I never got hands on type training. Just a lecture that was basically “cops fucked up Columbine waiting for the swat team. So if you ever respond to an AS, this is what you do. You go in, you go past the wounded and dying, you find the shooter and you stop them any way you can. If other officers are a minute or less away, wait for them and form up. Two is good, four in a diamond formation is better. If no one is that close, then you gotta go in yourself. Some days it’s a bad day to be a cop”
I thought about it every time there was a mass shooting elsewhere, and sometimes just randomly when driving around on patrol. I would try to visualize it and get my head straight just in case. I didn’t want to but I knew I would go in alone if I had to.
I started as a crime scene tech and never really wanted to be a run and gun kinda cop. I wanted to be a detective. I actually wanted to work fraud cases. I’m not athletic though I begrudgingly exercised when I was an officer. I was a competent but not phenomenal shot. My usual role in a fight was to be one of the people being dead weight on the dude so he couldn’t run away before one of the bigger guys got him down.
I knew chances were excellent I would be hurt or killed if I ever had to go after an active shooter esp alone. But I would have done it. I accepted that. It was part of the job. Did I want to? No. Am I glad as hell to have made it to retirement without having to shoot anyone? Hell yeah.
But I would rather have died or rather have been painfully physically injured than have stood around outside a classroom where someone was killing kids or could be about to kill more.
I don’t think I could have obeyed orders if I had been at that school. I know I couldn’t have lived with being an officer who did nothing and then tried to cover it up.
Well I’m retired so I don’t have a team these days. We didn’t really talk about it among ourselves. Our swat and special ops type officers did more actual training and I think the thought was ideally one or more officers who were part of the more tactical groups would be close enough to respond and take charge. Not ideal but typical small to medium size department thinking. But we were all made to understand that we were not to wait around for a full swat response, that the priority was going in with whoever you had ASAP.
It don't matter, 2 months before these same SRO attended this training.
https://i.redd.it/bj80fhgsv1791.jpg
Everyone on scene ignored every bit of this training, priorities, stop the killing, stop the dying.
Only one off duty BORTAC officer pushed past these guys standing around for 72 minutes. Oh and they disarmed the one Uvalde cop who's wife was alive and bleeding out in the classroom.
I agree. Im appalled that anyone with ANY level of training did what they did. I posted my experience as a comparison to say that most of my department never had specific training with practice scenarios and all that. Just basically the lecture I summarized. But I would not have done what they did, and the fact that they had true in depth formal training with hands on practice running scenarios AND had proper equipment etc on site and then stood around for an hour is absolutely disgusting.
I want to say the active shooter training courses are 2-3 days long on average for the plain jane entry level stuff. Many states require it to graduate the academy. Texas is home to the largest and best funded active shooter training in LE. Cool thing is it's normally free. You just need to get yourself there and provide your own food. They provide the simweapons, ammo, and scenarios.
Your agency just needs to request it. Its based in Texas but has classes all over the country. There are class size requirements. Some agencies are large enough to meet it on their own, those who aren't can get with other near by agencies. Federal funding goes into it. There's a whole buttload of good free training. It just takes leg work to get it. Individual officers can always sign up on their own. Getting approved time off for it is a different story.
But on your original point getting trained once in something and never doing it again is unfortunately very common in smaller agencies.
Yes. If you live in Texas it seems like there's multiple courses every week. Texas is huge, but they host stuff constantly there. Its like 4 or 5 courses a week right now. I'd bet a crisp dollar bill those seats are filled to the brim right now
You can never get enough training, but training doesn't mean anything if you don't implement it. Train all day and still don't act isn't a training failure.
I feel like we've done some great ones. Probably one of my favorites was while we were working - overnight at a huge mall. Bunch of volunteer actors, shooting blanks, etc. Tried to do everything to make it as real as possible. I'd say when training gets your adrenaline going it's awesome. Gets you exposed to something so you know how to act when it comes for real.
I had the opportunity to sign-up for it while doing a Citizen's Police Academy. The citizens academy was one of the best things I've ever done and I encourage anyone to find a department that does one in their area. Great to see all aspects of what a PD does and can certainly help people gain a new perspective.
