One can’t answer how many lives would be saved, but you have to try.
In simplest terms, the training was on point. In the scenario, it was just another average day of day work. One squad comes in to work the 6 am to 4 pm shift. Each squad has about 10-12 officers for the district. 3 or 4 maybe more will be in court all day; radios off as that is their assigned court date. Some may be out on other calls. A supervisor might be on the scene, or maybe not. You can get help from the neighboring districts but they are in the same boat – day work with half the staff out in court on other calls and they are miles away. They will respond, but late. You never know how many officers will actually be “in service” and able to respond immediately to a call, with immediately meaning – the call goes into 911. It gets routed to a data entry person who has to enter the call into the system while at the same time putting the “alert tones” out on the radio that alerts everyone the shit is about to hit the fan with the call coming up. This takes precious minutes. By the time you hear the alert tones on the radio, the situation was at least ten minutes into it. Then, you have to navigate through traffic to get to the site. As fast as things work, it is still a delayed response to get to the scene simply because of logistics. As an aside, if there was an SRO (school resource officer) on the scene, that officer could immediately get on the air and scream for help, and the available cavalry would be coming immediately without the delay of the 911 call getting out to the street. But alas, our county and many others in the area – I can’t speak for nationwide - in its infinite wisdom who had SROs for 15 years, removed them from the schools 18 months ago because they were a racist presence in the schools, only there to lock up minorities which as intelligent people know was so far from the truth. But I digress.
In any event, the point is the training had to be realistic. You are not going to have an entire squad of officers responding to the scene immediately. You might have only two or three, maybe four if lucky initial responders. Yes, many will come later, but immediacy is the key. And this was the basis of how we were trained, at least several years ago. We did it in twos and threes, because that is basically how it would go down on the street. Realistic training.
The first 2 or 3 responding officers would have to be the immediate action team and take immediate action without waiting for back up. Hopefully, one of the responding officers carried a ballistic shield. Each squad had 2 shields on the road. Some training you had a shield, some you did not as it wasn’t available. No matter. You deal with it. If you had a shield, one carried and 2 fell behind as you entered the school – running. If no shield, you had another method to attack by running in a spread formation. Where do you run? Well, the training occurred on a Sunday when the school was empty, of course. But the school was filled with “actors.” You ran towards the threat. As you were doing this, the actors in the school – swat officers pretending to be teachers and the like – screaming he’s down there he’s down there and he’s shooting! You’d continue to run to the threat and you would hear the gun being fired and kids screaming. Terrifying training to say the least. Along the way you’d see injured bleeding bodies, hear them screaming for help, and you were told to ignore this and continue to the threat. You would see people running away from the threat, which you had to ignore as you proceeded towards the threat. When you got to the classroom there was no delay. You heard the rounds going off, they had kids screaming (teenager volunteers from the Police Explorer program – another abandoned program in the past 18 months because no one wants to be the police anymore) You forced open the door, did your safest, immediate entry possible with or without the shield, which would give the shooter or shooters a choice at who to shoot first – left entry right entry low entry – but the shooter had to pick and if you were not being shot at first you could try and take out the threat – with your heart rate a million beats a minute – also part of the training get your heart rate up to how it will be when the scene is going down - but the scattered entry, as best you can scatter in a classroom would in theory allow one of you to identify and take out the threat which had to be identified in seconds. Sim rounds were used by both the bad guy and the “actor” officers which exploded on impact with red dye so you know if your shots took effect after all the stressors were in place or if it was your time to depart this earth. All the while everyone screaming and the crap hitting the fan, exactly as it would unfold in real life. Ask me how I know.
In any event, this training was repeated so it became muscle memory. When the shit hit the fan, you will always revert to your training. And we were told – you may not get out of this alive but this is what your job is, and this could be your kid in the classroom so do your job. There is no excuse at all for those first responding officers to not go on the offensive, enter the school and attack. Maybe one life would have been saved; maybe more. It’s speculation but do your damn job.
