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Active shooter incidents have risen considerably in recent years, elevating public and law enforcement focus on improving response to these incidents. The contemporary policy for reacting to an active shooter event is for the officers who first arrive on the scene to move quickly to engage and neutralize a shooter, prioritizing victim safety and minimizing loss of life. This study provides a preliminary understanding of the police view regarding their role in active shooter events and their experiences with active shooter training.

We conducted a survey of 413 sworn personnel across three US cities. Analyses examine differences in officers’ training experiences across the agencies and predictors of a sense of duty to prioritize victims’ lives over that of officers.

Officers’ training experiences differed by agency, yet most officers supported a duty to sacrifice their lives to prioritize victims’ safety during active shooter incidents. Officers with more years of experience have lower odds of supporting a duty to sacrifice their lives to save victims during an active shooter situation relative to less experienced officers. Respondents who recall officer safety among the top three most memorable topics from their recent active shooter training also have lower odds of supporting a duty to sacrifice.

The authors add knowledge about police officers’ experiences with active shooter training and officers’ opinions about their role in responding to active shooter incidents. We discuss implications of the findings relative to police culture and training and suggest directions for future research.

Groups of students were enrolled in a course that sought to produce a three-phase theoretical model over three semesters.

A design project to comprehensively address school violence was launched at a university in eastern Pennsylvania.

This article updates the recent and most critical finding of the project by illuminating specific implications of the importance of teacher training and the development toward competence in recognition of children who are emotionally and psychologically injured through proactive measures such as screening for emotional and psychological well-being.

Although the model has not been tested, screening to identify those in need of emotional support and training to support teachers is clear. Screening and training offer important opportunities to help learners build skills toward resilience to soften the effects of trauma.

A view of the “whole child” with regard to academic success could further foster social and emotional development.

Early intervention can prevent the onset of symptoms associated with posttraumatic stress and related disorders. This effort alone may significantly reduce the uncomfortable incidences and perhaps ultimate prevention of the violence that is perpetuated among children.

Preliminary research supports a continued conversation regarding effective tools to find children emotionally and psychologically at-risk, which allows teachers an opportunity for timely emotional and psychological interventions.

We describe a holistic approach to promoting school safety that merges an emphasis on student voice with staff training in restorative practices. We first describe current approaches to keeping schools safe based on the existing research literature. Given that most of these approaches rely on access to credible information about potential threats to school safety, we then discuss student voices as one critical source of information, especially at the middle and high school level. We report on a recently developed tool designed to encourage students to share threats to school safety they are aware of with adults. Initial testing identified potential barriers and facilitators to students' willingness to share information. We discuss teacher training in restorative practices as one approach that might address some of these barriers, including anti-snitching cultures in schools, students' lack of trust in adult responses to student-identified concerns, and punitive school climates. Based on recent work, we identify barriers and facilitators to implementing restorative practices in schools. We provide recommendations about potential strategies to merge student voice with school personnel's training in restorative practices to minimize peer victimization that can escalate into violent behavior.

There has been a long-running debate as to which is more important in the job market, education or experience. Traditionally, people have looked at these as exclusive traits of one another; however, more progressive thought sees these as complimentary attributes in perspective and existing employees that can be achieved at the same time through proactive activities such as micro-credentialing. This chapter will explore how formal and informal micro-credentialing processes can be put forward in both education and training environments.

The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, 2022) shows an increase in severity and frequency of natural disasters in the past years with more organisations being faced with surviving these events than ever before. The recent COVID pandemic has shown how every organisation across the globe can be affected by a disaster and the cascading effects that follow. Techniques such as micro-credentialing is a tool that can be utilised by all organisations to ensure a safer outcome from these events as well as being positioned for better continuity of critical operations through the event helping to increase the survivability and profitability of the affected organisation.

The use of micro-credentialing components successfully could be discussed using any field or discipline. To be applicable to all readers, this chapter primarily focusses on the emergency services/management discipline as an example programme of how micro-credentialing can be efficiently utilised to produce a more successful workforce. Emergency management (EM) truly is an interdisciplinary field that utilises many other fields to protect people, organisations, and communities from emergencies and disasters. More importantly, though, there are components of EM that every field should embrace for safety as well as to ensure continuity of operations through any event, thereby making the components in this chapter applicable to all readers regardless of discipline or organisation.

Early career teachers (ECTs) of Color are key in making change, resisting racism and pushing back against white supremacy in K-12 education, specifically in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms. Through a narrative telling inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) of Nora, an Asian American ELA ECT in the Midwest, and by drawing on Fisher’s (2011) Critical Integral Pedagogy of Fearlessness, this study aims to recognize the narrative power within teaching praxis as Nora stories herself toward becoming a critical pedagogue.

Using narrative inquiry methodology and methods (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000), the authors simultaneously considered the commonplace tenets of narrative inquiry – temporality, sociality and place – of the intertwined relationships of the participants and observers. The field texts included in the corpus of data include myriad tellings of Nora’s experiences in her initial years of teaching ELA. Data were analyzed in stages of parsing out narrative blocks and structures.

The findings indicate that Nora, as an ECT, went through recursive cycles of fear as conceptualized by Fisher (2011) – bravery, courageousness and being fear-less – of working toward radical love (Hooks, 2000) within her ELA instruction. The authors argue that Nora confronted her personal and professional fears as she strove to become a critical pedagogue in her ELA classroom.

