Truck Into the Market
At 1015 on a Tuesday you are the first supervisor to arrive at a farmers market where a pickup truck has driven through barricades into a crowd. At least 11 people are down, two obviously critical; the truck is stopped against a produce stand about 40 feet away, engine running, driver's door open, driver gone. About 200 people are in the area, many running; several bystanders are attempting CPR; a fire engine is staged two blocks away and the first ambulance is six minutes out. Four officers are on scene, one of them a probationer in month four. A witness yells that the driver ran toward the parking garage with 'something in his hand.' Radio traffic is chaotic and three units are asking for direction. Your department uses NIMS/ICS and has a unified command with fire.
1. What do you do in the first ten minutes? State your command and your priorities.
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Announce command first. Plain language, on the designated channel: 'All units, this is Sergeant ___; I am incident commander at the farmers market, truck-versus-crowd, multiple injured. Switch to tactical channel ___. Staging is at ___; do not self-deploy into the market.' Chaos on the radio is itself a casualty cause; fixing it is the first act of command.
Priorities in order: rescue and triage, scene security, suspect containment, preservation.
- Medical: request the mass-casualty response and additional medic units through fire, not piecemeal. Ask fire to bring the engine up as a hard barrier and to stand up a rescue task force. Establish a casualty collection point behind cover, not in the open market lane, and assign one officer to protect the treatment area. Bystanders doing CPR are an asset - let them continue until relieved, but get gloves and direction to them.
- The truck: do not move it and do not let anyone move it unless it is blocking a patient. It is the primary evidence.
- The crowd: one officer on the inner perimeter and crowd direction, with a clear instruction to move people away from the garage side.
- The probationer: pair him with a veteran and give him a bounded job - perimeter or traffic. Do not send him after an armed suspect alone.
- Request resources now: additional supervisors, air unit, K9, and a second channel for the suspect search so the main channel stays clear for medical.
2. How do you handle the fleeing driver and the parking garage?
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Do not let the scene dissolve into a manhunt. The most common failure in a mass-casualty event is that every officer runs after the suspect and no one treats the patients or controls the scene.
Contain, do not chase. Broadcast the description and direction, the 'something in his hand' detail, and the garage location. Assign a two-officer contact team with a supervisor's acknowledgment - not the probationer as primary - to hold the garage entrances and set a perimeter on the structure. Request the air unit and any available K9. Pull garage camera feeds and identify the vehicle and the registered owner; the truck already gives you an investigative path that does not require running into a dark garage.
Do not pursue into the structure alone or in a crowd. A single officer chasing an armed subject through a crowded market creates a second mass-casualty risk, and a foot pursuit in a parking structure with no perimeter and no radio coverage is worse. If the subject is seen leaving, follow at a distance, broadcast, and let the perimeter take him.
Keep the priority straight. The driver is one person; there are 11 patients. State on the air: 'Suspect search is a separate assignment. Everyone else stays on patients and scene security.' If you have to choose, containment wins and you can say why in the after-action review.
3. How do you establish unified command with fire, and what do you document?
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Unified command is a conversation, not a radio announcement. Find the fire battalion chief at the engine, state the situation and your objectives, and agree on who owns what: fire owns triage, treatment, and transport; law enforcement owns scene security, the crime scene, witness management, and the suspect search; both share the casualty count and the decision to move patients. Pick one incident command post location, announce it, and staff it with a scribe and a runner. Keep span of control at three to seven people per supervisor; with four officers and a growing response, that means assigning branches, not personally directing every unit.
Transfer command formally if a lieutenant or captain arrives: state the transfer on the air, brief them face to face with the command log, and log the time. An undocumented transfer is how two people end up giving conflicting orders.
Document: command log with times; unit assignments; resource requests and arrival times; the casualty count as it changes; the decision points - especially prioritizing rescue over the suspect search, and not pursuing into the garage; which patients went to which hospital; the scene security log; BWC status; witness names and video sources from businesses. Start the witness canvass early and preserve market and garage video before it overwrites.
Then take care of the people. Check on the probationer and the officers who did CPR; activate peer support. Hold a hot wash within 24 to 72 hours and produce a written after-action report with recommendations, not just a narrative.