Making terror real: Police active-shooter training is meant to overwhelm
One thing needed to be clarified to the assembled officers, revved for an active-shooter exercise.
Doors in this Johnson County church Thursday morning might not necessarily open all the way. So don't — whatever super-amped drama might unfold — force one off its hinges like someone did in training the day before.
But as for clarity on the scenario that awaited them, the information was frighteningly scarce.
Shots have been fired, Merriam Police Cpl. Jeremiah Waters told the black-clad, armored officers from several area police forces. You're an off-duty security officer and you're the first one to arrive.
"That's all you get to know," Waters said.
Action.
The first four officers entered the building, one at a time, as they might arrive in a real terror crisis, rushing from wherever they heard the dispatched call.
Loudspeakers pumped the church's atrium with recorded screams and fire alarms. Volunteer actors scattered about, some wailing as if in pain, some running with their hands in the air. At least one of them, somewhere, was a gunman.
"We do the best we can ... to overwhelm them," said Leawood Police Capt. Brad Robbins.
The training had been planned before the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School left 17 dead in Florida last month, but the tragedy was freshly on their minds, he said.
The scenarios attempt to re-create the moments of instant decisions. The old tactics of waiting and organizing teams no longer apply, Robbins said.
"People are dying," he said. "It might be the school resource officer who hears about it and has to act by himself or herself. Every second that goes by, there is a chance to lose an innocent life. You have to get in there."
The old images of police forces barricaded on the outside, as at the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, have been replaced by the image of Hesston, Kan., Police Chief Doug Schroeder, who immediately raced inside and shot down a killer at Excel Industries in 2016.
And often, since officers from multiple police forces may arrive at a shooting scene, they will be teaming on the fly.
"Take a breath," Waters had advised the officers before the exercise began. "Think through the problem right in front of you."
In Thursday's exercise, the first four officers had to find one another, radio their situation and work their way through the building, stalking after the gun blasts that trainers fired from airguns.
Teams of officers followed, as they would in a real crisis, attempting to secure a space for the paramedics behind them to triage and retrieve wounded people who might be dying.
The actors who were "wounded" — many of them from the Johnson County Sheriff's Office Citizens Academy — held information sheets describing or showing pictures of their injuries.
The officers took turns cycling through two scenarios. In one they discovered that two shooters had in the end killed themselves. In another they sprung in on a gunman in a loud — and dark — dance hall who fired on the officers and their flashlights.
"It's intense and confusing," Westwood Police Officer Ruth Peter said.
The setup put them in situations they had not experienced — like not always having someone watching your back, Westwood Police Officer Penny Teddy said.
"That's what it's really going to be like," Leawood Police Officer Robert Mahon said.
Leawood Police Cpl. Ron Hulsey and Teddy ended up firing on the shooter in the dance hall, seeing the flash of his gun across the room.
Hulsey would have been wounded. The guns in the exercise were loaded with paint pellets, and Hulsey had two splatters on his left arm. The gunman, though, was put down with splatters across his chest.
Police in the exercise came from Fairway, Leawood, Merriam, Mission, Overland Park, Prairie Village and Roeland Park. School district police from the Blue Valley and Shawnee Mission districts also joined in, plus firefighters from the Consolidated Fire District No. 2 and Leawood Fire Department.
Johnson County has been holding trainings like this for more than 10 years, and there will be more ahead, Robbins said.
"Times have changed," he said.
This story was originally published March 15, 2018 at 3:36 PM with the headline "Making terror real: Police active-shooter training is meant to overwhelm."