Learning from the Paris attacks
On 60 Minutes this week, Anderson Cooper reports on how American law enforcement has been preparing for "active shooter" attacks like the ones in Paris last week and in Mali this past Friday. Active shooter cases are ones in which the police must confront gunmen often still in the act of killing, or trying to kill, multiple people.
It's a situation the New York Police Department has been readying itself for since the 2008 attack in Mumbai, India, that killed 173, Commissioner William Bratton tells Cooper. In fact, the NYPD is retraining all of its 35,000 police officers on how to handle an active shooter, and allowed 60 Minutes to film some of that training.
Overtime editor Ann Silvio spoke with John Miller, the NYPD's deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism and a former CBS News senior correspondent. Miller says the Paris attackers had more tactical training and military experience than the relative novices ISIS has previously recruited.
"You had a kind of shooter who didn't spray the crowd, but took careful aim, chose their shots carefully," he says. "When one shooter went to change magazines to reload, another shooter would open with more fire until the other gunman had reloaded, and that they were working in close tandem coordination."
To address this kind of threat, he says, all police need to be prepared and equipped to act quickly if they are the first on the scene.
"It boils down to three things. Run if you can, hide if you have to, and fight if that is your last option."
They also need to be alert to cues regarding the shooter's intentions. At the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, for instance, it was clear that the terrorists who took hostages did not intend to spare lives. "It looks like a hostage situation, it feels like a hostage situation," he says. "But at the end of the day, what we've seen in these terrorist situations is, usually, the plan is to kill as many people as possible and to use the negotiations to buy time to kill more."
Miller says police confronting active shooters must also take into account how the attackers are armed. In Paris, some wore suicide belts. "In the active shooter scenario, the first command may be, 'Drop the gun and put your hands up,'" he explains. "In a suicide belt scenario, 'Drop the gun and put your hands up' might not be enough."
For viewers wondering what they would do if faced with an active shooter, Miller has some simple words of advice. "It boils down to three things," he says. "Run if you can, hide if you have to, and fight if that is your last option."
The video above was produced by Ann Silvio and Lisa Orlando and edited by Lisa Orlando, Sarah Shafer Prediger and Will Croxton.