And I'm happy about the relationship. That being said, the mission is the thing that's the most important piece to me. Going out and observing you all do this training obviously brings me a lot of satisfaction and that satisfaction is in knowing that we are training that first response community to be better and to react and respond better to active shooter situations and also to extrapolate out of that, using what they use in the classroom during this training and other scenarios as well.

I think it makes them more effective as a operational unit by the time they're done with it. So, I love that aspect of it. That's, that's really the driver for me. But when you stop and think about NERRTC or I can explain a little bit about NERRTC, most of the training that we do, we do in-house meaning we have SMEs and full-time staff that are devoted to doing nothing but delivery of those courses that I mentioned before.

So this relationship that we have with alert and with you is, it's not unique because we do have one other subcontractor that we work with that has a similar relationship, but it is out of the ordinary for what we typically do. We have roughly 80 full-time staff an...

Episode 48: Interview with TEEX's Jesse Watkins

On this week's podcast we have our sponsor of the Active Shooter Incident Management Advanced and Intermediate courses, TEEX's Jesse Watkins. In this episode we talk about the courses and training available to the first responder community.

Bill Godfrey:

Jesse Watkins:

Oh, it's my pleasure Bill. Thank you for having me.

Bill Godfrey:

Jesse Watkins:

Previous Episode

Interview with ALERRT's John Curnutt

Episode 47: Interview with ALERRT's John Curnutt

This week we are interviewing John Curnutt from ALERRT. We discuss how ALERRT started, it's mission, and how it works together in the active shooter picture.

Bill Godfrey:

Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. Today I've got with us a special guest. We've got John Curnutt, assistant director of the ALERRT Center over in San Marcos, Texas, and our sponsor for the ASIM class along with TEEX. John, it's good to have you here.

John Curnutt:

Oh man, it is great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Bill Godfrey:

So John, thanks for joining us today. Why don't we start off ... I'd be actually surprised if any of our audience didn't really know who ALERRT was or how you guys fit into the active shooter picture but talk a little bit about ALERRT and the mission and how everything fits together.

John Curnutt:

It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. It's interesting, our starts are very humble. Back in 2000, 2001, it was very localized. We were looking at our response after Columbine and trying to see how would we do something different in our training, the equipment, the policies, everything that needed to change for the new normal or the new emerging trends as we saw them.

So long story short, we started applying for grants because we were ... Small to medium-sized agencies, we didn't have the big budgets, and we could not afford to get the training and the equipment to train with that we knew that we needed to have the best bang for the buck. So as we applied for grants, everything just kind of turned into a here's a program, you have a program, we'll help fund this, but you have to take this program out. So if it was a state grant, we were going across the state now. If it was a federal grant, we were going across the country.

Right after we started kind of working on this, 9/11 happened. We're coming up on the 20 year anniversary of that. So that kind of kicked things into a whole nother gear. They started looking for anti-terrorism programs that were up and ready to go. They could just be retooled just a little bit to kind of fit this new national threat that we were facing, and so all this kind of contributed to what we put in our course and the ferocity and the passion behind teaching the course.

So years later, we are a research-based organization out of Texas State University. We look at everything, we analyze everything. The events, the cause and effect of how the response went, any deficiencies, and we try to fill those gaps with meaningful curriculum. So what do we teach, how do we teach, what do we spend more time on, all that stuff. So we've developed civilian response training as a result of that. We've developed medical training for police, we've developed tactical training for the medical people, all this stuff over the years. The incident management piece has obviously been huge. We've studied all these events and the communication, command and control, the C3 if you will, has always been lacking, and a lot of it, it's a law enforcement issue.

So we're always looking for where are the gaps and how to best fill those gaps, and the connectivity with our other sister services in the first response community, the civilian response component, the emergency management aspect, we're trying to bring all the stakeholders together as best we can with the grants that we're given. Our goal basically to sum it up is to have the best research-based active attack training in the country. So in doing that, we solicit, we look for, we seek out events and great training programs and people with a lot of experiences and friends of ours that have been through a lot of stuff, not just here in the United States but overseas, and we try to extrapolate from that what would translate well into a patrol reality, into an EMS paramedic reality, into a firefighter reality as you make the scene first on one of these incidents. So that's kind of who we are in a nutshell and what we do and who we do it for and what we're all about.

