Md. Responders Join Regional and Federal Agencies in Active Shooter Drill

June 29--Sykesville police Officer Nick Betcher had one hand on the officer in front of him and another on his gun as he entered a dark, smoky room. He, along with at least 13 other officers, entered the building looking for the source of several shotgun blasts as well as any gunshot victims.

The group separated, tackling the different rooms of the empty building on the Police and Correctional Training Commissions campus in Sykesville. Some carried wounded victims outside, while others looked for the shooter. Once they cleared the building and assessed the scenario's victims, the group huddled up with those same victims, as well as the bad guys and instructors, to go over what happened in the drill.

Then they geared up and did it again.

The active shooter drill in the building was one of two run as part of a course on rescue task force and tactical emergency care Tuesday morning. The training helps teach the law enforcement officers how to extract, assess and treat wounded victims from a situation involving an active shooter.

"It's definitely a lot going on. Strobe lights, smoke going off. It's dark," Betcher said of the drill.

Officers from Department of Homeland Security, Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Sykesville Police Department, U.S. Park Police and Maryland State Police, as well as Sykesville Freedom District Fire Department personnel came together to learn how to assess and treat victims of an active shooter situation.

The training is important because an active shooter situation is "unfortunately, a way of life," said Adam Parks, assistant special agent in charge with the Homeland Security Investigations of the Department of Homeland Security.

In the training scenario, the team is armed, meaning they can go in while SWAT teams or other rapid response teams are still working to neutralize the threat, Parks said.

"When fire and [emergency medical services] can't go into a situation, we can because we're armed," he said.

The men and women were taught how to bandage, assess, make a tourniquet and other emergency care techniques, as well as how to work together, said instructor Edwin Lard, CEO and executive director at the Diplomatic Protection Training Institute, which organized the training session.

"It's a program that teaches fire, EMS, law enforcement agencies, gives them a platform to work together to help them to address casualties from an active shooter situation," Lard said.

The trainees were run through two situations to help them work together and put what they learned to use. The first involved two victims -- played by Sykesville Firefighter Connor Holley and Josh Swain, 16, who volunteers at the Sykesville fire station -- who took simulated gunfire while conducting surveillance in an SUV.

The law enforcement officers were grouped into pairs, including Betcher, who paired up with another Sykesville officer. Before the scenario began, they put blacked-out goggles on and were guided into the SUV.

At the sound of a shotgun, each pair would rip off the goggles, and begin to assess and treat the victims in the SUV before extracting them from the vehicle, ending the scenario. To make the situation more stressful, Lard would yell at them to hurry up and rock the SUV, and another officer would fire blanks from a shotgun.

"It was very fast. Just trying to find where the equipment was," Betcher said after the drill. There were tourniquets in the vehicle; I didn't have any on my person, so just to find them. And to assess the injuries. We had to do a makeshift tourniquet because we didn't have enough."

For the second drill, Holley and Swain, joined by another Sykesville firefighter, put on fake blood and posed as victims of a group of active shooters.

The trainees grouped themselves into "bad guys" and "good guys" and conducted four scenarios. Each one changed, but in each, the bad guys shot victims and took hostages. The good guys had to extract the wounded victims, save the hostages and get the bad guys.

The twist was that the rooms were mostly dark, and the instructors used a fog machine to make it smoky and harder to see.

Once the group got the victims outside of the building, they would assess them and treat any wounds that they could not treat inside, load them up on stretchers, and take them to the Sykesville ambulances that were waiting outside the building.

The second drill was the culmination of the training, requiring the officers to work together and use what they learned about assessing and using medical skills, Lard said.

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