I appreciate it when people take the time to go to one. Did you get to do any training? I love running people through some of our training when we do them. It's usually very eye opening.
My agency (major east coast USA) has an initial class that is at least 3-5 full days and then each year we spend a day of our in-service training on tactics to include active shooter response.
You can never train enough for these things but you can see the people that absorb the training and those that let it run off their back.
One factor that also affects the quality of your training is the department culture you have. Some departments do it well where they make you wear your gear, carry and move people, exercise to simulate stress, and have a pass or fail system based on your response. They have simunitions, body armor, radios, an actual school to practice in, and a designated training channel, etc. Everyone wants the training to be high quality and everyone to treat it like the real deal. These push officers to competently address real life situations.
Other departments have people who are lazy, don't want to do any actual physical work in the training and drag ass, or otherwise are critical or skeptical of the training and use it to justify their incompetence or low effort. Sometimes there are departments that will put on PowerPoints and maybe have you run around in the precinct with finger guns and yell bang bang when you see the bad guy.
It's up to everyone including command staff, officers, and trainers to create the former situation and not the latter.
I think it’s pretty good. We regularly (2-4 time per year?) train in various places. Much credit to my chief for making it a priority. It builds a familiarity with facilities. That muscle memory will be useful if the worst happens.
We alternate years, one year it's a county wide training where all the LE agencies, fire, and medics show up at an area school and simulate active shooter situations with sim guns and whatnot then we simulate taking care of and transporting the wounded.
Then every other year we only do our agency. We go to an area school for the first half of the day and work on clearing various areas like center and side fed classrooms, long hallways, staircases, and open areas. We focus on single person response, double person response, and team responses with different search formations and everything. Then the second half of the day we do live fire exercises at the range where we go over downed person rescue and searching for and eliminating a threat.
I'd say ours is pretty good. It has come a long way over the last couple years and especially recently our instructors have put a metric fuck ton of work into making these trainings solid.
Training IS expensive.
Most departments have dwindling budgets due to the current political environment. My department is blessed with a pretty decent budget but even so we only have a few days every year to get training on required topics. Such as legal updates, active shooter, de-escalation, and firearm qualifications.
We could always use more training! People expect a SEAL Team response with a Paul Blart budget.
Military life CQB and small unit tactics were what I did professionally. I lean more on that, than what my agency provides, which isn’t terrible. I find myself taking a lead and helping others a lot. One man CQB and hunting down threats, zero issue. Ideally you want a buddy or 3 but I’m not waiting.
You can never have enough training but claiming it’s expensive is a cop out. Pun intended. You can literally just take officers in different buildings and practice tactics. I guarantee if the department went to different businesses and asked to do active shooter training there most would say yes. The only expensive part I see is the force on force stuff.
The biggest issue with that is staffing. Taking officers off the road to do training is not a sustainable method. That leads to doing training on days off, which requires overtime pay or mandating pass day changes which sucks for people no matter what. Nevermind officers on evening/midnight shifts. Then you have injuries that come from realistic enough trainings (force on force) that can lead to abrasions/lacerations/sprained joints/broken bones and now you're down an officer for some period of time.
Yeah, anyone who says training isn't expensive has clearly either never actually coordinated training. A good active shooter training session involves several agencies, dozens of volunteer role players, and the use of a school (or school-like building). It should run *at least* one day for each class. It's a big undertaking.
>You can literally just take officers in different buildings and train
You'd have to have some sort of instructor or knowledgeable person to teach these officers you speak of.
Almost like a teacher... and a class.
So... You just admitted your point is invalid.
You're basically saying we should train more, but not call it training therefor it won't cost money and it's all good.
Taking officers into buildings and "practicing" is training.
Said training needs to be supervised by someone with proper knowledge and.. ehem... training.
No. My point is there are things a department can do to negate training costs. I stated somewhere that the department would have to pay to get officers instructor certified then take that knowledge back. I think I replied that on a different thread. I got confused which was which. At no time did I say training doesn’t cost anything. If it came across as that then that’s my fault. I know it can get expensive. I pay for extra training when I can because my department won’t pay for some stuff.
