Recent officer-involved shootings such as the one in which 22-year-old John Crawford III of Fairfield was gunned down by police at a Beavercreek Walmart on Aug. 5 have come under public scrutiny and have some questioning if officers might be too quick on the trigger. A 911 caller reported that Crawford was waving a rifle at people in the store, including children. Police would later learn Crawford was talking on his cell phone with the mother of his two children as he carried a BB/pellet rifle he had just picked up from a shelf.
Law enforcement officials maintain that split-second decisions to use lethal force don’t come easy. In fact, officers regularly train themselves on how to react and make the proper decisions in active shooter situations.
Hamilton police officers took part in an active shooter training session this week at a local church. The message from the trainers, Hamilton Police Officer Brian “Bucky” Buchanan and Sgt. Wade McQueen, was clear: There’s no waiting around for back up, so stopping the shooter is an officer’s top priority, even if it means using themselves as “armed bait.”
An active shooter is an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area, according to the FBI.
Buchanan noted the weapon being used by the assailant does not have to be a firearm, pointing to a 2012 incident in at Miami Jacobs Career Center in Columbus, in which a man armed with three knives stabbed four people.
A recently released FBI report titled, “A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013,” found that active shooter incidents are becoming more frequent. The first seven years of the study show an average of 6.4 incidents annually, while the last seven years show 16.4 incidents occurred per year.
More than 1,000 people were killed or wounded during that period — an average of 11.4 per year — the study finds.
The events that forced law enforcement to change the way they respond to mass shootings range from the Columbine High School killings in 1999 to the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 and the Sandy Hook, Conn., school shooting in 2012. Those events — and the responses law enforcement employed — were referenced in training materials Beavercreek police viewed less than two weeks before the incident at Beavercreek’s Walmart.
“As far as law enforcement is concerned, the biggest problem that we have is time,” said John Benner, a Vietnam Army veteran and former Hamilton County SWAT commander who is president of Tactical Defense Institute in West Union. “Law enforcement has to respond and they have to respond quickly and decisively. And if they don’t, they’re going to lose a lot of lives. It’s just that simple.”
Buchanan said in many of the mass shooting cases, including Columbine and Virginia Tech, people were dying while police formulated a response plan.
During Hamilton police active shooter simulation, 13 officers ranging in experience levels of less than a year to 28-plus years of services swept through a hallway littered with dummies, representing dead or injured people, in search of a gunman. The officers had to survey rooms, check behind closed doors and inside closets.
All the while, Buchanan was telling them, “You have to get involved without hesitation.” No longer is officer safety a high priority in an active threat situation.
“You are somewhere just above the threat,” Buchanan told the officers.
With simulated shots firing in a back room, officers searched the building with gun in hand to find the threat. They learned how to properly hold their firearm, whether handgun or rifle, to maximize their field of sight, and how to use all of their senses to find the shooter, including gunpowder and blood.
The officers were instructed to walk past those screaming for help, whether innocents or wounded officers, until the shooter was found and stopped.
“Remember, the suspect wants a body count,” Buchanan said. “He is neither looking for you, nor expecting you to respond quickly.”
“The best way for the killing to stop is for the shooter to go down, or for them to turn their attention to you,” he said. “We are armed bait.”
Officers in Hamilton, Middletown, West Chester Twp. and the Butler County Sheriff’s Office routinely train in scenario situations, but funding cuts have lessened the frequency of training in recent years.
“Training is so key in so many way because the world changes constantly,” said Middletown Major Rodney Muterspaw.
Muterspaw agree that officers reaction to active shooter situations has changed, but not as much as some people might think.
“Yes, there used to be a thought that you waited for SWAT or back up, but you know I don’t know of any police officer worth their salt that could have ever just stood outside while there was a shooting and people were dying,” Muterspaw said.
West Chester Police Department put its officers to the test this summer with a mass shooting simulation at Lakota West High School that featured smoke-filled hallways with screaming, bloody victims, a blaring fire alarm and a gunman continuously firing off rounds. Officer had to walk past crying children and a “dummie” dressed in a police uniform slumped against a wall in order to find the shooter.
“We were trying to get the stress level up as high as you could get … overloading their senses,” said West Chester Officer Michael Bruce.
But no amount of training can totally prepare officers for the real thing.
“No situation will be the exactly the same; wish it could be, but every situation is different. And ever person is different, which means reactions will be different,” Bruce said.
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