Current scholarship portrays ECTs as lacking agency in their development and/or effectiveness in the classroom and little is said about Asian American ELA ECTs and critical instruction. The authors present Nora’s counter-narrative to make visible what is right with ELA ECTs, specifically teachers of Color, as they transform their fear into courage to fight for educational equity.

In response to a critical need for uniform school crisis preparedness and response efforts across districts, the National Association of School Psychologists developed PREPaRE, a model and training curriculum aimed to equip school-based professionals to engage in comprehensive school crisis prevention and intervention practices. The PREPaRE acronym stands for: Prevent/Prepare for psychological trauma; Reaffirm physical health, security, and safety; Evaluate psychological trauma; Provide interventions (and) Respond to psychological needs; and Examine the effectiveness of prevention and intervention efforts. The model spans four crisis preparedness phases: Prevention, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery. This chapter provides a detailed overview of the development and structure of the PREPaRE model's core components and the organizational framework of the Incident Command System. It delineates elements of the basic school crisis response plan, assessment of mental health risk following a crisis event, and the provision of crisis interventions within a multitiered system of support framework. Additionally, it summarizes ongoing effectiveness and implementation research used to evaluate and improve the model based on immediate training outcomes assessed through pre and postmeasures and training transfer to applied school contexts. Implications for research and public policy regarding school safety and crisis prevention and intervention, as well as the future of PREPaRE curriculum development, are discussed.

School violence can cause or exacerbate individual and collective trauma. Trauma-informed school approaches offer schools and educators guidance for how to respond. In this chapter, we provide an overview of trauma-informed school approaches and their contributions to healing individual and collective trauma. We begin this chapter by addressing the complex intersection of disability and trauma, and the unique implications of school-based violence for students with disabilities and their teachers. We then define trauma-informed care, describe current short- and long-term trauma-informed school approaches, and explain the aims of these approaches at individual and collective levels. Next, we locate trauma-informed responses to school violence in a context of systemic trauma and share considerations for disrupting the systemic conditions that perpetuate trauma and school violence. We discuss critiques of the trauma-informed care movement and conclude with recommendations for scholars pursuing research in this area.

The Astroworld concert tragedy is used as an example of crisis (mis)management and the potential utility of the 4R model. Although the 4R model has been implemented in high-risk emergency management situations, it is useful in the PR field because of its actionable approach, creating a way for practitioners to prepare for and manage crisis situations.

This is an analysis of the crisis that occurred at Astroworld, spanning preparation, day-of events, casualties and enduring reputational impact. The paper applies the 4R method to the Astroworld tragedy to show how it could have lessened or even prevented the tragedy. Finally, the SCCT model is used to explain why the official post-crisis statements were ineffective.

Social media has heightened the importance of a quick and effective organizational response to risk and crisis situations because poor responses can go viral quickly. However, social media also provides intelligence and crowd sourced information that can inform PR practitioners of emerging crisis scenarios. It is also an underutilized tool for two-way communication during crises.

The 4R approach is beneficial to general practitioners as it simplifies crisis best-practices, something essential for quick action. As our world changes and becomes less predictable, practitioners must have a clear plan to protect their organizations and the public surrounding them. This approach includes reduction, readiness, response and recovery, which are all essential in crisis communication.

The 4R method has not been explored or applied in the PR field. This paper highlights how the model has been utilized in the emergency management field and illustrates the way 4R can serve the PR field.

The purpose of this study is to compare violent and non-violent extremists in terms of their age when they first perpetrate an extremist act, and to understand how this relates to other factors underlying extremist behaviours. While the end goal of many extremists may be functionally similar, the pathways into extremism vary, and the literature has demonstrated that a “one-size-fits-all” explanation does not exist. Motivational drivers are complex and dynamic; therefore, attempting to identify a terrorist “profile” has limited applied efficacy.

This study applied a temporal approach (“crime script analysis” or CSA) to identify, map and compare the sequential stages (or “scenes”) in the life histories of violent and non-violent extremists who have committed acts of extremism across different age groups. Crime scripts comprising mainly qualitative data for 40 male extremists (20 violent, 20 non-violent “cases”) were developed, and CSA was conducted according to the age at which they committed their first extremist offence.

Results demonstrated key temporal, developmental differences between the pathways of extremists who commit their first offence at different ages. One key difference was that for both the violent and non-violent extremists, those under 30 used the internet as a main means of joining networks and spreading information, whereas the over 30s made more personal, community links.

This research can aid identification of potential environmental triggers and potential increased susceptibility to triggers across certain age groups.

This chapter examines the concepts of race and racism, critically reviewing their historical and contemporary applications in everyday life as well as in academic and policy debates. Racism has been extensively researched, with various theories and conceptualisations developed across social science. However, there is a great deal of disagreement regarding its nature, contemporary significance and empirical validation. This chapter examines these and attempts to synthesise some of the common definitions of racism provided in the literature. It explores related concepts and underlying themes pertaining to expressions of race and racism. Furthermore, it unpacks current knowledge about racial issues and discusses recent advances in the conceptual understanding of various forms of racism. It also elucidates the social, political and analytical applications of racism as a concept and the significance of racism in contemporary societies. The chapter concludes by highlighting how racism is a dynamic phenomenon, continuously evolving with the social, political and technological transformations in contemporary societies.