This session presents descriptive findings from an ongoing study of school-based active shooter events, with a specific focus on secured access and attacker entry. Drawing on the FBI active shooter dataset, the analysis includes 54 identified K–12 school events and examines how physical access points shaped attacker movement, victim exposure, and incident outcomes. The presentation will summarize key descriptive patterns related to door status, entry points, lockdown implementation, and breach attempts, highlighting where secured access appeared to delay or prevent attacker movement and where it did not.
In addition to completed attacks, the session will address school-based active shooter events that were averted due to secured access measures. These cases do not appear in official FBI active shooter counts but provide important insight into how locked or controlled entry points can interrupt an attack before casualties occur. The presentation will describe how these averted events were identified and what they reveal about prevention and early interruption.
The session will also include brief case studies of select incidents where unusually detailed information was available. These cases illustrate how secured access functioned in practice, including both effective use and failure through bypassed or compromised measures. Together, the findings offer a data driven foundation for understanding how secured access operates during real events and what implications this has for policy, training, and school safety planning.
Learning Objectives:
- Describe patterns of secured access, entry, and breach observed across school-based active shooter events identified in the FBI dataset
- Distinguish between completed and averted school-based active shooter events and explain how secured access measures contributed to interruption or prevention.
- Apply descriptive findings from real incidents to inform school safety planning, training, and policy decisions related to access control and lockdown procedures
Speakers:
Hunter Martaindale, Director of Research, ALERRT - Texas State University
Joe Eleuterio, Research Associate, ALERRT - Texas State University
Jack Johncox, Research Associate, ALERRT - Texas State University
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Dr. Hunter Martaindale is Director of Research at the ALERRT Center and Associate Research Professor in the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Texas State University. His research examines how law enforcement officers respond to active shooter and active attack events, with a particular focus on decision making and performance under extreme conditions. He leads research efforts that analyze real world active shooter incidents and evaluate how training shapes officer behavior during these events. His work integrates operational data, experimental designs, and applied evaluation to inform evidence based training practices. He has published widely in criminal justice outlets and works closely with law enforcement agencies to translate research on active shooter response into training that reflects the realities officers face.
Joe Eleuterio is a Research Associate at the ALERRT Center and a doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Texas State University. His work focuses on applied research that evaluates and tests key components of law enforcement training, with particular attention to active shooter and active attack response. He contributes to the design and implementation of studies examining how training influences officer decision making and performance in high risk situations. His research emphasizes practical evaluation, bridging empirical findings with training practice to support evidence based improvements in law enforcement preparedness and response.
Jack Johncox is a Research Associate at the ALERRT Center at Texas State University. His work supports research on active shooter and active attack events, with an emphasis on human performance and applied training evaluation. He facilitates data collection for experimental and field studies, including projects examining officer decision making and performance under stress. Johncox manages ALERRT’s vision tracking and virtual reality systems, supporting immersive training and research applications. He also develops data visualizations used in internal analyses, reports, and research publications, translating complex operational and performance data into accessible formats for researchers, practitioners, and training stakeholders.