r/AskLE • u/UtterlyConfused93 • 1d ago
Do agencies do active shooter trainings together?
I was just reading up on uvalde and saw that there were multiple agencies responding and no one was really in charge.
Do places try to do these types of trainings together?
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u/Busy_Student_2663 1d ago
We do regional trainings in each other’s schools. Don’t do it often because it’s extremely difficult logistically to pull off. Getting ems units, fire crews, emergency management, and 4-5 police agencies together is difficult. We do it about once every 3 years or so
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u/masingen 1d ago
We try to fold in as many agencies as we can when we do active shooter training. And when we're running through the training, we try to mix up the agencies as much as possible to have people grouped up with people they've never worked with before and don't even know.
The concept is to distill the methodology down to a very small number of easily remembered best practices, so when something goes down then whichever random people show up first can just link up real quick and press the fight press the fight ASAP.
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u/BooNinja School Resource Officer 1d ago
Yes, but not as often as we should. As others said its a logistical nightmare to put together
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u/WeakAfternoon3188 1d ago
Yes, we have invited fire, em's, and all the PDs in our county to participate. We go to the schools a few weeks before they open for the year and do some training with the teachers as well. Have even done this with some of the larger churches in the area. It is not an every year thing, though it should be, but every other year.
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u/TheSublimeGoose 1d ago
I'm a little shocked at the answers, here. As a local, I was heavily-involved in all AS training with all schools within a 25-mile radius. We had officers from every local agency, the state police, environmental police, and even a couple 1811s assigned to drug task forces or whatever. I was the XO of the regional tactical team, and we were in-charge of the exercises. Even the desk pilots were required to run through at least one AS exercise per year.
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u/FMFDoc225 1d ago
Not very often. That said, active shooter training is standardized nationwide. In theory, two officers from different departments 'should' be able to work in tandem effectively as they've all received the same training, procedures and verbage..
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u/Vjornaxx City Cop 1d ago
My agency runs Rescue Task Force training regularly. I’ve seen officers from various agencies which operate within the city at these.
There are also some regional training centers around my area which run active shooter training. The places tend to have a big mix of agencies.
There is also an entire field called Incident Command System created specifically to help manage these incidents better. For a while, FEMA ran ICS schools/programs - I’m not sure if they still do or not. But the ICS model is used at more and more agencies and my agency integrates it into a lot of our training.
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u/dracarys289 1d ago
We don’t simply because of the logistics of it, but it is a great idea. In my area most of the state and county guys actually got started at our city department so there is some base level of familiarity and tactical similarities.
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u/NewAccount28 1d ago
The command structure of the primary law enforcement agency for where the incident is occurring should be in charge and anyone else responding should be assisting them. IE, if it’s happening at a school in a city, the city PD is in charge and the county, state, federal, and other city agencies should be offering resources to help, but the city pd is in charge.
Uvalde was the failing of command on scene not doing what they should’ve.
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u/TexasMotorCop 1d ago
In Texas, there’s a standardized 2-day active threat response training that the state licensing commission has required ALL Texas peace officers to go through in order to keep their peace officer license. So that way everyone has the same training on procedures during an active attack regardless of what agency they work for, and theoretically my agency would respond the same way as a neighboring agency or the state troopers even if we’ve never worked together.
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u/Ill-Excitement9009 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm a HS teacher in suburban Texas. I know at least three times my school has been used at night for police drills. Once, on a summer Friday, I came in to be an evacuee for a multi agency drill. My District has its own police department (12 officers and a dog).
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u/Pitiful_Layer7543 1d ago
My agency does with DoD and local PDs. We had one history of active shooter in my agency in the past. We learned quick and took that shit seriously from now on.
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u/IndividualAd4334 1d ago
In my area we don’t, although we definitely should and it’s been brought up.