Department trains for active shooter situations
The Broomfield Police Department conducted its annual active shooter training at Holy Family High School on Wednesday morning.
The training, which began shortly after the Columbine High School shooting, is a yearly event where trainers from Broomfield SWAT help patrol officers run through multiple active shooter scenarios in which they might encounter while on the job.
“Unfortunately, Colorado has been center stage to a lot of mass shootings,” said Eric Fredrick, commander of investigations and co-commander of SWAT. “A lot of the tactics we use and train with now come from incidents that happened in Colorado.”
Fredrick said the main tactic that changed after Columbine was deciding that local police should act instantly in an active shooter event to stop the violence immediately, rather than waiting for SWAT to arrive on scene.
The training is a more simplified version of the hundreds of training hours that SWAT officers complete to prepare for active shooter situations, but that is because of the need for immediate and effective action from patrol officers, Fredrick said.
Because most patrol officers don’t get team training like SWAT, simplifying the training and making it as effective as possible allows for the patrol officers to feel more prepared working together in high stress situations such as an active shooter. It also allows for easy integration with other departments if necessary.
“You might have one school officer, a motorcycle officer, and a patrol officer teaming up to handle a situation, so the tactics have to be simple and effective,” Fredrick said. “That gives them the best chance for survival and success. We try to keep the tactics and training consistent throughout the region, so it’s cohesive throughout departments.”
Fredrick said because there
have been so many mass shooting events in recent years, there is now a national level of standardization of training for mass casualty and active shooter situations. Fredrick also spoke about the importance of looking at real life scenarios, such as the recent Uvalde shooting, having communication with other departments about what could have been done differently to be more effective, and learning from those situations.
The officers spent part of the day doing classroom training with SWAT members going through the rudimentary tactics, and then moved on to live scenarios with acting gunmen and victims throughout the school. One scenario even included a fake bomb in the room with the “shooter” to add an extra element of training for the participating officers.
“This training is really important because these people can do a lot of damage to unarmed people, but usually first contact with police the shooter is dead or has committed suicide within 30 seconds,” Fredrick said.
Nick Sprague, patrol commander and co-commander of SWAT, said the training is updated yearly and usually reflects current events and scenarios, but for this year’s training the department went back to basics because of the many fresh faces in the department.
“We have a pretty young department right now, so it’s important to start with the basics and then bring in the next steps,” Sprague said.
The active training scenarios are the best way to encourage confidence and “muscle memory” for the
officers who could potentially face these intense situations in real life, the commanders said.
“This kind of training allows them to get a chance to understand what they might see, hear, and encounter in a real active shooter situation,” Sprague said. “We try to make it as real as possible so they will be more confident going into something like this.”
The department usually does this training at Holy Family High School, but have held it in other places such as an office building and an outdoor venue so the officers have experience in multiple types of locations.