Dogtown Wire

The police department is running a new mandatory training class for all its officers, and Sgt. Terry Kuykendall has the bruises to show for it.

Terrible lessons were learned from the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 that have resulted in decisions by law enforcement agencies on how to deal with people determined to take lives for reasons known only to them.

“It’s an active-shooter training all of our police officers at the police department have to go through,” said Kuykendall. “It’s being taught by SWAT Team member Officer Steve Chamness and SWAT Team leader, Sgt. Patrick Shoemaker.”

Strategies on how to handle incidents involving an armed, and sometimes heavily armed, gunman or gunmen have changed in the wake of Columbine, Kuykendall said. There are the occasions when police will deal with a potentially mentally imbalanced person taking hostages in an effort to publicize their perceived problem with society by using hostage negotiators.

But after Columbine and the many copycat shootings in schools, colleges and businesses, strategies have evolved to stop the shooters more quickly, he said. The ineffectual effort of law enforcement agencies had in responding to the shootings at the April 2007 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University brought forth the need for more training for patrol officers.

The securing of a shooting incident location by patrol officers and then waiting for intensively trained SWAT teams has been re-thought, he said.

“The people who respond initially are patrol officers,” said Kuykendall. “I think one of things that has been learned was that maybe it wasn’t the best philosophy to wait for the big boys. Looking back I think that is probably true.”

The day long training sessions starts with classroom discussion for the patrol officers to have the complexities of entering and searching a building in teams. The lecture teaches them to get to the room where the shooter is located as quickly as possible, he explained.

The exact details of this plan of attack weren’t shared for obvious reasons, but working as a team to have the eyes of each team member, and their drawn weapons, work in unison is the obvious tactic. Moving as if one entity, the training instructs the officers how to move swiftly to survey every square inch of the area they move through.

The point it is to ascertain the number of shooters that might be involved and to stop the threat, he added.  

“As police officers that is what we are sworn to do; to serve and protect,” he said. “Especially at a school where children are involved.”

After the classroom discussion it came time to split up into good guys and bad guys for the actual search at the school the officers were using for the training session. The bad guy or guys would place themselves within a room of the school and wait for the search team to put into practice what they had just learned.

The look in Kuykendall’s eyes was intense as he explained that even though he knew it was a training session, in the back of his mind he said he knew he was training for a serious reality he hoped the department would never have to experience.

The intensity of moving through the vacant school had his blood pressure rising and adrenaline flowing knowing that around a corner could be the bad guy, he said. And both the good and bad guys weapons were loaded with Simunition , a trademarked non-lethal designed ammunition used to bring reality to these exercises.

“You know that this is possibly going to be a life or death situation if you enter that room. You know that if that person is in there and armed, it’s probably going to be a shootout and you have to react to this as a fight or flight situation. There is no backing out of the classroom; you’ve got to eliminate the threat of that person if they are killing innocent people.”

Kuykendall said he had the bruises to prove that it was a fight and not flight that made the day feel real. As part of the first bad guy team he was hit in the shin and knee with Simunition, and as a good guy, “even getting dinked, in my mind I knew as we entered rooms it was going to bad.”

He got popped a couple more times as the good guy, one that grazed his forearm, but got the bad guy.

“I’ve been a cop for 13 years and ideologies and philosophies change all the time, law enforcement is always evolving,” he said. “I can’t praise Chamness and Sgt. Shoemaker enough for the training they did.”

He added there is no doubt in his mind that the setup and implementation of the class prepared the officers to react to a situation if it arose.

“I can say this is the best training exercise I have ever been through in my 13 years as an officer,” Kuykendall said.

The strategy used for the training was gathered from that used by other agencies and included watching a video from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on the search method.

Shoemaker stressed the importance of having every officer on the force trained in these new tactics by phone Wednesday, and added he is pleased with how positively officers are reacting to the class.

He agreed with Kuykendall that this program is especially important for the safety of children, but also for the possibility of having to deal with a shooting that are occurring to much lately in businesses.

The lecture material came from the National Tactical Officers Assoc. , Shoemaker said. And the real life exercise came from “the different training we’ve gone through over the years,” as SWAT Team members.

“Anytime you have an active-shooter situation going on, a person that is actually committing active homicides,” the more training the better Shoemaker said. “Our officers do a very good job, but it’s the fact that they have to get into that mindset if someone is actually shooting, that they have to go in. And in schools, with those kids, if nothing else you let the bad guys shoot at you instead of them.”

“That’s the way you’ve got to look at it because those kids can’t protect themselves.”

In other new developments, the NLRPD just got their new Crime Scene Unit truck as shown below to replace the aging van it had for years.

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