The police slithered down the school’s remarkably realistic hallway, ears pricked up for imitation gunfire. Avoiding a child-sized mannequin, they headed for the classroom where an actor was screaming.
“Shots were fired,” the instructor called, urging officers to what would be real-life gunshots. ” What do we have to do ? »
Officers – many of whom have never fired their weapons at another person, let alone been shot at – must answer this question correctly. Whether they are a dozen or just one, training requires them to commit, even if they risk death. The May school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two adults died as officers wavered, demonstrates the price of failure.
The State Preparedness Training Center in Oriskany, NY, where the terrors of the future are simulated, studied and, perhaps, prevented, is part of a vast infrastructure for tragedy. Since 2017, tens of millions have been spent by the federal government on mass shooter training, and states have spent even more.
And while some efforts are aimed at prevention – a new National Terrorist Unit within the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services is gathering intelligence from social services, schools and departments. to identify threats – most only happen once an attack has started.
Thus, throughout the country, schools teach children to flee, hide and fight, and hospitals prepare the admission of entire classes. But as children head back to school this month, memories of the previous bloody year make it clear that such efforts alone cannot stem the tide of violence.
The 1,100-acre facility, which cost more than $50 million, simulates a terrifying array of scenarios, from terrorist attacks to flash floods. Its crowning glory is the Cityscape, an aircraft hangar transformed into a small town, complete with a bar, a school and a shopping center – all built to be bombed and shot down. There are framed photos on the walls, coffee mugs on coffee tables and, on a teacher’s desk, a VHS copy of Shaquille O’Neal’s comeback “Kazaam.”
“We put a lot of care into making it as realistic as possible,” said Jackie Bray, commissioner of the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, which oversees training for state police and emergency responders. .
“One of the reasons we train, and one of the reasons we train regularly, is that we ask people to do things that are really against their instincts,” said added Ms. Bray.
It’s hard to say if efforts like these will be enough.
There are no national standards for police training, resulting in variations from city to city and state to state. Most forces are small and rural, lacking the resources or organizational support of municipal services. And while the state covers training and even provides housing for New York officers, some resource-strapped departments may still struggle to take advantage of it.
Even the best preparation is no guarantee of success: A New York Times analysis of 433 actual and attempted mass shootings from 2001 to 2021 showed nearly 60 percent ended before police arrived. In total, the data showed that police subdued gunmen in less than a third of all attacks.
“You see these stories, and they’re terrible, and you hope they’ll never be something you have to deal with,” said Sgt. Chris Callahan of the Saratoga Springs Police Department, who took an active shooter course in June. “You’re hoping that if that was ever the case – if I was ever called up – that I would be able to come back to that for this training.”
The dilemma is not new. In a 1947 report, military historian SLA Marshall noted that less than 25% of combat troops found the courage to fire their guns during World War II. While his methodology has since proven less than scientific, his conclusion has persisted as a symbol of the human propensity for hesitation in the face of danger.
Mass shootings create a similar conundrum. When a gunman barricaded the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016, police waited nearly three hours to move in while the victims bled. Two years later, when an armed teenager attacked students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people, an armed officer retreated to safety. In May, the nation saw hundreds of officers in Uvalde stand their ground for nearly an hour at Robb Elementary School.
When a person encounters a threat, the eyes dilate and the heart rate increases, preparing the body for action. The brain’s response to stimulus is heightened, but the prefrontal cortex is restricted, impairing decision-making and hand-eye coordination.
Specialized military and SWAT teams often seek to recruit people who are naturally cool under pressure. But base officers can’t do much about biology, said Dr Arne Nieuwenhuys, who studies human performance at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. “Their ability to deliberately control their response under high stress is just very limited,” he explained.
For those who come to the State Preparedness Training Center, learning how their body responds to stress is just one of many lessons learned in classes that last two to five days.
Envisioned by Governor George E. Pataki following the September 11 attacks, the center opened in 2006 to allow police, firefighters and emergency doctors to train together. Registrations never reached the 25,000 per year hoped for by the governor: its peak, in 2019, was half. The center was built with a combination of state and federal money and provides free training to all law enforcement officers in New York.
In active fire training, groups of 24 navigate hallways and clean rooms, among other exercises. They train to respond to domestic incidents and reports of shootings in malls and at school. After the comments of the instructors, they restart the exercises.
In one scenario, officers must respond to gunfire in a shopping mall. They arrive in an eerie silence. On the lookout for clues, they scour every store – the cafe, the Army-Navy store – before finding and engaging the shooter hidden in the storefront of a travel agent.
The imperative for this kind of engagement began after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. The police did what they were trained to do: secure the perimeter. Then they waited for a SWAT team. In the meantime, nearly a dozen students have died.
Mr Stallman, the center’s deputy director, has instructed officers since those early days, and he recalls “a lot of pushback”.
“It was extremely difficult to convince the patrol officers that they had to go,” he said, because officers had for years left these tasks to specialist teams.
“‘I don’t have the vest,'” he said, the officers complained. “’I don’t have the training they have, I don’t have the long guns they have. Now you’re telling me I have 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 San Marcos showed that a third of officers who responded alone were shot.
“Some departments haven’t necessarily changed their way of thinking; some departments were a bit ambiguous about whether this officer should wait for other additional officers,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group. “In the wake of Uvalde, if there was ambiguity before, there is no longer any on the responsibility of the first responder.
Mr Stallman said he hoped to help officers understand that they had to put themselves in situations they couldn’t walk away from.
“How difficult it is,” he said. “But if they don’t, then people die.”
In the past, training programs aimed to insulate agents from their own stress – the idea being that an individual could develop immunity to the fight-or-flight response with exposure. But relatively little attention has been paid to evaluating the impact of training on actual police work.
“We don’t even collect data on police shootings, let alone analyze whether the training the officer received was instrumental in the success or failure,” said University researcher Stephen James. from Washington State who studies stress and police politics.
Dr. James instead favors skill-based training that incorporates manageable amounts of stress to build confidence. Realistic programs like Oriskany’s can be helpful, he said, if they follow evidence-based programs.
“What we need to do, instead of trying to get people used to the stress side of the equation, is build the resource side of the equation,” he explained.
Dr Nieuwenhuys, the researcher in New Zealand, started seeing something similar. In a 2010 simulation measuring the marksmanship of police officers against an assailant who occasionally retaliated, he found that police officers were able to improve their performance under high anxiety circumstances. Preliminary results suggest the effect could be repeatable in more severe circumstances, he adds, but only if officers receive the right training.
Then there is the crucial question of whether a clinical outcome will be reproducible when it matters.
Katherine Schweit, the former head of the FBI’s active shooter program, thinks any training is valuable. But even so, there are no guarantees.
“We all want a simple answer,” Ms Schweit said. “It’s an impossible goal. And the reason it’s an impossible goal is because we’re not machines. We are humans.
Outside the classroom in the center of Oriskany, officers sprang into action. Using the door frame as cover, they fired their bright blue imitation guns into the room, downing the shooter with four clean pops.
Then they heard the screams in the next room – a hostage, held at gunpoint by a second gunman. They only stopped for a moment before unleashing a cloud of ghost bullets on the shooter, ending the standoff in 25 seconds flat.
Soon an instructor, EJ Weeks, was giving feedback, praising their communication and training. Could they have acted faster?
“We have to act directly, directly towards this threat, mitigate the threat,” Mr. Weeks reminded them. “Stop the killing so we can do what? »
“Arrest the dying,” chained the officers.