Halting the Horror

When a teenager walked into an Omaha mall and began shooting last December, some shoppers and employees hid in clothes racks, dressing rooms and bathrooms.

Short of evacuation, these actions — known as “sheltering” — are the only immediate defense available in such open environments, security experts say.

The Omaha incident was the second mass shooting at a mall within this past year. In February 2007, nine people were shot, five of them fatally, at Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City. The gunman in that incident, 18-year-old Sulejman Talovic, was shot and killed by police; the Omaha gunman, Robert Hawkins, took his own life.

King Rogers, president of Minnesota-based KingRogers International and a former vice president of assets protection for Target, says that once shooting starts in an open environment, the only thing unarmed shoppers and employees can do is “hunker down to protect their own personal safety until the police arrive.”

In the Omaha incident, security guards using video monitors “started tracking this guy because as he came into the center, he went right out and then came back in,” says Malachy Kavanagh, a spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers. Kavanagh, who has seen videos of the incident, says security officers trained their cameras on the suspect and dispatched guards to intercept him, but “unfortunately, they didn’t get there in time.”

In January, members of the National Retail Federation’s Loss Prevention Advisory Council met with Kavanagh and other representatives for mall owners to try to pinpoint additional security processes that retail and mall operators could adopt to combat the threat of violence.

“Whenever random violence happens, you have a very fluid situation,” he says. “The questions in a mall, when something is happening within a common area, are: where is it happening, and what is happening?” The answers to those questions, he says, “will determine whether you shelter in place or you evacuate. Or it may be both. You may find it best to shelter in place where you can and evacuate parts of the area where you can.”

Because the Omaha shooter was in one of the mall’s department stores, “they could evacuate the rest of the mall, but for the people in the department store, it was best to shelter in place,” Kavanagh says.

Pinpoint collective measures
That incident happened very quickly. “The police reports indicate that it probably took four minutes for him to shoot those people and then himself because they were all congregated in one area by customer service,” Kavanagh says.

ICSC, NRF and other trade associations are encouraging collaboration among their members and law enforcement agencies to pinpoint collective measures that retail and mall operators could adopt.

Still, “there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ for every incident,” says NRF vice president of loss prevention Joe LaRocca, “and in many instances people only have a few seconds to react, making advanced training, communication and practice exercises [such as fire drills] very important.”

During such an event, he says, “the protection of human life comes first and providing some general guidelines can go a long way to helping people respond properly.”

Some retailers employ POS systems that can receive alerts from the mall’s security command center. “Messages can go to all the registers to inform employees about what is happening, where it is happening and where they can go for assistance,” Kavanagh says.

One of the ways to prepare employees for incidents that may become violent, says Jeff Lenard, spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores, “is to have regular security trainings with employees. First and foremost, retailers need to find ways to minimize the likelihood their stores will be targeted before a criminal comes into the store.”

Keeping a store or a mall well lit, with a minimum amount of cash on hand and with gates, fences or other barriers blocking escape routes, says Lenard, all help to deter violence from armed criminals whose goal is to steal as much cash or contraband as they can as quickly as possible.

Retail and shopping center security executives are collaborating with law enforcement agencies, sharing information and observations that could prevent mass violence.

In one such collaboration, a major retailer sent members of its organized retail crime team to work with law enforcement agents to try to identify and apprehend the snipers who terrorized the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area in 2002. Members of this ORC team staked out the rooftops of company-owned stores in the Baltimore-Washington area, as well as along Interstate 95 in Virginia.