Area law enforcement holds active shooter training

With weapons drawn, Jefferson County Sheriff’s deputies and Louisville Police officers, moved down the school hallway toward the sound of gunfire. Their goals, since this was a simulation, were to hone their skills stopping an active shooter threat and practice assessing potentially deadly scenarios.

JCSO Corporal Todd Hanchey, who is in charge of training for the Sheriff’s Office, said that he considers this type of training paramount.

“You’re going to do in real life what you trained to do. That’s a motor memory thing,” Hanchey said. “When you haven’t done a thing in a while, it’s not like riding a bike. You want to have training as much as you can.”

He believes active officers should get this type of live-action training at least two times a year.

“Things have changed since Columbine regarding how we respond,” Hanchey said. “You have to stay ahead of the curve. When something like this happens, we learn from it and a lot of the ways we respond changes. We have this kind of training to stay abreast of what the new techniques are.”

Utilizing a combination of trainers from Columbia County, Jefferson County and the local Emergency Management Agency, around 30 local officers spent a day reviewing techniques and actively practicing them in what Hanchey called a real-life-scenario-based training. The officers worked on building clearing, threat evaluation and neutralization in the former Louisville Middle School building. Participating officers and the trainers used special firearms and rounds that fired paint projectiles.

Hanchey explained that the scenarios involved officers being dispatched to an active shooter situation.

“Upon arrival they go in and have to communicate back to dispatch where they are what they are doing,” Hanchey said. “They listen for gun shots.”

Roleplayers act as both the shooter and what he called distractionaries, such as students or school staff, so that the officers have to assess the potential threat in each person they encounter.

“They have to use their judgement to determine if the role players are a threat and if they should use deadly force,” Hanchey said. “Of course, they have to locate and stop the threat, but they also get to practice dealing with the victims at hand.”

Hanchey described a scenario where officers discover wounded civilians, move them to secured locations, and then have to work to supply lifesaving first aid while scanning the area for possible in-coming threats.

“This live force-on-force training is essential to us being able to respond as a unit and with the practical knowledge that will enhance the probability of a positive outcome involving armed threats, both for the victims and the officers,” said Jefferson County EMA Director Jim Anderson.

Hanchey said that other training of this type is currently being planned and that all local law enforcement is invited to attend each time. Some of these exercises will include other emergency response departments, such as area fire fighters.

“Once you stop the primary threat, then the chaos really begins,” Hanchey said. “We have to train on keeping emergency responders safe so they can triage anyone who might have been injured, setting up staging areas where parents can gather to be reunited with their children. There’s a lot that has to be planned for.”