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Law enforcement trains for active shooter in school
Local first response agencies teamed up Tuesday to get educated and trained for a possible situation involving an active shooter in a school.
Representatives of the Fort Scott Police Department, Bourbon County Sheriff’s Office, Mercy EMS and Fort Scott Fire Department attended an active shooter training event held at Fort Scott Middle School. The five-hour training involved classroom-type instruction led by School Resource Officer Mike Trim, and tabletop exercises with personnel from various agencies grouped together to discuss plans. The training concluded with a scenario involving an active shooter inside the school.
Trim said the primary goal of the training is “education.
“And to test our preparedness and sharpen our preparedness for such an event,” he said.
Trim’s talk focused on the responsibilities of each entity on the scene and “how to integrate each of the agencies” in a plan to address a potential emergency.
Trim said the FSPD has conducted active shooter training for officers twice a year for the last several years. He said the training was not planned in response to any recent school shootings in the U.S. but is beneficial in that it involved every emergency agency in Bourbon County.
“This is actually the first event in the city with every entity present in a training event,” he said. “We had already planned this before Florida.”
On Feb. 14, 17 people were killed and 17 more were wounded in a mass shooting that occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The suspected perpetrator, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, was identified by witnesses and arrested shortly afterward and later confessed.
Trim said the FSPD rotates schools for the trainings conducted throughout the year.
The tabletop exercises involved three types of scenarios – a low-impact event that deals with a threat of a school shooting, a moderate impact event that involves a single gunshot with reported injuries in a classroom, and a critical-impact event that is described as an active shooter event.
The low-impact event deals with identifying the credibility of a threat, discussing and dealing with rumors surrounding the threat, such as posts on social media, and whether a crime has been committed.
The moderate-impact event involved discussion and questions on communication between entities, notifying parents, access to the building for the fire department and EMS, and making sure correct information is sent to the school office in such an event.
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