At training, officers prepare for the worst

CASTINE – The call for the training scenario came in at about 2:15 p.m.

Someone had started shooting at the Maine Maritime Academy campus. One person already was dead and the shooter was still in the dormitory threatening to shoot more.

A four-man tactical team arrived at the scene. A shot rang out as they entered the building and another as they headed up the stairwell to the second floor. Moving as a unit, the men made their way down the dark hallway until a gunman appeared. At that point, the suspect and the officers exchanged gunfire.

That was one of the scenarios this week as law enforcement officers from all over Hancock County gathered at MMA for “simunitions” training in the interactive use of force. The scenarios put the officers into real-life situations they might face during their careers in which both they and the “bad guys” they face use real weapons that have been modified to shoot small paint pellets.

“This is top-notch training,” said Sgt. Sean Geagan of the Bucksport Police Department, one of the instructors for the two-day session held on Wednesday and Thursday. “This is as close as it gets to the real thing.”

The scenarios – some of them taken directly from incident reports from departments in Hancock County – ran the gamut from a simple stop of a motor vehicle with a light out to the active shooter scenario in which one or more suspects already have shot someone. In all of the scenarios during the two days at MMA, each suspect was armed. The suspect always was killed and sometimes officers were wounded.

“This is the closest it can get to the real-life situations most officers will face at some time in the field,” said Sgt. David Kearns of the Bar Harbor Police Department, another instructor. “This helps them to know how they’re going to react in a situation. That’s something a classroom can’t teach you.”

Although most of the officers receive similar training at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy and their departments conduct training regularly on their own, this is the first time this many different departments have participated in the training together. The Hancock County Sheriff’s Department, which developed the training session along with the instructors, officers from five local police departments, members of the Maine Marine Patrol, and security officers from the Hancock County airport, participated in the two-day training session. In all, 48 officers went through the training.

“This lets the public know that we’re working together,” said Detective Sgt. Alan Brown of the Sheriff’s Department. “This gives them all a chance to work on a team. That’s important. In some of these situations, I’m not always going to be working with four guys from my department. We do this training so that we can work together so we know what we do and how we do it.”

The actors portraying the suspects made every effort to make the situations as real as possible. The instructors monitored the scenarios while the officers responded to the simulated calls, and graded each officer on specific procedures that should be followed.

Immediately after the whistle blew ending each scenario, the instructors reviewed the exercise with the officers, often while they were still sweating and the adrenaline was still pumping from the confrontations in which they often had only a fraction of a second to decide whether to shoot or not to shoot.

“That is really intense,” said Officer Dan Harlan of the Bucksport Police Department.

The critiques from the instructors were taken to heart, and as each team moved through a series of shootout scenarios, the officers got better at making decisions and at working together as a team.

Although the scenarios were set at MMA and the college’s security officers participated in the setup for the training sessions, the scenarios were not specific to the college campus.

“The buildings are empty at this time of year and they have characteristics that we needed: doorways, bathrooms, stairwells, the field house. All of these things we can utilize for the training,” Brown said.

One or two departments at a time have done similar simunitions training in several high schools around Hancock County.

This type of scenario-based training is used by departments throughout the state and around the country. Most of the departments at Wednesday’s training session said they try to do similar sessions annually.

Given the events at Columbine High School and the more recent shootings at Virginia Tech, Brown said, it is important for officers to be prepared for this type of situation.

“We can’t say something like this isn’t going to happen in Hancock County,” Brown said. “I would rather be prepared for it and have nothing happen, than to have something happen and not be prepared for it. That’s why we do the training ahead of time. If we have to deal with it, we want to do it properly.”

rhewitt@bangordailynews.net

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