I've been reading Christian Craighead's book, One Man In.
He's the former 22 SAS operator who responded to the 2019 DusitD2 complex attack in Nairobi. He went in solo, helped around 700 people get out alive, and was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross.
He used a term every public safety professional should consider: Free radicals.
That's how he described the armed bystanders who showed up wanting to help. Some were private security. Some were former military. Some came with nothing but nerve — one even brought a sledgehammer. A free radical is unpredictable. You don't know what you're going to get.
We need to think hard about this in America because of what I call the Uvalde effect — the collapse in public confidence after the country watched officers wait in a hallway while children died.
If a parent doesn't trust that the badge is going through the door, that parent is going through the door.
That's not an insubordination issue. It's a human response to a perceived vacuum of courage.
If you're the first officer on scene, perimeter control cannot be your priority. It is entirely possible an armed citizen goes into that building ahead of you, beside or after you. Once you verify they aren't the threat, stopping to control them is counterproductive.
Craighead understood this. He wasn't going to talk them out of being there, they weren't listening, and arguing wasn't stopping the killing. He put his ego aside and stayed on the mission. He couldn't control the free radicals in Nairobi — so he used them to move casualties and watch his back while he pushed forward.
That dynamic belongs in your cognitive rehearsal long before you face it in a hallway.