DENVER, Colorado (USA) - During last week’s campus shooting in the US state of Oregon, it took just six minutes for police to arrive on the scene and neutralize the shooter.
The swift response has been credited with saving lives. Police across the US say that, increasingly, they are trained to deal with mass shootings:
a growing number of police departments now conduct “active shooter drills,” with the goal of preparing their forces to best respond to a gunman opening fire in a public space.
But many American police officers say they know a mass shooting could happen any day.
Many of them regularly go through elaborately-staged shootings, to be ready for when they get the call.
“We do two big trainings a year, we bring in outside law enforcement agencies with us,” said Lieutenant Brandon Graber of the Fort Carson Police Department.
“Each training is a weeklong event, where we train with city, county, police departments as well as the FBI. Annually, all of our officers are required to conduct active shooter training at least once a year,” he explained.
This drill was organized by the police force at Fort Carson Army Base in Colorado.
Officers are taught how to approach a shooter, and the best equipment to use.
“We’ve incorporated the use of long rifles and shotguns, that we’d never really talked about previously,” said Graber. “We’re working on getting active shooter kits for all of our responding officers, as well as ballistic shields.”
Police in nearby Denver say that active shooter drills have taught them not only how to take down a gunman, but also a way to reduce casualties: equipping officers with basic medical gear can save lives.
“We identified a gap in our response during the initial exercise, we followed that up, learned from our mistakes, learned from the after-action on ways that we can improve -- and that was by adding the medical component. Tactical trauma care - a tourniquet - can be your best friend,” said Commander Paul Pazen of the Denver Police
Many city police departments also hold active shooter drills with the security personnel of school districts.
For a drill in Jefferson County in the Denver suburbs, professional actors played the shooters, and high school students volunteered to play the victims, and to do the special-effects make-up.
“It’s important that we continue to up our training, it’s important that we continue to look at what the evolution of school safety is and how it’s changing,” said John McDonald, Executive Director of Security at the Jefferson County Schools.
“We take a look at best practices and lessons learned from previous tragedies all over the world,” he said.
Officials from around the world look to Jefferson County as a leader on school safety. But it is a reputation born out of tragedy: this is where the notorious 1999 Columbine shooting happened, and three other shootings.
“We, unfortunately, have had four school shootings in a 35-mile radius. And that’s tough, and that’s in a 12-year period of time,” said McDonald. “So we’ve had no choice but to look and say - what can we do, what should we do, what will we do?
In Colorado, teachers and students in public schools also go through active shooter drills - for the younger grades, they are generally referred to as “stranger danger” drills, so as not to provoke unnecessary fears in vulnerable young minds.
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