MOULTRIE — Shots are fired and law enforcement officers jump into action, returning fire, to quickly take out a shooter. This shooter, however, will get up and walk away from it. The Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office held four days of intensive Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training at Stringfellow Elementary School this week.

ALERRT Instructor Thomas Moore led the training, which started with classroom instruction dealing with the principles of rapid response to an active shooter scenario. He used as examples the school shootings that had occurred in the past to illustrate the lessons that were learned from them.

Columbine High School example

Moore started with a recap of what happened at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, where 12 students and one teacher were killed by two shooters.

He said when one of the shooters fired at the officer who was first on the scene, he returned fire at 60 yards with a handgun but was not successful in taking the shooter down.

“Is it possible to hit a person at 60 yards with a hand gun?” he asked the class and the answer was, “yes.”

Then, he asked them, “Do you currently … rhetorical question….Do you currently have the skill set to shoot at the shooter at 60 yards with a pistol? … Hard skills in this are incredibly crucial.”

“Hard skills” are specific quantifiable, measurable skills that can be learned through training and education.

Moore said hard skills mattered because, if the officer had been able to hit one of the shooters, it would have changed what happened at Columbine.

He said, “Law enforcement got there and did exactly what they were trained to do. They contained it and called SWAT.”

He said they didn’t enter the school but did try to engage the shooters from outside of the school and they got the people that were injured on the outside of the building to safety.

“Nobody pursued the shooters. They waited for SWAT to do that. They called multiple SWAT teams,” Moore said.

He said when SWAT entered the school, it was chaos with unexploded bombs everywhere, students and teachers hiding, ankle-deep water from the sprinkler system, and kids running up and grabbing them looking for safety.

“That was 45 minutes after the attack started and the SWAT finally started their entry. Forty-five minutes. Thirteen minutes in this thing, both the shooters killed themselves,” he said. “We just had people in there bleeding out, dying.”

Moore repeated: The officers did exactly what they were trained to do. He said there were reports of officers on the scene that said, “We’re not doing the right thing, here. We’re doing what we’re trained to do. We’re doing what policy told us …. but this is wrong.”

Moore added they immediately knew there was a problem only minutes into it. He said another problem was that EMS wasn’t allowed to go in until hours later, so there were injured people in the building dying.

“That is what launched things like ALERRT. That is what launched us saying, ‘We’re not waiting for SWAT.’ Originally they said, ‘We’ll wait for four law enforcement officers. As soon as we get four law enforcement officers, we’re going in.’ Then, we realized that’s not quick enough either,” he said.

He told the class that what they were going to learn was that, even if they are alone, they still need to make entry.

“You hunt down an active killer and you stop them, all alone,” he said.

He told them that if they were blessed enough to have three or four officers with them that was great but if not, they still needed to enter the building and stop the shooter, period.

“It is the only thing that’s acceptable,” Moore said. “This is what we signed-up for. Those kids are in that school alone. If it’s a church house, those adults, those kids are in there alone. Tax-payers gave you body armor and a gun.”

He said the recurring themes, with all of the active shooter incidents, that he was going to talk about were: “We didn’t think it would happen here,” “It’s a small town,” and “That kind of stuff doesn’t happen here.”

Moore said some of the lessons learned from Columbine were that all law enforcement officers needed to have the training, not just the SWAT teams. He added that any cop with a gun and a badge needed to understand how to deal with active shooter situations.

“This is not a SWAT problem. This is an ‘all cop’ problem,” he said.

He said another thing they did after the Columbine incident was revise the “priority of life scale.” He asked them if they remembered from their law enforcement academy training that “officer safety is number one?” Then, he asked them, if “officer safety is number one” and domestic violence calls are dangerous, why respond to them?

Responses from the class were because they had signed-up for and were getting paid to do the job.

“So, what you’re telling me is that your job is number one. Officer safety is not number one, the job is,” he said.

He said, if “officer safety was number one,” officers could tell dispatch that they were not responding to a domestic violence call.

Moore said officer safety has never been number one but they could say it was important. He said the way to handle officer safety was to train and train for real and practice like they meant it.

He told the class that on the “priority of life scale,” hostages were number one and he wasn’t telling them that some lives were more important but it was a way to help them make decisions.

“So, the first people we have to protect is hostages, next is innocent bystanders,” he said.

Moore said the reason hostages were first was because they were harder to save where innocent bystanders could easily be directed to get out of the way to a safe location.

Moore said the third priority was public safety (law enforcement) and fourth was the suspects.

He said they were trained to use objectively reasonable force to stop suspects but they were still on the “priority of life scale” list.

“We’re not judges, we’re not juries, we’re not executioners. If we have to use force or deadly force, we render aid to the suspects,” Moore said.

