Playing Cops & Robbers—With Real Cops!

A good friend and I signed up for the Citizens Police Academy offered by the Garner PD. It's a nine-week course going over various aspects of local law enforcement, from DWI stops to tazers. I've always been fascinated by police stuff, so it seemed like it'd be fun.

I had no idea how cool it would turn out to be.

Last week, we covered domestic violence and community-oriented policing. Some of the spousal abuse statistics were mind-boggling. This lecture was abbreviated, however, because we got the opportunity to observe some rapid deployment training being conducted at a local middle school. Plastic BBs and blue plastic pistols. Yelling and radio chatter. Loads of adrenaline and testosterone.

This was a training exercise to work on new procedures developed in the bloody wake of Columbine. Nowadays, rather than surround and contain the shooter(s) (which in Columbine meant that the freaks kept blasting while the cops waited outside), the cops "actively engage" the shooter. All law enforcement folks in North Carolina are trained the same way for this kinda stuff, using a four-person diamond formation as they make their way down the hallways. We were given the chance to try it out, and it's a beautiful thing in its simplicity.

The idea is that if the first four people on the scene are a combination of deputies and police officers or whatever, they can get inside the school quickly and make their way toward the shooter.

The idea is to take him/them out quicker--and to give him/them something besides kids to shoot at.

SOMETHING BESIDES KIDS TO SHOOT AT. In other words, you enter the school part law enforcement officer, part target. Hang a big "Shoot me please!" sign on themselves so our kids don't get hurt. Standing in the hallways the other night, hearing "gunshots" and screaming down the hall, I found the whole idea chilling. But the cops I met saw it as part of the job. And I admire the hell out of them for it.