When, at 11:24 a.m.
April 20, 1999, the first police officer to respond to the Columbine HS
massacre--an SRO on duty that day who exchanged fire with Harris outside the
high school--Harris and Klebold still had 44 more minutes to live.
Eleven more of
their victims had yet to be shot and killed. Fourteen more had yet to be
wounded.
Eleven minutes
later, at 11:35 a.m., the pair inflicted the last casualty of the massacre
yet it would be another 33 minutes before Harris and Klebold committed
suicide, at 12:08 p.m. During that interval, they wandered the school,
firing their weapons at nothing in particular, and making occasional contact
with students who’d gone to ground. Had they been inclined, the pair had
ample means and opportunity to slay dozens more.
Meanwhile, outside,
police officers had surrounded the school and established a perimeter but
were making no move to enter the building, as though Harris and Klebold were
merely hostage takers who could be negotiated with or waited out. Not until
11:09 p.m., one hour and one minute after they’d turned their guns on
themselves, would SWAT finally make entry.
The horror of that
day 19 years ago forced school administrators, psychologists, and law
enforcement to re-think and re-write doctrine. In particular, SWAT team
leaders began developing protocols for neutralizing what is now called the
“active shooter”: an armed man--almost always a man, often heavily
armed--who occupies a public space, commences shooting, and continues to
shoot to kill until he runs out of ammunition or is disarmed or disabled.
It takes time for a
SWAT team to muster, however, and the first-responders at the scene of an
active shooting are almost certainly going to be patrol officers, who may
never have aspired to make a forced entry of anything under fire but of whom
much will be expected in the next 10 seconds, the next 30, the next 90. It’s
with those officers in mind--the sharp edge of the wedge--that the Indiana
SWAT Officers Association (ISOA) will be holding a one-day active shooter
course at Chesterton Middle School, from 8 to 4 p.m. Monday, July 27.
The CMS Exercise
As it happens,
Chesterton Police Reserve Officer Tony Emanuele helped organize the course.
He’s a member of ISOA’s Mobile Training Team, which once a month gives him
the chance to teach to other police officers throughout the state the skills
he learned while serving with the U.S. Coast Guard’s Deployable Specialized
Forces (DSF), USGS’ version of a special warfare command. During his career,
Petty Officer Emanuele served two tours of duty in Iraq and a third, a
counter-piracy operation, off the coast of Somalia. He also led a 12-man
SWAT team in New York City tasked with anti-terror assignments and riverine
security details at the United Nations and during presidential visits.
So Emanuele knows
his way around a threat-level. He politely declined, however, to discuss
Monday’s active-shooter exercise in any detail. The tactics to be taught
aren’t exactly state secrets, they’re easily Googled, yet there’s no point
in being stupid about it, Emanuele told the Chesterton Tribune. How
to engage the active shooter and safely and effectively return fire; how to
move as a single officer, without backup; how to move as a team of officers;
how to establish a collection point for casualties and begin immediate
first-aid: these are the subjects participants will be drilled in.
Simunition--non-lethal
training ammunition--will be fired, inside the school, as part of plotted
scenarios.
When it comes to
excising an active shooter from a public space, Emanuele noted, there’s no
real difference between a school, a mall, an office building, a hospital.
The tactics are the same. The particular advantage offered by CMS--besides
the fact that it’s empty right how--is the diversity of “terrain”: hallways,
stairways, multiple rooms, outer and inner offices, and large open areas
like gyms and cafeterias.
Neighbors on Monday
will see a swarm of law enforcement at CMS throughout the day,
Emanuele warned, at least in the form of squad cars. But little or none of
the exercise will be conducted outside the school.
The interagency
response to the exercise has been “huge,” Emanuele noted. Officers from 15
different departments will be participating, including the Chesterton,
Portage, Hammond, West Lafayette, and Chicago PDs; the Porter County,
Tippecanoe County, and Marion County sheriff’s departments; and the NICTD
Transit Police. The Indiana State Police, meanwhile, is providing
instructors for the exercise free of charge to ISOA and 5.11 Tactical, a
law-enforcement outfitter sponsoring the event, is providing complimentary
go-bags to participants.
Training for the
Inconceivable
“It’s unfortunate
we have to have this kind of training at all, ever,” Chesterton Police Chief
Dave Cincoski said. “But we’re truly fortunate to have a resource like the
Indiana SWAT Officers Association to make it available and inexpensive. May
we never have to use it.”
“Tony (Emanuele)
has been a great asset to this department,” Cincoski added. “He’s brought a
wealth of experience and knowledge from the Coast Guard.
Steve Rohe,
director of security for the Duneland Schools, will be on hand as an
observer on Monday. “The old approach used to be containment and grid
search,” he said. “Now it’s threat neutralization and search-and-recovery.
It has to be. It’s the age we live in and it’s sad. Odds are, it’s not going
to happen here. But that’s what they thought at Columbine and Sandy Hook.”
Rohe did suggest,
on the other hand, that the CPD’s very conspicuous presence in the Duneland
Schools might tend to act as a deterrent to those of ill will. “The Duneland
Schools has a terrific relationship with the Chesterton Police Department.
Not that many years ago, a police car parked outside a school prompted all
sorts of calls to administration from worried parents. Now we have officers
in the schools every day, just visiting, circulating. And we’ve got the SRO,
Randy Komisarcik, who’s based at CMS and helped plan the drill.”
Monday’s
active-shooting exercise is only one of many courses taught by ISOA’s Mobile
Training Team. Over the past 12 months, ISOA has held tactical drills on an
airplane and passenger train car and offered sessions on counter-ambush,
arrest control, and defensive tactics.
ISOA’s goal: to
give the patrol officer SWAT capability, for serving and protecting in a
world scarier and more volatile than anyone could have imagined a generation
ago.
“A SWAT officer is
every officer nowadays,” Emanuele said. “If you’re first on the scene of an
active shooting, you have to be part of the scene. You can’t just wait for
SWAT. So we’re giving patrol officers the enhanced skills they need to save
lives immediately.”