He concluded the Columbine example saying that since officer safety was not number one, they needed to take their training seriously.

Virginia Tech example

Next, Moore recapped what happened at Virginia Tech in 2007, where a student killed 32 people and wounded 17 others before killing himself.

“It was the worst school shooting that we’ve had and it is one of the best responses,” he said. “Response was phenomenal.”

He said the lesson they learned from that incident was they needed some real breaching capabilities because the shooter chained the main entrance doors to the building shut. He told them that they would be talking about breaching and practicing it later.

“We make the mistake, in law enforcement, I hear it all the time. … We assume what the victims are gonna do,” he said. “Don’t try to predict what they’re going to do.”

Another thing they learned from the Virginia Tech incident was that the victims in the classrooms reacted different ways during the attack from barricading the door and escaping out of a window to just standing with a blank face.

Moore said, “Don’t be surprised when you find people hiding. Don’t be surprised when you’re going down the hall and a bunch of people are running at you. Don’t be surprised when you go into a room and you didn’t announce yourself and now you got a whole bunch of citizens trying to fight you because they think you’re the bad guy.”

Robb Elementary example

The last school shooting incident he recounted was at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a shooter killed 19 students and two teachers.

Moore said the shooter had wrecked his vehicle in front of the school and the incident was, initially, called in to 911 as a car accident. Then, later on, it was reported to law enforcement that shots had been fired, he said. However, most of the officers that responded thought they were going to a car accident, he said.

“They see a man with an AR-15 trying to go in the school. One of the officers is holding a rifle, sees the guy with the rifle trying to go in the school. He looks back at his supervisor and says, ‘Can I shoot him?’ Are you allowed to shoot somebody that’s entering a school with an AR-15? One that he shot at two people,” he asked them.

Some of the officers in the class voiced “yes.” Moore asked if that was objectively reasonable because that’s a standard they live and die by.

Being objectively reasonable is making a decision based on reason without personal feelings or opinions.

Moore continued, “He asked his supervisor. The supervisor did not respond. The guy enters the school.”

He said when the officers entered the building and didn’t hear anything, they thought school was out. Then, when 911 calls came in from students telling them they were in two rooms and people were shot, law enforcement decided to treat it like a barricade, which is actually when a shooter is alone in a locked or barricaded location.

Moore asked the class if it was a barricade or a hostage situation and then answered himself. He said, it should have been treated like a hostage situation.

He said, “A big problem is nobody took command.”

He said it was 77 minutes before the two classroom doors were breached by a border patrol tactical team and they were shocked to see dead kids because they had been told that nobody was in the rooms but the shooter because it was a barricade situation.

“So, lessons learned. Lack of instant command. This is super important. There has to be someone in charge. … There has to be someone to coordinate this effort,” Moore said. “it doesn’t have to be some super high-ranking person. If you’re the first one on the scene, you are in charge. Period.”

He said the fire department does a phenomenal job of it because whoever was first on a fire scene, they say over the radio, “I have command.”

Moore said law enforcement needed to do what the fire department does and tell everyone over the radio that they “have command” when they get to a scene.

He, then, said that the first response of law enforcement was to stop the killing by locating and neutralizing the shooter. He said the next step was to stop the dying by rendering medical aid to stabilize victims and then get them to a higher level of medical care as quickly as possible.

“You have to transition from ’stop the killing’ to ‘stop the dying’ immediately,” Moore said and added that as soon as the shooter was down they had to start saving lives.

“I recommend that you get as much medical training as possible because you cannot have enough medical training,” he said.

He then talked with the class about the difference in a hostage/barricade situation and an active shooter situation. He said if a shooter was keeping victims from getting medical care, he was still, technically, actively killing them because they would bleed out.

He said another thing that went wrong in Uvalde was that when they decided it was a barricade/hostage situation, they didn’t take into consideration the critically injured. He said the lives of the wounded probably could have been saved if they had not waited but gone in to stop the shooter.

One of the things that Moore also told the class was that qualifying at the shooting range with the score that the academy approved, as the base standard, was not good enough and wouldn’t cut it in a gun fight situation, where an attacker was shooting and moving.

“The public needs better. The people that we are paid to protect need better,” he said.

He said everyone hoped that they would never need to use their shooting abilities but the abilities had to be there. He told the class that he would work with anyone who was interested in additional firearm training.

Last, before they spent the rest of the day training and running through active shooter simulations, he covered specific tactical principles, in detail, with the law enforcement officers. These were principles they would practice during the training exercises throughout the week.

“Training has to be recent, relevant and realistic. It just has to be or it doesn’t work,” Moore said.