This week, 16 police agencies, including the Delaware State Police, participated in a two-day training session in Bethany Beach organized by the Ocean View Police Department, focusing on responding rapidly to high-risk situations.
Topics ranged from how to deal with a mentally ill person threatening suicide to school shootings. Tuesday’s session, which included the school-shooting topic, became eerily relevant last week after a student gunman killed 32 people and himself on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., in a gruesome act of violence.
Ocean View Police Chief Ken McLaughlin said he expected the entire two-day session to be helpful but especially wanted local law enforcement officers to know how to respond to such a mass shooting, inside or outside of a school.
“We know it’s going to be the patrol cop who is handling this situation,” McLaughlin said, adding that his department recently participated in practical drills in area schools, preparing for a hypothetical school shooting. Selbyville Police Chief Scott Collins organized those training sessions.
“The public expects a professional response,” McLaughlin said. “The average patrol officer does not get this kind of training. I’ve got an obligation,” McLaughlin said, to see that his officers do get that training.
Steve Ijames, a deputy chief in Springfield, Mo., and former head of that department’s special response team, echoed McLaughlin’s sentiment, confirming that patrol officers — not special response teams — usually handle rapid-response, high-risk situations such as those discussed this week.
“The idea is to deal with practical stuff they are really going to face,” Ijames said Tuesday. “I don’t want the idea of a school shooting to overshadow the value of this class. They are statistically more likely to encounter the mentally ill person with a gun (outside of a school).”
Ijames has taught the class, “Rapid Deployment to High Risk Situations,” in 33 countries and across the U.S. since 1994. On Tuesday, he discussed situations such as encountering suspects wielding a gun or a knife without threatening violence and how to relieve such a situation.
He also explained, in detail — using graphic videos and photographs — how to properly disarm a suspect or shoot someone with plastic bullets or a bean-bag gun. Tuesday morning’s session — complete with cheers of approval by the law enforcement officers in attendance, as well as sighs in disgust — revealed high-stress situations and the consequences of mishandling such situations, the results of which could be death on “either side of the badge.”
Ijames continually, and with an experienced background, stressed the officers remaining calm and following a leader who makes all the requests and does all the talking with hopes of attaining “verbal control.” Citing the hit television show “Cops,” he said police officers are prone to screaming in a high-risk situation, which usually only exacerbates the problem.
“It’s real important in scenarios like this that you facilitate effective communication. That’s not screaming,” he said, adding that simultaneous screaming promotes a “leaderless” environment and chaos.
Bill Crotty, a member of a Delaware State Police special response team and patrol supervisor who sat in the second-to-last row in the small room Tuesday, said he attended to learn tactics to bring back to — and, hopefully, implement within — the state police.
“It’s very helpful,” Crotty said of this week’s session. “A lot of times, patrol guys are the first ones to arrive, and situations can be dealt with before they mushroom. We might be using something that is effective, but there might be something out there that is more effective.”