The ALICE program was created out of a husband’s desire for his wife to have a better plan in case of an active shooter event. After the Columbine High School shooting, Greg Crane was a law enforcement officer in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area and his wife, Lisa, was an elementary principal. While both prepared in their professional lives for this type of tragic event, it was not until a fateful conversation around the dinner table that brought the two worlds together and created the ALICE program. Around a Christmas Eve dinner in 2001, when an announcement came across the local news of an officer being killed in the line of duty the conversation turned toward the dangers of law enforcement. Although he had trained for many years to have officers ready for an active shooter call, Greg asked Lisa a question he had never asked a school administrator, “What are y’all doing while the police are making their way to the school?” Lisa explained the school’s protocol, which was the standard at the time, “When I find out we have an intruder, I put out a “Code Red” over the PA, the teachers get everyone in a classroom, lock the door, turn off the lights, sit in the corner and wait for the police to arrive.” Greg said for the first time the abnormally high numbers of killed and wounded in the recent school shootings of the 90s made perfect sense…the targets were too damn easy. He did not like that plan for Lisa and the people at her school so he set out to find a better plan. However, after reading the work of the so called “Experts” in school shootings he found that in the end, when the bullets started flying, the staff and students were on their own to “figure it out”.
Greg and a fellow officer, set out to create a plan based on the strategies that brought them through some violent shooting situations. As they developed the strategies and ran the concepts by Lisa, she would tell them how they would work in the school setting. Through years of development, modifications, additions, deletions and a lot of input from other ALICE Instructors across the country, ALICE Training has evolved into the first program of its kind that uses options-based, proactive, survival strategies in our country. Now, many governmental agencies, law enforcement organizations and associations have made recommendation which mirror the ALICE concepts. We continue to lead the way with cutting-edge research, updated materials and an ever increasing body of knowledge and experience to help civilians of all demographics learn strategies which can help them survive an active shooter situation at school, work, hospitals, church or anywhere they may find themselves under attack.
Our vision is to have all citizens to have the skills and knowledge of their options to respond when shots are fired because they have learned in the K-12 setting, just like they do now when they hear a fire alarm.
If the police can’t be there in time to help, the next best thing is to prepare our civilian population to help themselves until public safety arrives.
Today, the ALICE Training Institute is headquartered in Medina, Ohio, and provides proactive risk management to schools, universities, businesses, hospitals and places of worship. Since its inception, ALICE has been adopted by more than 900 organizations, representing more than one million people across the U.S.
To learn more about current ALICE training programs, contact us now.