Bill Godfrey:

John, I think that's a fantastic explanation of what ALERRT does and the mission, and you're the assistant director there, right? What does your day to day job look like? What is the kind of stuff you end up spending your time on?

John Curnutt:

Yes sir. So I started as one of the lead instructors back in the day and then moved up to director of training and then into the assistant director position. My day to day now, I have IT training, logistics. I coordinate very heavily with research so that everything is all pulling and pointing in the same direction and everything complements each other smoothly across the board. So the grants that we get, they offset ...

Next Episode

Ep 49: ASIM Checklist Endorsed as National Standard by NTOA

SPECIAL EPISODE - We have exciting news on this week's podcast! Our guest is Thor Eells, Executive Director of the National Tactical Officers Association (NTOA). Today, Thor shares the news NTOA is endorsing the C3 Pathways Active Shooter Incident Management Checklist as the national standard of incident management of active shooter events. We discuss the importance of setting national standards for first responder training. Thor also tells us what NTOA is working on, including a neuroplasticity program to help first responders make decisions faster and more accurately while under stress.

Bill Godfrey:

Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey. I'm your podcast host. It has been a minute since the last podcast we've done. I'm excited to be back, but I'm even more excited that we're back with a very special guest today. I would like to introduce you to Thor Eells, the executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, known to our law enforcement audience as the NTOA. Thor, welcome.

Thor Eells:

Thank you very much.

Bill Godfrey:

Hey, before we get going on this, because we probably have some audience members that aren't familiar with NTOA because we have more than just law enforcement. Can you tell us a little bit about the NTOA and its mission and where you guys are going?

Thor Eells:

Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunity to do so. The NTOA is a nonprofit organization we originally created in 1983 by a then-lieutenant with the LA County Sheriff's Department, who was hoping to establish an association for networking information sharing among tactical teams in the United States while they were in their relative infancy and ensuring that through this shared information and knowledge, that it would professionalize this pledging self-discipline within law enforcement.

Over these past decades, this association grown now to roughly 40,000 members with specialties that now include patrol, tactical EMS, crisis negotiations, and corrections. We even now also have membership from fire and EMS as a result of the whole development of rescue task forces and the need, with these new emerging threats, for all of these disciplines to be able to work and collaborate together in critical incidents for successful outcomes. We teach roughly 200 classes a year. We have taught all over the world, and we have membership from five continents. So it has grown exponentially since the founder, John Coleman, first created the association.

Bill Godfrey:

Wow. That's fascinating. I didn't realize that you guys had formed back in 1983. That is pretty amazing. I'm so excited to hear you talk about the fire/EMS membership and the pursuit of rescue task force. Obviously we're going to talk about that a little bit today, but we've got a big announcement to offer today. You want to go ahead and break the news to the audience?

Thor Eells:

Well, happy to. We are extremely excited to be able to enter into this collaborative agreement with C3 Pathways and the endorsement and the creation of a lot of information sharing between our two entities, but particularly as it pertains to the active assailant/active shooter checklist. I think that this is really a very important and potentially impactful partnership in helping those first responders that are tasked with a very, very difficult job in making good decisions in a time-compressed and stressful environment. So I think this is just the beginning of many good things to come between our two companies and associations.

Bill Godfrey:

I think it's wonderful. I'm so very excited to have you guys recognize the checklist and endorse it as a national standard. I'm just blown away and so humbled by that, along with the rest of the C3 team and the instructors that have been doing training for years. It's an interesting phenomenon. We've been using the checklist and training for over 10 years now and have some 3,000 different agencies from law enforcement, fire, EMS, emergency management across the country that are using it.

But this is the first time that we've actually had a national standard-setting bodies such as yourself. For those not on the law enforcement side, NTOA is essentially to law enforcement, what the NFPA, the National Fire Protection Association is to the fire department in being able to set the standards and set national standards. We are just so honored to have you guys recognize that and endorse it.

I think it's a really big deal. I've obviously been gone from active duty for a little bit now, but it always made me more comfortable as a responder when I knew that the process or the procedure that I was following was a national standard. I...