If you aren’t actively engaging or addressing the threat what is your new priority?
Reload
Run
Communicate
Reload.
Get ready to reengage the current threat when it reappears or to engage the next threat, which may be a greater one depending on your circumstances. You don’t want to be in the position of having fewer rounds in your gun when a greater number of bad guys appear or the first comes back for more.
When given time and opportunity fill that gun back up. Even your sidearm should (seriously) have a second magazine to top you off. If not though, next step.
Run.
If there is still any risk where you are, be elsewhere. Get out of the kill zone, off the X, away from the danger area, and any other cliche phrase that has you moving from where the attack just took place to an area safer for you and your’s
Get inside. Get in the car and go. Book it down the street. Harden down close by. Whatever form it may take get distance from the place where it was determined that ‘this is a good place to attack you’. There are reasons the spot was chosen and now that the fight is on, or was on, there is all the attention in the world on that spot, good and bad.
You can talk to the authorities from a place of safety and any LEO, dispatcher, or whomever would advocate you stay in a location you do not feel safe and secure is not doing you any favors. “It is not safe there/here. I am not safe there/here.” are all the encouragement they should need to start setting alternatives.
Communicate.
Especially if you have anything resembling a team or persons in your care. Keep accountability, get confirmed head counts and injury checks. Check each other. Call out directions. Call out movements. Keep everyone, if not on the same page, in the same ballpark.
Start any necessary communication with authorities. Have a plan on what you are saying and how you are saying it. Necessary is very important, your focus should be the fight, not dialing 911
Communicate your needs. Ambulance, Additional Officers, Special Medical Concerns for injuries and/or conditions.
Communicate the scene, guide your help to you. Give them cardinal directions, address, land marks, description of you and your group.
Remember this is NOT the time to start talking about what happened. Your priority is getting help to you. It is not your ‘It happened so fast…’ narrative time yet, and when it is that had best be your legal counsel.
