Shoot first: Columbine transforms police tactics

updated 11:53 p.m. ET April 18, 2009

GOLDEN, Colo. - The first officers on the scene had never trained for what they found at Columbine High School: No hostages. No demands. Just killing.

In the hours that followed, the nation watched in horror as the standard police procedure for dealing with shooting rampages in the U.S. proved tragically, heartbreakingly flawed on April 20, 1999.

Two officers exchanged fire with one of the teenage gunmen just outside the school door, then stopped — as they had been trained to do — to wait for a SWAT team. During the 45 minutes it took for the SWAT team to assemble and go in, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot 10 of the 13 people they killed that day.

The killers committed suicide around the time the makeshift SWAT team finally entered. But the SWAT officers took several hours more to secure the place, moving methodically from room by room. One of the injured, teacher Dave Sanders, slowly bled to death.

"It was really frustrating," said Marjorie Lindholm, a grief counselor and speaker at police training seminars. Lindholm was a 16-year-old student in a science classroom where two classmates used their T-shirts to try to stanch Sanders' bleeding. "We were told, 'They're on their way, they're coming.'"

Ten years later, Columbine has transformed the way police in the U.S. deal with shooting rampages.

Stop the shooter
After the tragedy, police across the country developed "active-shooter" training. It calls for responding officers to rush toward gunfire and step over bodies and bleeding victims, if necessary, to stop the gunman — the active shooter — first.

Sgt. A.J. DeAndrea, a patrol officer in the Denver suburb of Arvada, and now-retired sheriff's Sgt. Grant Whitus, two of the SWAT team members who searched Columbine High that day, now train police with the idea that a gunman, in a mass shooting, kills a person every 15 seconds.

Slideshow   Columbine remembered A look back at the April 20, 1999, shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. more photos

"Based on what we had been through, we had decided that day that we would prepare, and that the lives lost at Columbine were not going to be in vain," said DeAndrea, team leader of the Jefferson County Regional SWAT.

Around the country, police say the strategy has saved lives time and again.

In North Carolina, active-shooter training became part of the state's law enforcement academy curriculum in 2001. Last month, a rampage at a Carthage, N.C., nursing home that killed a nurse and seven helpless patients was cut short when 25-year-old Officer Justin Garner entered the place alone and injured the gunman with a single shot. Garner had undergone active-shooter training.

"Fifteen years ago, if I heard about what that officer in North Carolina did, I would have said 'What a fool, he violated every procedure that we knew about,'" said Steve Mitchell, program manager with the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies in Fairfax, Va. "It's been a complete turnaround."

Contain-and-wait strategy
For three decades before Columbine, law enforcement had followed a contain-and-wait strategy calculated to prevent officers and bystanders from getting killed: The first ordinary cops at the scene would set up a perimeter to contain the situation, and then wait for the experts — SWAT team members trained in military tactics and equipped with special protective gear and assault weapons — to go in and bring down the gunman.

That strategy and the creation of SWAT teams were prompted by the 1966 sniper attack at the University of Texas at Austin, in which Charles Whitman climbed a clock tower and opened fire with a high-powered rifle, killing 14 people.

Columbine prompted the most sweeping changes in police tactics since then.

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