In the light of recent school tragedies in Canada and the United States a scheduled exercise for the North Bay Police Services Tuesday couldn’t have been timelier.
In the light of recent school tragedies in Canada and the United States a scheduled exercise for the North Bay Police Services Tuesday couldn’t have been timelier.
Twice a year the Emergency Response team undergo weeklong specialized training where they run a number of scenarios. Tuesday saw the team responding to a hostage situation on Monastery Road that took on an eerie familiarity.
“For us this type of training has come in effect since Columbine a number of years ago, and we’ve been doing that yearly ever since,” explains Sgt. Mike Hunter.
“We didn’t portray this because of those (Montreal and Pennsylvania). We already had this incorporated, but it’s just a matter of enhancing and fine tuning it and keeping it fresh. It’s a skill, it’s a tangible skill. If you don’t use it you loose it, so we have to keep using it as much as we can even in training.”
Hunter says the way in which police respond to hostage situations was forever changed following Columbine. Prior to that fateful day officers were trained to wait and explore the demands.
“The officers in their previous training did wait, they were containing the outside, and taking care of the people that were running from the building either injured and or frightened,” he says, “waiting for those backup officers, waiting for those tactical officers to arrive before going in. Now those frontline officers that we have here in North Bay are trained if they have an active shooter, those three or four officers are going in right away. As you saw in the scenario here, we’re bypassing innocent victims, we’re bypassing injured people with the objective of finding the bad guy, so we can isolate him and minimize that injury or damage.”
Part of minimizing the carnage is for the officers to understand what they are up against upon entry of a building. No matter what, they are to stay focused on the task at hand … eliminate the threat.
“Right now our officers are starting to understand more and more how these people are acting, what their goals are, or what their objectives are. In the past though, it used to be that they wanted something. If they go in and take hostages they want money or they want fame or something like that, but now what they want is violence.”
“These people are going in with no other objective then to kill or hurt somebody else, so the police response has to be quick, and has to be effective to minimise that. We’ve come to the realization that we may not be able to stop it because it’s already happened once we find out, so now it’s a matter of minimizing the damage; minimizing the injuries to least amount of people as we can and that comes with our quality of service.”
Hunter says Nipissing University played a key role in the day’s exercise because not only did the school provided a perfect location to train in, but that they also provided expert subjects to assist in the drill.
“We’re trying to inflict as much emotion, both psychological and otherwise on the officers, so they have more than just one thing to think about.”
“If you’ve got some innocent victims running by yelling and screaming and you’ve got some injured people, that all adds to their stress level and it’s training them to stay on task and stay focused for what they have to do,” explains Hunter.
Students from the Criminal Justice program were led into the Monastery not knowing what was going to unfold and when the mock shooting started they found themselves reacting to the situation. The students found hiding spots, ran screaming from the building and even stared down the barrel of the officers’ guns.
Professor Shelley Lechlitner says being part of the exercise offered far more insight for her students than could ever been found in a classroom.
“I think it’s terribly important that they see things first-hand. We can teach scenarios to people and they ask very good questions, but actually observing it on a first-hand basis … it’s just so important because there are other factors at play.”
“Adrenaline, fear, all kinds of things that you just cannot put into the formula when you’re trying to describe a scene, no matter how particular you are about the facts about the scene orally in class.”
Lechlitner says that she would like to see the students walk away with an understanding of the roles that everyone plays in a situation like this, from the victims through to the police and the seriousness of the task at hand.
“Also, the role that the accused person plays in the whole scenario, in terms of how he or she is treated, what the avenues of escape are, in terms of whether this person is going to commit suicide, those are the types of things they would never have access to from a class scenario,” says Lechlitner.
“I definitely think it was a learning experience for all the students that were involved, it also gives you a real appreciation for the students that were faced with this situation in real life,” says Shawna Cunningham, a 4th year Criminal Justice student.
“It gives you a greater respect for the police in this situation as well. It makes you more cautious realizing that it can happen anywhere. It could happen in our own school even.”
Hunter says the exercise was an excellent opportunity for students to see the operation from the inside, especially as these types of drills have replaced the old standards.
“Even in the young primary grades now, where they use to train back in the 60’s and 70’s for nuclear demonstrations teaching kids to get under the desks, now they’re training for terrorists and rapid action deployment. So they’re teaching them about lockdowns, teaching them were they should go, where they should stay and what to expect from the police when we come in.”
Training for the rest of the week will include high-risk vehicle stops, containment exercises and high-risk arrests.
