City Hall trains for active shooter
Cranston police officer Jared Hardy came running into the office of Carlos Lopez, Chief of Staff for Mayor Allan Fung, looking to hit any moving target he saw with the weapon he was carrying. The weapon was a Nerf gun, so there wasn’t any real threat, but city hall employees still felt the realness of an active shooter scenario during that moment.
This interactive active shooter training is staged annually in Cranston schools, Lieutenant James Jennings said, but this was the first time that city hall employees took part in one.
The reason, according to Mayor Fung, is because of how real the threat of an active shooter is in “today’s day and age.”
“It’s happening in our neighborhoods, in our backyards,” Fung said in reference to the Providence Place Mall shooting that took place last week. “It’s sad that we’re in the day and age where this is going to happen, but we have to prepare for it.”
In order to be instructors, the police officers have to become certified in a program called ALICE, which stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter, and evacuate. This acronym is what the training, which includes an hour-long PowerPoint presentation and two different “real” situations, is based on.
Lt. Jennings said in an interview after that the training for them was in-depth and included more painful weapons than a Nerf gun.
He also said that around 200 people had signed up for the training session at City Hall.
During the presentation, the officers got specific in explaining how to deal with an active shooter situation.
Staying alert is the most important thing during an obvious high-stress situation, they said. Being informed beforehand on what to do, meaning where to evacuate to, how to react when a shooter is near you, and what to do when police officers respond, is also key.
They said that evacuating is the first and best thing to do, but if that’s not possible or if the shooter is within your vicinity, do whatever you can to get the shooter to stop, including throwing computers, chairs, or small objects. This will at least distract the shooter possibly for enough time to escape, they explained.
The officers also pointed out specific situations such as if people gang-rush the shooter and knock the gun away from him/her. One city employee said he’d pick up the gun this point and shoot the intruder, but the officers told him that from their perspective, a responding police officer in a high alert situation would then think that person was the shooter.
The officers made sure to use the word intruder rather than stranger because Lt. Jennings pointed out that a lot of the time it’s a person you know or have seen before, whether it be a former or current employee or otherwise, and it’s something they’ve planned out.
Officers said that 98 percent of shootings are done by one person, and in most of the other 2 percent the people stick together during the attack. That’s why evacuation is always the best option, because rarely do you have to worry about another shooter being somewhere out there, they said.
After the presentation came the high-stress part – the real scenarios.
In the first situation, the employees, who were gathered in a couple offices that are part of the Mayor’s office, were told to just hide in the corners of the room. When the “shooter,” played by Officer Hardy, came into the room, he was able to open fire on whomever he saw before moving onto the next room.
Lt. Jennings told the Herald that “it’s not just the old lock the door approach” to reacting to an active shooter situation, but rather it’s about “barricading and countering, and defending your space.”
Mayor Fung added that this kind of training “gets us out of the old mindset that we should duck and hide.” That was on display during this first mock situation, as although there were a few who avoided getting shot because they were well hid, the shooter had free aim at those who were crouching.
In the second mock situation, the employees in the far office were told to barricade themselves in as best as they could while the ones in the front office were told to counter the shooter by throwing things at them (for which they were given small rubber balls). When Hardy came in, he got some shots off, but the balls being flung around the room made him pause for enough time for some of the people to get out of the room. Then, he couldn’t get into the other room because of how barricaded it was.
The realness of the situations was evident by the screams heard all through the hallways of city hall, from employees in the hall screaming “shooter, shooter,” or the police officers yelling to each other as they “responded.”
City hall was much tenser than usual Friday morning as the police officers came in to train employees on an active shooter scenario, but Mayor Fung said that “this kind of training is critically important.”
