Do me a quick favor. Read this article about a shooting in Collier County Florida and imagine the scene. Pay attention to some of the descriptions of 
the 911 callers. “How can we calm down? Someone’s dead!” The man screaming in the background, “Hurry up!”
When you’re done, think about this question. Where should you be staged for this scene? You’re responding in emergent. There are people screaming and yelling. One victim is yelling for someone to hurry up. Nobody knows who shot who or where the shooters went. Where do you want to wait?
In light of all the facts, the answer seems obvious. You want to be a long way away. Somewhere with good access to the area, but way out of visual range. If someone sees you parked a block or two away waiting, they’re not going to understand. The lay public doesn’t understand staging for the police. They’re even less tolerant when bleeding gunshot victims are crying for help.
But it’s also worth considering that the ambulance crew might not know any of these little details. Who knows what dispatch information was relayed. They could have been responding on a man down or shots fired. They don’t know about the chaos and the screaming people. We all understand that initial dispatch info can be far different from what we find when we arrive on scene.
Where to stag might be obvious in retrospect, but not from the front seat of the ambulance, in real time. Unfortunately, we don’t get to make decisions with all the information available and laid out before us. We make decisions in real time. And real time can move awfully fast when we’re driving to the scene of a shooting.
I think you see where I’m going with this. In my experience, we tend to stage way to close to the scene. I think we do it for a bunch of reasons. Surely our macho bravado can play a role.
So can our sense that we’re on the good team and nobody would want to hurt us. There’s also the fact that, most of the time, we can get away with creeping in to visual range of the scene and “checking things out.” I think that’s what we call the normalization of deviance.
Here are some quick guidelines for staging away from a potentially violent scene.
1. If you can see the scene, you are too close.
2. If you can street that the call is on you don’t know where the address is on the street, you are too close.
3. If you can see the rear of the buildings on the street where the call is, you are too close. (I personally had this one get me into a very sticky situation.)
4. If you can make one turn and see the scene, you are (probably) too close.
You shouldn’t need to creep up on your scene like a hunter stalking prey. Find a safe spot several blocks and several turns from the call and stop. Just stop. Wait for the all clear and drive in. The scene will still be there when you arrive. And there will probably still be plenty of chaos to deal with.
Now it’s your turn: What criteria do you use when choosing a place to stage away from a scene? Have you ever gotten too close and and been frantically waved in to an unsafe scene? How did that go over?
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If anyone on the phone with 911 tells them (and later, every TV camera they can find) they see you, you’re too close.
Our policy is simple. Two blocks over, two blocks up.
I think those are both excellent guidelines. Who else?