Area school officers are trained to engage active shooters
Police at Houston-area schools say their officers know what they are supposed to do in the event of an active shooter on campus: Go through the door.
“I believe every police officer should inherently know that,” Klein ISD Police Chief David Kimberly said Friday.
The question of what police should do in the event of a mass shooting has come into sharp focus following revelations that a school resource officer at last week’s school shooting in Parkland, Fla., stayed outside and never engaged accused gunman Nikolas Cruz, 19, as he made his way through a building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 14 students and three adults.
The revelations have sparked a national discussion about when officers should intervene in a mass shooting, with President Donald Trump saying the Broward County deputy was a “coward” or “didn’t react properly under pres-
sure.” More sympathetic social media commenters questioned what a lone officer with a handgun could do against a gunman with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle.
Steward Russell, chief of the Pasadena ISD Police Department, minced no words Friday about an officer’s role in responding to threats.
“Our officers are trained to respond, that one person can make a difference, not to wait,” Russell said. “Nobody wants somebody to senselessly go in. However, we believe we are there to make a difference and trained to make a difference. That is being a police officer. If you don’t want to take that risk, you are in the wrong job.”
‘What they are trained to do’
Alan Bragg, retired chief of the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD Police Department, said news that the deputy remained in the parking lot during the Florida shooting would prompt a gut check in individual law enforcement officers.
“I guess the talk that is probably going on now is about that, and doing what they are trained to do,” Bragg said. “I think they are going to be talking among themselves that they are all trained and all committed.”
It is a training that never has been truly put to the test in the Houston region. Officials from multiple districts could not recall any incident in the Houston area in which a school district officer fired his weapon at a potential threat on a K-12 campus.
Bragg, who led the Spring ISD and Cy-Fair ISD police departments for 26 years, said neither department had a shooting incident during his tenure.
“We don’t want to use our training,” Bragg said. “But if it is needed to save a life, that’s what they are trained to do.”
After Parkland, considerations of how best to keep schools safe spilled almost immediately into the political arena, with gun control advocates, including many Parkland students, calling on Congress to tighten access to guns.
Trump and the National Rifle Association have called for teachers and school staff to be armed as a first defense against potential on-campus threats.
Gov. Greg Abbott has called for a review of school safety procedures and more public information of school safety audits, which schools in Texas must complete every three years.
“Our schools must always be a safe place for learning,” Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said. “I have directed (Texas Education Agency) staff to begin full implementation of his directives.”
Abbott also called for better scrutiny and upkeep of federal databases. Failure by military officials to update background check information allowed Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, to obtain access to a gun, later used in a church shooting in Sutherland Springs last Nov. 5.
According to news reports, both the FBI and local law enforcement were tipped off that Cruz could be a threat and made social media posts in which he posed with guns and boasted of becoming a “professional school shooter,” but they failed to take any action before he walked into Marjory Stone Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and began shooting.
In Houston-area schools, there is no blurred line between who is responsible for security. Though state officials give local districts discretion, most in the Houston area have their own police departments with licensed, certified officers.
Across all the large districts, those officers are armed and stationed at high schools and middle schools. Elementary schools in the area may not have an officer on campus every minute of the school day, but patrol officers routinely pass through. The larger districts have commissioned police staffs that number in the dozens. Houston ISD has more than 200 officers.
Lessons from Columbine
All of those officers undergo rigorous training, some specifically aimed at what to do alone against an active shooter.
Much of that training changed dramatically after the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado on April 20, 1999. At Columbine, police maintained a perimeter and waited for more equipped reinforcements to arrive. That delay prolonged the attack by the two teenaged gunmen who killed 12 students and one teacher and wounded 21 more.
“What Columbine showed us is we can’t wait,” Russell said.
When confronted, he said, most school shooters stop. Resistance forces them to take a defensive position, Russell said, or “eliminates” the threat.
Officers now follow Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training, taught at Texas State University in San Marcos. The program has taught more than 105,000 officers nationwide how to react to shooters.
“We put them in fight or flight, in a ramped-up situation,” Kimberly said, noting his department relies on ALERRT. “We put them in scenario-based environments to teach.”
Instruction includes identifying threats but also awareness that there will be many young people between the suspect and the officer. Friendly fire is to be avoided as much as possible.
“We want them to slow down their breathing, not panic, aim at a target,” Kimberly said, noting the training is as much teaching people to rewire their instincts as much as providing instruction.
Officers also are outfitted more than ever, with many large departments, including HISD, providing body armor. Schools in the Houston area with departments also have close contact with larger police departments, which in the metro area have rapid response capability with S.W.A.T. that schools lack.
‘Our officers are going in’
It is a backstop city police do not take lightly, said Joseph Gamaldi, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union.
“If something like that shooting happened in Houston, our officers are going in, I promise that to the public,” Gamaldi said. “That’s who we are, and that’s the oath we took.”
Ex-Broward County Sheriff ’s Office Deputy Scot Peterson also took that oath but stayed outside the Parkland school, leaving many in law enforcement wondering what led him, a veteran officer, to not follow through. Few local school police officers, however, wanted to discuss it Friday.
“It turns my stomach to think about it, to see it,” Russell said, echoing what Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said when Peterson’s actions were revealed. “I don’t know what he was faced with, but one person can make a difference.”