Lessons from the Route 91 Festival Las Vegas shooting: How Chaos Breaks Communication

How Would You Respond to More Than 20 Active Shooter Calls at Once?

That’s exactly what we faced during the Route 91 Harvest Festival mass shooting in Las Vegas.

Of those calls, only one was real. The rest, more than 20, were ghost calls.

Over 22,000 concertgoers fled the scene that night, many running into nearby businesses. In the chaos, people genuinely believed they were hearing gunfire in other locations. Hotels, casinos, restaurants, each started calling in reports of active shooters on their property.

The result: dispatch was overwhelmed with dozens of simultaneous reports of active shooters across Las Vegas.

This wasn’t something I had ever trained for. I’ve taken active shooter courses and incident command training, but no one talked about this scenario. Dozens of reports, most of them false, all coming in at once.

So when I heard it over the radio, it caught me off guard. It added to the chaos I was already trying to manage while building a response plan.

How do you stay focused when the radio is blowing up with active shooter calls from all over the city?

Remember that you can only focus on one threat at a time.

In a real active shooter situation, dispatch will always get multiple calls. That’s one of the ways to distinguish a real event from a ghost call. If you hear about a location with just one report, be cautious. But when several callers are reporting the same location, that’s where your focus needs to be.

As leaders, this matters even more. If you send teams to every single report, you risk spreading your resources too thin and not being able to address the actual threat. It’s not easy, especially when lives might be on the line.

During a later incident where I was the incident commander, we got a report of another possible shooter.  I didn’t send a team to the call, and asked dispatch to alert me if any more calls came in from that location. I didn’t want to spread our resources too thin while I had officers inside a building with an actual active shooter.

That second report turned out to be a ghost call. But I’ll be honest, I felt the weight of that decision.

What if I had been wrong?

That’s the reality of command in moments like these. It’s not about being fearless. It’s about making the best call you can with the information you have, staying focused, and protecting your people.

The more we talk about these real-world complications, the better we prepare the next team to face them. Ghost calls are part of the chaos. They’re driven by panic, confusion, and the human instinct to survive. 

You won’t always have perfect information or enough time to make a perfect call, but if you’ve built a strong team, practiced decision-making under stress, and trust your training, you can lead through the noise.

These aren’t textbook incidents. They’re messy. They test your judgment, your patience, and your composure. 

Sharing these lessons openly gives the next leader a better shot at getting it right. Having honest conversations about what went well, what could have gone better, and how we felt during the incident is imperative to prepare those around us for similar situations.  That’s why I teach these lessons now, so I can prepare the next generation of officers and leaders to respond to similar critical incidents.  

Our in-person training and online class both discuss how to mitigate ghost calls, as well as the chaos of critical incidents. We give you actual tools to use in the moment, so you can perform at your best. Click here for more info.