Deputies receive mass shooting training

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

Training that four Van Wert County sheriff’s deputies recently completed could have a big impact on whether people live or die if a mass shooting would ever occur locally.

Deputy Sergeant Andy Tracey and deputies Ed Klausing, Seth Karl, and Mike Biberstine recently took the ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate) training in Portland, Indiana. The training program was developed by a police officer in 2001 to protect his wife, an elementary teacher, following the Columbine High School shooting in April 1999.

“The training was a real eye-opener for all of us,” said Klausing, a local self-defense trainer who noted that local school safety plans have relied on the traditional lockdown training in the past.

Klausing added, though, that the lockdown method, developed in California to deal with drive-by shootings, isn’t all that effective when a shooter is actually inside a school building, or business.

Unfortunately, a lockdown, Klausing said, where students passively hide behind desks in their rooms, led to more casualties at Columbine and Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“When an intruder comes into a classroom, more lives were taken because here they are all hidden in a room and crunched down,” he noted, adding that ALICE training would have saved a number of lives in those shootings.

ALICE training provides teachers and students with the freedom to decide what action is best to take, whether it’s evacuating the building, or “countering” shooters by throwing objects at them and keeping moving to make themselves a harder target to hit.

Karl said the 16-hour ALICE training, which included scenario training, was shocking to the local law enforcement officers, noting that, in one scenario, 30 law enforcement officers were in a room and 19 of them were “killed” by an intruder within 7 seconds while using the lockdown method.

“That actually brought to light for everybody how real it actually is,” Karl said.

Because shooting incidents take place in seconds, it’s unlikely that law enforcement officers would be able to reach the scene before a shooting is over, which means that those at the scene need to know more about how to keep themselves alive.

That’s the focus of ALICE training, which is aimed at providing a number of ways potential victims could survive a shooting incident.

Klausing said that, in one scenario, he was the active shooter and found it hard to focus on shooting people when they were throwing things at him.

“By that stuff being thrown at me, all of a sudden my arms just went up and I was trying to block everything,” Klausing said, adding that he is a trained law officer, while most mass shooters are not trained gunmen.

The deputies said the training really hit home for them, especially because all are parents. Several said they went home and spoke with their own children about the training and what to do.

Sheriff Tom Riggenbach said he feels that, while the drills his office has held at Lincolnview and Crestview local schools the last couple of years are improving safety, he feels the new training will make even more of a difference.

“We feel the ALICE training gives people a fighting chance — literally — to survive,” Sheriff Riggenbach said, adding that the new training also gives teachers and students the option that it’s okay to use any means, even if it goes against the rules and school policy, if it provides a way to survive a shooting incident.

That means that, for example, if a teacher has the chance to drive a school bus away from the scene with his students, but doesn’t have a commercial driving license, it’s better to risk getting a ticket to save lives.

“We have to start with the young kids, and put it in their heads that it’s okay to do this,” Karl said. “You’re not going to get in trouble for countering a threat, to get away from them.”

Sheriff Riggenbach said the deputies are now creating presentations they can take out to schools and businesses to provide training on how to survive active shooter situations.