“Police! Get your hands up!”
Simulated gunshots and pretend victims…
“Help us, help us! Hands up!”
…lead to actual training and experience for the roughly 300 police officers participating in mandatory active shooter training this week.
“Anybody not clear right away where those shots were coming from?”
Grand Rapids Police Captain Dave Siver says there are 9-10 sessions a year that take months to plan and are as realistic as possible. Today’s simulation is a classroom-shooter scenario hosted at Cornerstone University,
“We’ve got a machine that mimics gunfire. We’ve got actually paintball-like cartridges we fire at each other, so it’s not just a walk-through or tabletop exercise. They’re actually doing realistic, scenario-based training.”
Siver says ongoing training is important not just for new officers, but the whole department because as officers are promoted, their roles change in emergency situations. Sessions include what happens after a shooter is neutralized, coordinating various emergency agencies, and conducting the investigation.
“Those events happen all over like you go to a Meijer or Walmart and there’s multiple victims shot or a nightclub shooting so there’s multiple arenas and avenues where this could happen and we want to be prepared, and what’s the latest trends.”
Officers study what worked and didn’t in previous incidents, and Siver says there’s always something to be learned.
“Obviously with recent events we don’t want to be the agency that has a failure, and we want to make sure the community is served the best it can be.”
“Shooter down!”