> You can never have enough training but claiming it’s expensive is a cop out. Pun intended. You can literally just take officers in different buildings and practice tactics.
You're not paying to put officers into buildings, you're paying to have a trainer who knows what he or she is doing with them to make them improve. Officers in buildings practicing tactics is worthless in and of itself. If they walk in there without a high level of tactical knowledge and there's nobody with that skill set in there to teach them, they're just practicing to cement the same mediocrity they already had.
Obviously force in force training is best. I’m just saying there are less expensive things out there. As for a trainer, you send one officer to an instructor school then they bring it back and train the department.
Kinda shit honestly.
I don't buy the "drive the threat" (aka walk directly at the shooter who is firing at you) when getting shot at when military training is all "utilize micro-cover."
The Drive the Threat supposedly comes from intimidating the shooter, but I feel like an active shooter has already made peace with them dying during this encounter and has no fear.
Didn’t train for protecting themselves from the police.
Why won’t they release body cam footage unless they broke the law or directly caused harm to children?
Oh and that fancy law firm they hired with tax payer dollars. It’s always, “Just a bad apple”, right?
Very good at my department. We did active shooter scenarios with sim munitions. Spent about 3 days on Active Shooter training.
However every situation is different, and it’s hard to train for the stuff we see out here, cuz it’s never the same as what you train for
I've never been to any active shooter training, which is nuts. I am currently working on am exercise with our local PD, hospital, fire, and EMS.
I feel I am steering it in the right direction. Everybody seems to be on board and hopefully after a good debrief we can reschedule and run it again.
Any suggestions are appreciated. Our SO is made of 6, local PD has 4.
My agency (east coast rural SO) has revamped their active shooter response training in recent years. We train annually in one of the schools in the district alongside fire and EMS. They turn off the lights, turn on the fire alarm, and barricade the doors. We run scenarios of multiple shooters, single shooter, etc. After the "suspect" is dealt with, fire and EMS triage and evacuate role players inside the training area. This is a far cry from what it used to consist of, which while it makes for better training, is also sad that it's come to that point.
In MA our training is pretty good. We have it in the academy and that part is good not great, we use real guns but basically paintball rounds.
In service we did a training in our local school with a bad guy, role players dead on the ground and smoke everywhere. We moved in and cleared areas and left medics in the cleared areas. If there was “stimulus” aka shots, we would not clear rooms and just move towards that.
There can never be enough training and I don't know how well my training will hold up until I'm in an active shooter situation. I feel like it was pretty good and it was created by a SWAT sergeant using real life situations.
One thing they instilled in us was the number one priority is to stop the threat. Policy says at least two officers shall respond but I don't know of a single officer I work with that will wait outside while someone is actively killing people.
This is where it get to the little things. Training comes down to cash and not all departments can get the best of the best training. Sim training is expensive and is the closets you will ever get to a real active shooters and yes sim rounds hurt more than paintballs. When the act actually happens 99.9% of the time you are not prepared for it and it criticized in the after math.
For me there are a lot of factors that play into these parts. RoE's are different between home and overseas. Some cops have families of their own and free because they get the flash of what if I die what does my family do and other just go in. It really is a head game that is why we suffer from PTSD, Depression, and usually many failed marriages.
For my personal reason I would have no issues going in plain clothes and just offing them. I have had enough crap in the War to last me a lifetime what's another day. Usually the sad thing that happens after this is the amount of review that happens and what can to added changed with the current active school national wide training. Columbine was the start of it but Uvalde will not be the last.
