Editor’s Note: This is a first-person account from Duplin Times contributor Curt Simpson about his time as a volunteer role player during active shooter training with the Wallace Police Department.
WALLACE — It doesn’t matter how prepared you think you are, when a shotgun blast goes off in a school building classroom or hallway, it’s deafeningly loud, and it will make you jump out of your skin.
That’s the point.
For the last two Tuesday afternoons, I and several other members of the community were role players in active shooter training at Wallace Elementary School. The training for Wallace police officers was done at the direction of Wallace Police Chief Jimmy Crayton, and was led by his colleagues, Youngsville Police Chief Greg Whitley and Knightdale Police Chief Lawrence Capps.
The training was especially sobering with the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in May still fresh in our minds. The Texas shooting had 21 fatalities, including 19 children.
The slow response of law enforcement officers to the Texas shooting has come under a great deal of scrutiny in the weeks following the tragedy, and it’s led to calls for more and better training for law enforcement officers to deal with such incidents quickly and effectively to minimize the number of victims in such an incident.
“As you heard multiple times, we have two objectives. One, stop the killing. Two, stop the dying. I hate that we even have to talk about this, but this is the world that we live in,” Crayton said.
Crayton explained that the training was two-fold: The first part dealt with tactical maneuvers and communication. The last part, with role players, was designed to be winnable, realistic scenarios that forced officers to address the threat while incorporating all they had learned during the first half of the training.
Administrators at Wallace Elementary and Wallace Rose Hill High Schools assisted with coordinating the training while school buildings would be empty of students, and most staff, during the summer break. This allowed officers to role play through multiple scenarios in large buildings where finding one “bad guy” can be a challenge.
Officers tried to become familiar with the layout of each school through the use of school maps and by walking the halls and into classrooms, offices, cafeterias and gymnasiums.
With a small police force like the one in Wallace, it is likely that only one or two officers may be able to respond to an emergency call immediately. They are trained, however, not to wait outside but to enter the building as quickly as possible and methodically clear rooms for possible threats.
As part of their training, officers paired up with guns drawn and began a sweep of the halls and classrooms to find the shooter, whose identity and whereabouts were unknown to them. Officers would go from room to room, often dealing with role players who were frightened and hysterical, and try to quickly make sense of the situation.
To add realism and to give officers cues to work with, a shotgun firing blanks would be fired down a hallway or in a classroom, and then officers were expected to run in the direction of the gunfire to find the shooter. In a building as large as the elementary school, officers said it was sometimes difficult to determine exactly where the gunshots had taken place.
Role players were also asked to run down the hallways, away from the shooting and into the arms of the police, to distract them just as a frightened crowd of people might do in such a situation.
Once a shooter was identified, officers would then use Airsoft rifles and handguns and fire “simunition,” or non-lethal training ammunition, at the suspect.
“The weapons are designed on the same platforms as our duty weapons, so that gives us familiarity in the weapon’s functionality,” Crayton said. “It also allows us to make our training as realistic as possible, while keeping the officers and role players injury free.”
The department purchased the Airsoft guns and equipment with $5,500 in grant money two years ago, Crayton said.
Though the “simunition” is non-lethal, being struck by an Airsoft pellet is much like being shot with a BB gun. “It stings kind of like a wasp, but then it goes away pretty quickly,” an instructor told role players as they donned their protective helmets and masks.
The value of such training can’t be overstated, Youngsville’s Chief Whitley said. The more officers go through routines like these, the more acclimated they will be if the real thing ever occurs. Whitley constantly made the officers aware of how they were feeling physically under a stressful situation, and he stressed that firing a weapon accurately when your heart rate is elevated is a much more difficult thing to do.
At the end of each day, Whitley asked each officer for their takeaway from that day’s training. In addition to more technical observations about using lines of sight, the difficulty of locating the sounds of screaming in a building with so many hallways and rooms, most officers said they would like to get more training, more often. Crayton said more training sessions are planned for the future.
“It’s unfortunate, but this type of training is absolutely critical for police officers,” Crayton said. “The protection of our most vulnerable, our children, is not something to be taken lightly.”
“We have to train, and train frequently, to prepare ourselves for what has become the worst of crimes, carried out by extremely violent people.”
Crayton said he was appreciative of the instructors, community partners, role players and the families of Wallace Elementary and Wallace Rose Hill High School for their assistance.
