Ep 50: Implementing the ASIM Process

Sheriff Michelle Cook and Police Chief Terry Nichols share their experiences implementing the Active Shooter Incident Management Checklist process and their tips for success. Don't miss this discussion!

Bill Godfrey:

Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. It's good to be back with you today. My name is Bill Godfrey. I'm your podcast host, and I have with me today two former C3 instructors as our guest stars today, both of them law enforcement leaders, and hoping that one day when they do retire-retire, we might actually get them back as C3 instructors; hint hint, Chief Nichols, who just retired in the last few weeks. So I have with me Michelle Cook. She is currently serving as the Sheriff in Clay County. She also did ... Michelle was almost 30 years at Jacksonville?

Michelle Cook:

26 years at Jacksonville, yeah.

Bill Godfrey:

Yeah, so 26 years at Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Police Department as the operations chief, so she had an awful lot of responsibility there. Did a short stint as the Police Chief at Atlantic Beach, which was kind of a retirement job, but too easy for you. You needed something with more, and so now she's the elected Sheriff at Clay County, which is in north Florida. And we have with us Terry Nichols. Terry was the Assistant Director at Alert from the founding to, what was it? 2018, 20-

Terry Nichols:

2016, 2016.

Bill Godfrey:

2016. Left Alert, became the Police Chief in Brownwood, Texas, and then you did, what, a little over three years there?

Terry Nichols:

Three years there, and then moved to Seguin as chief, and spent three years there, and now I'm retired

Bill Godfrey:

Like a week and a half ago, two weeks ago? It's been pretty recent.

Terry Nichols:

It's been a month, it's been a month.

Bill Godfrey:

So it's exciting to have both of you here. I really appreciate you taking the time. I know the sheriff especially, you have a very busy schedule. But I wanted to have a podcast where we talk about implementing the Active Shooter Incident Management checklist and the process that goes with it. Because it sounds simple on the surface, and when you've gone through training, it's fairly straightforward, but trying to roll that out to a whole organization is a little bit of a logistics machine.

And the two of you have each done this, not only in your organizations, but you've done it more than once. So sheriff, you did it at Jacksonville, then did it at Atlantic Beach, now at Clay County, and Terry, you did it at both Brownwood and Seguin. So what I wanted to just get from you guys is, what was it about this process that made you say, "This is the way I want to go," and what were your lessons learned? How did you approach it and go along the way? So sheriff, you want to start us off?

Michelle Cook:

Sure. First of all, thank you for having me today to talk about this. I'm very passionate about this. You've asked why ASIM, why choose this method of managing an active shooter event, and I will tell you, I'm entering into my 30th year of law enforcement, and I've worked some huge cases, some huge incidents, thousands of them, and for me, being a street cop for so long and then the leader of street cops, the ASIM process, the ASIM methodology, it just makes sense.

In our industry, and Terry, correct me if you see differently, we teach young officers, young supervisors, to handle everything themselves. And on 99% of the calls that we handle, that can be done, but on a mass critical incident, like an active shooter event, relying on one person to handle everything is just unrealistic, and that's how things get missed, and unfortunately, that's how people die, is you got one person trying to handle everything.

Terry Nichols:

Yeah. For me, everything the sheriff said makes perfect sense, and she is spot on. Having been involved with Alert and standing it up from the get go, driving it post-Columbine, and how we were training cops, and then fast-forward several years and get introduced to the ASIM model, and realizing we had been missing the boat early on. When we started first training our officers, we were missing the management piece of this. We were doing good at going in and realizing that we have a different duty. There's no longer sit and wait for SWAT, that we had a different mission on these active shooter events.

But there's a whole management piece of this, and like the sheriff alluded to, that we're real good at teaching cops to go handle a problem by themselves, and they do it 9 times out of 10, but these events are catastrophic. They are geographical in nature. It doesn't just hap...