Police stalked down the hallways of a highly realistic school, ears trained to mimic gunshots.
“Shooting,” shouted the instructor, prompting the police to actually shoot. “What do we have to do?”
Many police officers have never fired, let alone shot, but they must answer the question correctly. Whether he arrives with twelve or he is alone, he must attend training even if it means death. The May school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 children and two adults died while police hesitated, shows the price of failure.
The State Preparedness Training Center in Oriskany, New York, a place to simulate, study, and possibly prevent future horrors, is part of a vast infrastructure for tragedy. Since 2017, the federal government has spent tens of millions of dollars training shooters, and states spend even more.
While some efforts are aimed at prevention, a new domestic terrorism unit within the New York State Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services is collating information from social services, schools and police to identify threats. , mostly since the attack began.
So schools across the country are teaching kids how to escape, hide and fight, and hospitals are preparing whole classes to be admitted. But as children return to school this month, the memory of the tragedy of the previous year makes it clear that these efforts alone cannot stem the tide of violence.
Costing more than $50 million, the 1,100-acre facility simulates a range of horrifying scenarios, from terrorist attacks to flash floods. Its crowning glory is Cityscape, a converted airplane hangar into a small town complete with bars, schools and shopping malls. There are framed pictures on the walls, his cup of coffee on the cafe table, and his VHS copy of Shaquille O’Neal’s classic “Kazaam” on the teacher’s desk.
Jackie Bray, Commissioner for Homeland Security and Emergency Services, which oversees the training of state police officers and paramedics, said:
“One of the reasons we train, and one of the reasons we train consistently, is that we ask people to do things that really go against their instincts,” added Bray.
It is hard to say whether such efforts will be enough.
Police training has no national standard and varies from town to town and state to state. Most militaries are small and rural, lacking the resources and organizational support of urban areas. And while the state covers training and even provides accommodation for New York officers, some departments lacking resources may still struggle to take advantage.
Even the best preparation does not guarantee success. A New York Times analysis of his 433 actual and attempted mass shootings that occurred between 2001 and 2021 found that he was nearly 60% finished before police arrived. was shown. Overall, the data show that police subdue the shooter in less than a third of all attacks.
“You look at these stories and they are terrible and I hope they are not something you have to deal with. I took the course: “If so, I hope that if I am called, I will be able to bring this training back to mind.”
Perplexity is hardly new. In a 1947 report, military historian SLA Marshall noted that fewer than 25% of his combat units found the courage to actually fire their weapons during World War II. His methodology has since been shown to be unscientific, but his conclusions remain symbolic of the human tendency to hesitate in the face of danger.
Mass shootings pose similar challenges. When the shooter barricaded his nightclub in Orlando’s Pulse in 2016, police said he waited nearly three hours while the victim was bleeding. Two years later, armed police retreated to safety when a teenage gunman attacked students at Marjory Stoneman’s Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people. In May, the public watched hundreds of Uvalde police wait for nearly an hour. at Robb Elementary School.
When a person encounters a threat, their eyes dilate, their heart rate increases, and their body prepares to spring into action. coordination is impaired.
Professional military and SWAT teams often try to recruit people who are naturally cool under pressure. But Dr. Arne Nieuwenhuis, who studies human performance at New Zealand’s University of Auckland, said ordinary officers could do little in the face of biology. “Our ability to intentionally control our reactions under high stress is very limited,” he explained.
For those who come to the State Preparedness Training Center, learning how your body responds to stress is just one of the many lessons you can learn in a 2- to 5-day course.
Conceived by Gov. George E. Pataki in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the center opened in 2006 to allow police, firefighters and paramedics to train together. Enrollment never reached the governor’s desired 25,000 a year. At its peak in 2019, it was half that. The center was built with a combination of state and federal funding and provides free training to all New York law enforcement officers.
Active shooting training involves a group of 24 people clearing hallways and rooms. They practice responding to domestic incidents and reports of shootings at shopping centers and schools. After feedback from the instructor, they perform the exercises again.
In one scenario, a police officer has to respond to a shooting in a mall. They arrive in an eerie silence. Searching for clues, they scour each store (café, army navy store) before finding and engaging a gunman trapped in a travel agency storefront.
The need for this kind of involvement began after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. The police secured the perimeter as they were trained. Then they waited for his SWAT team. Dozens of students died during this time.
Stallman, the center’s deputy director, has coached officers since the early days and remembers “a lot of backlash.”
“It was very difficult to convince the patrolmen that we needed to go there,” he said.
“‘I don’t have a vest,'” he said the officer complained. “I’m not trained like them, and I don’t have long guns like them. Now you’re telling me I need to come in and do their job?” ?”
Their concerns were not unfounded: A review of 84 active shooter attacks by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University in San Marcos found that one-third of officers who responded alone shot. It was shown that
“Some departments didn’t necessarily change their minds. Research Forum executive director Chuck Wexler said, “After the Uvalde incident, if there was ever any ambiguity, there was no longer any responsibility for first responders.”
Stallman said he hopes to help police officers understand the idea of having to put themselves in a situation they may not be able to escape from.
“It’s hard,” he said. “But if they don’t do it, people die.”
Previous training programs were aimed at preventing officers from stressing themselves out. The idea was that individuals could build immunity to a fight or flight response through exposure. However, little attention has been paid to assessing the impact of training on actual police work.
Steven James, a researcher at Washington State University who studies stress and policing policy, said, “We didn’t collect data on police shootings, but rather analyzed whether the training officers received contributed to their successes or failures. Not even.”
Dr. James instead prefers skills training that incorporates a manageable amount of stress to build confidence. said he.
“What we have to do is build the resource side of the equation instead of trying to get people used to the stress side of the equation,” he explained.
A New Zealand researcher, Dr. Nieuwenhuys, has begun to notice a similar phenomenon. A 2010 simulation measured the marksmanship of police officers in the face of occasional shoot-back perpetrators and found that police officers were able to improve their performance in highly disturbing situations. Preliminary results suggest that this effect is reproducible in more serious situations, but only if officers are properly trained.
Then there is the critical question of whether important clinical results are reproducible.
Katherine Schwight, former director of the FBI’s Active Shooter Program, believes all training is worth it. But even so, there are no guarantees.
“We all want simple answers,” Schweidt said. “It’s an impossible goal. The reason it’s an impossible goal is because we’re not machines. We’re humans.”
Outside the Oriskany Center classroom, police officers took action. They covered the door jamb and fired bright blue mock weapons into the room, knocking the gunman down with four of his neat pops.
Then they heard screams in the next room.
Instructor EJ Weeks immediately provided feedback, praising their communication and formation. Could they have moved faster?
“We need to move directly to that threat and mitigate it,” Weeks reminded them. “What can we do to stop the carnage?”
“Stop dying,” the police chorused.