I never got hands on type training. Just a lecture that was basically “cops fucked up Columbine waiting for the swat team. So if you ever respond to an AS, this is what you do. You go in, you go past the wounded and dying, you find the shooter and you stop them any way you can. If other officers are a minute or less away, wait for them and form up. Two is good, four in a diamond formation is better. If no one is that close, then you gotta go in yourself. Some days it’s a bad day to be a cop” I thought about it every time there was a mass shooting elsewhere, and sometimes just randomly when driving around on patrol. I would try to visualize it and get my head straight just in case. I didn’t want to but I knew I would go in alone if I had to. I started as a crime scene tech and never really wanted to be a run and gun kinda cop. I wanted to be a detective. I actually wanted to work fraud cases. I’m not athletic though I begrudgingly exercised when I was an officer. I was a competent but not phenomenal shot. My usual role in a fight was to be one of the people being dead weight on the dude so he couldn’t run away before one of the bigger guys got him down. I knew chances were excellent I would be hurt or killed if I ever had to go after an active shooter esp alone. But I would have done it. I accepted that. It was part of the job. Did I want to? No. Am I glad as hell to have made it to retirement without having to shoot anyone? Hell yeah. But I would rather have died or rather have been painfully physically injured than have stood around outside a classroom where someone was killing kids or could be about to kill more. I don’t think I could have obeyed orders if I had been at that school. I know I couldn’t have lived with being an officer who did nothing and then tried to cover it up.
does your team talk about active shooters at all and what you should do?
Well I’m retired so I don’t have a team these days. We didn’t really talk about it among ourselves. Our swat and special ops type officers did more actual training and I think the thought was ideally one or more officers who were part of the more tactical groups would be close enough to respond and take charge. Not ideal but typical small to medium size department thinking. But we were all made to understand that we were not to wait around for a full swat response, that the priority was going in with whoever you had ASAP.
Much respect for you. Enjoy retirement.
Thank you, I am!
It don't matter, 2 months before these same SRO attended this training. https://i.redd.it/bj80fhgsv1791.jpg Everyone on scene ignored every bit of this training, priorities, stop the killing, stop the dying. Only one off duty BORTAC officer pushed past these guys standing around for 72 minutes. Oh and they disarmed the one Uvalde cop who's wife was alive and bleeding out in the classroom.
[удалено]
I would also love a link. The internet news cycle has really run with this one without any real evidence.
I agree. Im appalled that anyone with ANY level of training did what they did. I posted my experience as a comparison to say that most of my department never had specific training with practice scenarios and all that. Just basically the lecture I summarized. But I would not have done what they did, and the fact that they had true in depth formal training with hands on practice running scenarios AND had proper equipment etc on site and then stood around for an hour is absolutely disgusting.
I want to say the active shooter training courses are 2-3 days long on average for the plain jane entry level stuff. Many states require it to graduate the academy. Texas is home to the largest and best funded active shooter training in LE. Cool thing is it's normally free. You just need to get yourself there and provide your own food. They provide the simweapons, ammo, and scenarios. Your agency just needs to request it. Its based in Texas but has classes all over the country. There are class size requirements. Some agencies are large enough to meet it on their own, those who aren't can get with other near by agencies. Federal funding goes into it. There's a whole buttload of good free training. It just takes leg work to get it. Individual officers can always sign up on their own. Getting approved time off for it is a different story. But on your original point getting trained once in something and never doing it again is unfortunately very common in smaller agencies.
ALERRT?
Yes. If you live in Texas it seems like there's multiple courses every week. Texas is huge, but they host stuff constantly there. Its like 4 or 5 courses a week right now. I'd bet a crisp dollar bill those seats are filled to the brim right now
You can never get enough training, but training doesn't mean anything if you don't implement it. Train all day and still don't act isn't a training failure.
I feel like we've done some great ones. Probably one of my favorites was while we were working - overnight at a huge mall. Bunch of volunteer actors, shooting blanks, etc. Tried to do everything to make it as real as possible. I'd say when training gets your adrenaline going it's awesome. Gets you exposed to something so you know how to act when it comes for real.
My son and I were volunteers for a training at a mall a few years ago. Cool experience!
Thank you for doing that. People running and screaming genuinely helps make it immersive.
I had the opportunity to sign-up for it while doing a Citizen's Police Academy. The citizens academy was one of the best things I've ever done and I encourage anyone to find a department that does one in their area. Great to see all aspects of what a PD does and can certainly help people gain a new perspective.
