Ep 126: Time to Call Your Emergency Manager

Your active shooter plan needs an Emergency Manager. After 2,700 active shooter exercises across the country, we keep seeing the same pattern: one agency tries to improve its active shooter response, but without emergency management leading a shared plan, training stays siloed, and different approaches collide at the same incident. In this episode of the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast, Bill Godfrey talks with instructors Kevin Nichols and Kelly Boaz about why your active shooter plan needs an emergency manager out front. They discuss: What happens when a single police or fire department tries to “do this on their own” without involving neighbors Why emergency management is the natural place to lead a community‑ or region‑wide plan across law enforcement, fire, EMS, and dispatch How existing EM relationships, plans, and “Rolodexes” help get chiefs and executives on the same page A practical path: get everyone in the same room, acknowledge the shared community problem, align expectations, then move into tabletops and exercises together Real examples where emergency management helped adopt a common active shooter checklist and train nearly all responders in a county or state How a line officer, firefighter, medic, or supervisor can approach their emergency manager and start this conversation without “jumping the chain of command” The bottom line: hope is not a plan. In almost every real event, “everybody is coming to this thing,” so somebody has to own one coordinated plan for everybody. That somebody is your emergency manager. Get the one‑page conversation guide mentioned in this episode to use with your emergency manager: https://ncier.org/research View this episode on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/EnG5QLvhjn8 #ActiveShooterResponse #EmergencyManagement #PublicSafety #Podcast Like what you hear? Drop a review and subscribe to our Podcast Channel. If you have questions, you can send them to [email protected] with “Podcast Question” in the subject line. Check out our websites and learn more about C3 Pathways / NCIER by going to: https://www.c3pathways.com or https://www.ncier.orgThe Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast is owned by C3 Pathways and NCIER. None of the content presented may be copied, repurposed, or used without the owner’s prior consent.