Police use Stillwater’s stadium to prepare for worst-case scenario
STILLWATER — For OSU football fans, a worst-case scenario in Boone Pickens Stadium is spilled nachos, a late interception or shanked field goal as time expires. But police officers from across the country spent Thursday preparing for a life-threatening worstcase scenario.
Twenty police officers from SWAT teams practiced with live rounds from high-powered rifles in the stadium. From suites high above the turf, snipers took aim on 3-inch paper targets below.
Stillwater and Oklahoma State University police departments posted alerts on social media telling residents to ignore gunfire from the stadium. Although muffled outside the gates, shots in the stadium reverberated across the aluminum seats in all directions.
Stillwater Police Lt. Dale Higgins, the Stillwater Multijurisdictional Special Operations Team leader, said the training offers a unique chance for officers to take the next step in preparing for the worst. The special operations team deploys to every game day, but Higgins said letting snipers shoot in the stadium provides familiarity with the environment in the same way as a regular shooting range.
Higgins said he hopes he never has to use Thursday’s training in real life.
“What used to never happen happens all the time now,” Higgins said. “We make no claim we can stop it, but we can mitigate the loss.”
Phoenix-based TacFlow Academy leads a course for police snipers to learn the varying heights, distances and angles that stadiums present officers. Boone Pickens Stadium is the academy’s 41st public venue response class and only the third college stadium to host training after Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn, Alabama, and Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Officers had to pass a qualification test for accuracy before shooting live rounds in the stadium. Higgins said concerns about stray rounds were misplaced because a sniper’s missed shot is a matter of inches on the target, not feet away from it.
Mark Lang is a TacFlow Academy instructor and active member of Dallas SWAT. He said the idea for training at public venues started before the Sept. 11 attacks and evolved as attacks and risks to the public changed.
“We kind of foresaw what was on the horizon,” Lang said. “Any time you get a large group or gathering of people together, because of the War on Terror and terror attacks, you’ve got to do something now to integrate SWAT teams to protect these venues.
“You want your besttrained, best-equipped guys here on event day. This could be any venue. It just happens to be at Boone Pickens Stadium right now. That being said, the traditional uniformed response here on event day is no longer good enough.”
Part of the training included teams planning a response to protect Hester Street from the stadium. Lang said the Walk, where OSU players, the Cowboy Marching Band and fans walk from the Student Union to the stadium, is a vulnerable target from vehicle-borne attacks up Hester Street.
On the stadium’s roof, a small team looked along the street and preplanned distances to dial in rifle scopes to help cover the area. This position included a .50-caliber rifle designed to disable vehicles. Lang gave the team the threat of an SUV rigged with an improvised explosive and suicide attackers inside.
Lang said he knows officers carrying heavy weapons may intimidate people, but said he thinks the security that SWAT teams provide at stadiums outweigh those concerns.
“Sixty-thousand people come here, and they’re going to want to be safe and have security,” Lang said. “So how do you provide that? We don’t live in that world anymore where you can assume to just go to the event and leave and everything will be hunky dory.”