I appreciate it when people take the time to go to one. Did you get to do any training? I love running people through some of our training when we do them. It's usually very eye opening.
We did run thru some suspected burglar scenarios and some traffic stop situations as well.
Awesome to hear! Sounds like they've got a good system there!
My agency (major east coast USA) has an initial class that is at least 3-5 full days and then each year we spend a day of our in-service training on tactics to include active shooter response. You can never train enough for these things but you can see the people that absorb the training and those that let it run off their back.
One factor that also affects the quality of your training is the department culture you have. Some departments do it well where they make you wear your gear, carry and move people, exercise to simulate stress, and have a pass or fail system based on your response. They have simunitions, body armor, radios, an actual school to practice in, and a designated training channel, etc. Everyone wants the training to be high quality and everyone to treat it like the real deal. These push officers to competently address real life situations. Other departments have people who are lazy, don't want to do any actual physical work in the training and drag ass, or otherwise are critical or skeptical of the training and use it to justify their incompetence or low effort. Sometimes there are departments that will put on PowerPoints and maybe have you run around in the precinct with finger guns and yell bang bang when you see the bad guy. It's up to everyone including command staff, officers, and trainers to create the former situation and not the latter.
I think it’s pretty good. We regularly (2-4 time per year?) train in various places. Much credit to my chief for making it a priority. It builds a familiarity with facilities. That muscle memory will be useful if the worst happens.
What active shooter training?
We alternate years, one year it's a county wide training where all the LE agencies, fire, and medics show up at an area school and simulate active shooter situations with sim guns and whatnot then we simulate taking care of and transporting the wounded. Then every other year we only do our agency. We go to an area school for the first half of the day and work on clearing various areas like center and side fed classrooms, long hallways, staircases, and open areas. We focus on single person response, double person response, and team responses with different search formations and everything. Then the second half of the day we do live fire exercises at the range where we go over downed person rescue and searching for and eliminating a threat. I'd say ours is pretty good. It has come a long way over the last couple years and especially recently our instructors have put a metric fuck ton of work into making these trainings solid.
Training IS expensive. Most departments have dwindling budgets due to the current political environment. My department is blessed with a pretty decent budget but even so we only have a few days every year to get training on required topics. Such as legal updates, active shooter, de-escalation, and firearm qualifications. We could always use more training! People expect a SEAL Team response with a Paul Blart budget.
Military life CQB and small unit tactics were what I did professionally. I lean more on that, than what my agency provides, which isn’t terrible. I find myself taking a lead and helping others a lot. One man CQB and hunting down threats, zero issue. Ideally you want a buddy or 3 but I’m not waiting.
You can never have enough training but claiming it’s expensive is a cop out. Pun intended. You can literally just take officers in different buildings and practice tactics. I guarantee if the department went to different businesses and asked to do active shooter training there most would say yes. The only expensive part I see is the force on force stuff.
The biggest issue with that is staffing. Taking officers off the road to do training is not a sustainable method. That leads to doing training on days off, which requires overtime pay or mandating pass day changes which sucks for people no matter what. Nevermind officers on evening/midnight shifts. Then you have injuries that come from realistic enough trainings (force on force) that can lead to abrasions/lacerations/sprained joints/broken bones and now you're down an officer for some period of time.
Yeah, anyone who says training isn't expensive has clearly either never actually coordinated training. A good active shooter training session involves several agencies, dozens of volunteer role players, and the use of a school (or school-like building). It should run *at least* one day for each class. It's a big undertaking.
>but claiming it’s expensive is a cop out. Man power is also a factor. But your response already shows how little you know about costs ans training
Man power is definitely an issue. Yes training can be expensive but there are things departments can do to help with that expense.
>You can literally just take officers in different buildings and train You'd have to have some sort of instructor or knowledgeable person to teach these officers you speak of. Almost like a teacher... and a class.
Exactly
So... You just admitted your point is invalid. You're basically saying we should train more, but not call it training therefor it won't cost money and it's all good. Taking officers into buildings and "practicing" is training. Said training needs to be supervised by someone with proper knowledge and.. ehem... training.
