The University Police Department has recently adopted the Alert Lockdown Inform Counter Evacuate program, or ALICE, to teach students techniques for surviving an active shooter situation.

“[ALICE] is simply common sense techniques for surviving an active shooter situation … somebody who comes in and is actively attempting to kill people,” said University Police Chief Monica Moll.

A company called Response Options created ALICE and now travel the country to teach its techniques.

Last month, Response Options came to the University and trained six University Police Officers and two University Human Resources employees as instructors of the program, Moll said. Those individuals can now train other individuals in ALICE.

“The ALICE program was conceived as a result of us being concerned with the school shooting phenomenon back in the ‘90s,” said Greg Crane, Response Options owner and co-founder of ALICE. “It became pretty obvious to us that [the police] weren’t going to be there in time to really help as many of the folks as we’d like to during one of these tragedies.”

Crane said the company then focused on finding out how shooters amassed large numbers of casualties.

“There’s really only two ways that happens: one, they’re very skilled in what they’re doing, or two, the job is very easy,” Crane said.

They determined that the targets were too easy, Crane said.

Part of this is attributed to what people had been taught to do in active shooter situations, which was to lock down.

“Normal shooting hit rates and kill rates are not at all what they are in a school shooting,” Crane said. “Police officers typically only hit the target 80 percent of the time in a life or death situation, but these shooters are hitting the target at a much higher rate than that.”

Crane said he has nothing against the lockdown idea – the “L” in ALICE even stands for “lockdown” – but that the lockdown response alone is inadequate.

Moll said lockdown may be the best option at times, but it wouldn’t simply be a passive lockdown. Instead of locking the door and hiding, students would be prepared to distract the shooter in any possible way, attempting to prevent the shooter from hitting their target.

Moll said the goal at the University is to train as many people in ALICE as possible.

“The ideal thing would be to train all faculty and staff and train all incoming freshmen,” Moll said. “It’s just not possible with the staffing levels we have.”

The University is currently trying to strategize about how they can branch out to reach more people with the program.

Resident advisers were trained before fall semester began and Moll will attend an Undergraduate Student Government meeting in October to train members.

“I think ALICE opens your eyes to a lot more possibilities on how to react to an active shooter situation,” said Alex Solis, an RA and USG senator.

Solis has already received the training and helped come up with the idea to bring ALICE training to USG members.

There are many ways to reach out to the student body with ALICE, such as offering classes in the training or asking professors not to cancel their classes when they aren’t available to teach – instead let an ALICE trainer attend their class to train to their students.

“We don’t want people to be hyper sensitive and worried that every time they have a class or a meeting there’s going to be an active shooter, but we would like to prepare people,” said Moll.

Crane said he hopes the ALICE program becomes widely known one day.

“Our goal in the future is that everyone become[s] a part of the system,” he said.