Mid Sweden University

Active shooter events require swift action. This study examines situation awareness during these incidents, focusing on how officers transition from less confrontational approaches to more confrontational, life-saving tactics. Using qualitative research based on observations from six active shooter training exercises, the study highlights key factors such as information, experience, and shared mental models that influence situation awareness. The findings reveal that while officers are willing to take risks, they often struggle to adopt the necessary speed and dominance needed to neutralize the threat effectively. 

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic documentation have not been widely explored in crisis management, despite their potential utility in facilitating the transcription of speech recordings. Although documentation is widely recognized as essential for creating a common operational picture, there is often a lack of such documentation, which can hinder understanding of events during and after a crisis. The novelty of the research is to apply existing technology and evaluate the potential of ASR technology in the domain of crisis management. We present preliminary results of using OpenAI Whisper for automatic transcription and documentation. In Phase 1, the ASR software was tested with existing recordings from previous research. In Phase 2, data was collected from recorded meetings during a tabletop exercise. The results indicate that transcripts, combined with other AI technologies, can provide valuable information and support for crisis and emergency management in Emergency Operation Centers. 

In this “work in progress” research, we attempt to understand and explore the effects of inadequate documentation during crises. We have studied the work of three different organizations during the first six months of the Covid- 19 pandemic and have been able to ascertain that almost no official documents from the organizations' crisis management teams can be found. The consequences of inadequate documentation resulted in challenges when learning from mistakes, difficulties in real-time learning, and a lack of understanding regarding the rationale behind the decisions made. This institutional amnesia is problematic for many reasons and needs to be further studied. The next step in our research will be to study information culture and try to understand the effect of this amnesia on resilience.

In extreme situations, the police have limited time to react when a threat or a situation arises suddenly. Situation awareness has been identified as a key factor for success in how tactical decisions are made. This helps the police to perform secure and legally correct interventions and decisions. We collected the primary data from 21 interviews with police officers, supplemented by literature and documents. We analyzed the relationship between tactical methods and situation awareness. The purpose of the article is to explore the relationship between police tactics and police officers’ work with situation awareness. Situation awareness has been studied through the lens of the Swedish police general tactical explanation model. We discuss how the general tactical explanation model provides the conditions for the police officers’ explanations to achieve situation awareness. We conclude that if the general tactical explanation model is applied during tactical interventions there are better possibilities to achieve situation awareness.

An active shooter event is one of the most complicated situations a police officer could face. Today the standard procedure for an active shooter event is to enter the scene and try to prevent casualties. This involves taking great risks and puts the police officers in a situation they have not been trained for. This is a work in progress paper where the long-term goal is to develop modern technology that could increase the chance of saving lives and decrease the risk of being injured or killed during an active shooter event. Six active shooter event exercises taking place in Sweden have been studied using an ethnographic field study approach. Four themes have been identified where we argue that technology could enhance the police mission: A) Situational awareness; B) Decision making/prioritization; C) Localization of both sound and people; D) Decreasing time of intervention. 

This is a work in progress paper on work and IT usage in distributed crisis management. The data presented in this paper has been collected at a one-day tabletop exercise with four Swedish municipalities. Four members of the four municipalities’ crisis organizations were invited to the exercise, which was designed as one scenario divided into two cases. At the start of each case of the exercise, each municipality was split into two separate rooms, to simulate a distributed crisis management. During the first case they could communicate using phone, TETRA radio, and the Internet. During case two in the scenario, there was no Internet connection. The study indicates that all the municipalities managed to organize and solve the given tasks using primarily voice communication, in case one using phone or, e.g., Teams, and in case two using TETRA radio. Information sharing using IT was non-existing

Police officers’ situational awareness during tactical intervention can be crucial for how they act and whether they use the correct level of force in extreme situations. This paper presents preliminary findings in ongoing research focusing on police tactical interventions and situational awareness. Twenty-one police officers were interviewed, and a video sequence of a shorter car chase was used to set the scene in the interviews. The interviewed police officers described their tactical decisions applying the standardized tactical approach applied in the Swedish police. In the analysis, a focus on how situational awareness is gained and how situational awareness is affected by tactical decisions is presented. The study indicates that the situational awareness process begins before the actual intervention (pre-intervention phase). During the actual intervention, situational awareness is very complex. Technology supporting police officers’ cognition, as well as management and control of one or many risk areas, is identified.

The study investigated how three agencies in Sweden were pursuing the implementation of an electronic archive (e-archive). The e-archive was seen by the Swedish National archives as a pre-requisite to the effective management of government information and would help the agencies to comply with the Swedish Public Sector Information (PSI) law which requires them to publish open data. It was also seen as an important component of an efficient e-government. The study further had two objectives: to establish whether the common specifications were being used and how the implementation of the PSI-law was being pursued. Interviews and a literature review were used as data gathering techniques. The Records Continuum Model (RCM) was applied to enhance an understanding of how the agencies were dealing with the publication of open data. Two of the agencies had implemented an e-archive but the third agency lacked one. All the three were publishing open data. The agency that did not have an e-archive was publishing open data that suited its existing information management infrastructure. This has implications since the PSI-law requires full publication of all PSI which has no restrictions. The common specifications were not being used by the agencies.

Crises management exercises could for several reasons preferably be carried out as simulations or as serious games. One advantage is the infinite number of replications without additional costs, another is that a virtual crisis management exercise allows the participants to make mistakes without crucial consequences. Several types of virtual exercises with crisis management scenarios could be designed as serious games. However, experiences from earlier virtual exercises are that the participant collaboration should not be taken for granted, and that even well-organised and repeated crisis management training has resulted in poor learning outcomes. An identified technique to stimulate collaboration and to increase learning outcomes in virtual exercises is scripted collaboration. The aim of this study is to explore and discuss the potential of using scripted collaboration in serious games for crisis management training. A literature study was conducted to find and analyse best and worst practices in the use of scripted collaboration. Findings show that scripted collaboration can be successfully applied in various ways. In a deductive thematic analysis, findings were divided into the categories of General collaboration scripts, Conflict scripts, and Role-play scripts. All the identified variations of scripted collaboration seem to have a potential to reinforce virtual crisis management exercises, if they are thoroughly adapted to the actual scenario context.

What happens when an organization requires its employees to work from home during a pandemic that needs to be managed? This research in progress article focuses on TELCO_ALPHA and the transition of their emergency operation centre  (EOC)  to  digital and distributed.  A qualitative research method approach was applied and liminality has been used as lens to investigate the shift from analog to digital. Focus has been on understanding the  transition  and how they  handled  ambiguity within the organization when  their crisis management  moved online. The transition was successful, and two areas were identified as important to this success: 1. TELCO_ALPHA used IT that the staff in the crisis organization already had experience of working with prior to the Covid-19 pandemic;  2. TELCO_ALPHA  ran  crisis management team meetings  as  they  would  run  regular business meetings. There was no new “crisis management structure” at the meetings.