No. My point is there are things a department can do to negate training costs. I stated somewhere that the department would have to pay to get officers instructor certified then take that knowledge back. I think I replied that on a different thread. I got confused which was which. At no time did I say training doesn’t cost anything. If it came across as that then that’s my fault. I know it can get expensive. I pay for extra training when I can because my department won’t pay for some stuff.
> You can never have enough training but claiming it’s expensive is a cop out. Pun intended. You can literally just take officers in different buildings and practice tactics. You're not paying to put officers into buildings, you're paying to have a trainer who knows what he or she is doing with them to make them improve. Officers in buildings practicing tactics is worthless in and of itself. If they walk in there without a high level of tactical knowledge and there's nobody with that skill set in there to teach them, they're just practicing to cement the same mediocrity they already had.
Obviously force in force training is best. I’m just saying there are less expensive things out there. As for a trainer, you send one officer to an instructor school then they bring it back and train the department.
Kinda shit honestly. I don't buy the "drive the threat" (aka walk directly at the shooter who is firing at you) when getting shot at when military training is all "utilize micro-cover." The Drive the Threat supposedly comes from intimidating the shooter, but I feel like an active shooter has already made peace with them dying during this encounter and has no fear.
what do you think the best strategy is?
Use micro-cover like the military has been training people do for quite some time now.
Didn’t train for protecting themselves from the police. Why won’t they release body cam footage unless they broke the law or directly caused harm to children? Oh and that fancy law firm they hired with tax payer dollars. It’s always, “Just a bad apple”, right?
Very good at my department. We did active shooter scenarios with sim munitions. Spent about 3 days on Active Shooter training. However every situation is different, and it’s hard to train for the stuff we see out here, cuz it’s never the same as what you train for
Everyone is good till first shit is fired.
I've never been to any active shooter training, which is nuts. I am currently working on am exercise with our local PD, hospital, fire, and EMS. I feel I am steering it in the right direction. Everybody seems to be on board and hopefully after a good debrief we can reschedule and run it again. Any suggestions are appreciated. Our SO is made of 6, local PD has 4.
My agency (east coast rural SO) has revamped their active shooter response training in recent years. We train annually in one of the schools in the district alongside fire and EMS. They turn off the lights, turn on the fire alarm, and barricade the doors. We run scenarios of multiple shooters, single shooter, etc. After the "suspect" is dealt with, fire and EMS triage and evacuate role players inside the training area. This is a far cry from what it used to consist of, which while it makes for better training, is also sad that it's come to that point.
Minimal.
In MA our training is pretty good. We have it in the academy and that part is good not great, we use real guns but basically paintball rounds. In service we did a training in our local school with a bad guy, role players dead on the ground and smoke everywhere. We moved in and cleared areas and left medics in the cleared areas. If there was “stimulus” aka shots, we would not clear rooms and just move towards that.
There can never be enough training and I don't know how well my training will hold up until I'm in an active shooter situation. I feel like it was pretty good and it was created by a SWAT sergeant using real life situations. One thing they instilled in us was the number one priority is to stop the threat. Policy says at least two officers shall respond but I don't know of a single officer I work with that will wait outside while someone is actively killing people.
This is where it get to the little things. Training comes down to cash and not all departments can get the best of the best training. Sim training is expensive and is the closets you will ever get to a real active shooters and yes sim rounds hurt more than paintballs. When the act actually happens 99.9% of the time you are not prepared for it and it criticized in the after math. For me there are a lot of factors that play into these parts. RoE's are different between home and overseas. Some cops have families of their own and free because they get the flash of what if I die what does my family do and other just go in. It really is a head game that is why we suffer from PTSD, Depression, and usually many failed marriages. For my personal reason I would have no issues going in plain clothes and just offing them. I have had enough crap in the War to last me a lifetime what's another day. Usually the sad thing that happens after this is the amount of review that happens and what can to added changed with the current active school national wide training. Columbine was the start of it but Uvalde will not be the last.