Police, firefighters train as teams to aid victims during mass shootings

April 08--Shots rang out at an old Milwaukee middle school. City police officers and firefighters swept through the halls. Moving in a diamond formation, they searched for the wounded.

The scene was an active-shooter drill, part of a collaborative training effort between the Milwaukee fire and police departments that is unprecedented in the city.

The strategy was straightforward: Combine officers and firefighters in mini-task forces to treat and evacuate the wounded while a volatile situation is unfolding.

"We are a team," police Lt. James Mac Gillis said to firefighters and officers on Monday. "No teammate gets left behind. The Police Department's primary mission is to protect the team, and the Fire Department's mission is to treat the casualties."

Preparing for such emergencies has become commonplace after mass shootings nationwide, including two in southeast Wisconsin, where gunmen opened fire at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek and the Azana Salon and Spa in Brookfield in 2012. Last week, three people were killed and 16 wounded in a shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas.

What makes this unprecedented for Milwaukee is that all of the city's roughly 1,600 police officers and 840 firefighters will be trained together, improving how they coordinate response to active-shooter situations. Since the beginning of March, group after group of officers and firefighters have met daily at the vacant Edison Middle School to prepare.

The scale of such joint training "is not common across the country," Milwaukee Fire Capt. Michael Wright said.

How police departments respond to shooting scenes has evolved, from the first on-scene officers waiting for a SWAT team to the officers pursuing the shooter.

Emergency medical response is changing, too, with paramedics no longer waiting for law enforcement agencies to deem the area safe before treating the wounded.

Time is essential. A victim can bleed out from a gunshot wound in five to six minutes, and the Milwaukee Fire Department has extensive experience treating gunshot victims, with a record of saving about 93% of those patients in 2011, Wright said.

At Monday's training, tourniquets were applied to victims. A young woman cried for help at the end of a hallway, pleading with officers and firefighters to check on her, her boyfriend and a friend.

As her pleas reverberated, the team of firefighters and armed officers methodically checked classrooms as they moved to where she lay. They wrapped bandages on her bloodied upper arm, and a separate team was called to bring her out.

In Milwaukee, each task force has four armed officers and four firefighters. They all must work together -- not always a simple task considering police and fire departments have different priorities, expertise and lingo.

The basic rule laid out by both departments: If the team is moving, police are in charge. If the team is treating someone, firefighters are in charge.

"Everybody keeps their identity," Wright said.

In the training at the former Edison Middle School, the wounded were played by police aides and fire cadets. The evacuation team removed the victims based on their injuries, sometimes being told to bypass someone even as that person was screaming for help.

Other obstacles, ranging from spotty radio communications to an unexpected reappearance of the shooter, were planted to create a realistic situation -- though officials acknowledged that no training can fully re-create the chaos of such situations.

"This is nothing compared to a grade school full of people," Wright said.

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