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Left, a Coldwater police officer searches a locker room during an active killer training day at Parkway High School on Tuesday.
ROCKFORD - The Mercer County Sheriff's Office's Active Killer Response Training is underway this week at Parkway Local Schools, with 52 officers from police agencies in Mercer County and neighboring Portland, Indiana, signed up to participate.
Since its inception nine years ago, Mercer County Sheriff Jeff Grey said the training has greatly evolved due to recent incidents such as the 2022 Uvalde, Texas, school massacre in which police waited far too long to confront the gunman.
"It evolves but the main thing is getting the instinct to get right in there … and not wait," he said. "Don't wait outside the building. When I became sheriff and we started doing this, you waited until you had four officers here (to enter the building). … Well all that time people are shooting, bad guys shooting in the building. Now we train them, get in the building, use your radio so people know where you're at in the building as you're going in. As other officers come, we try to teach them to link up."
This Mercer County Sheriff's Office is holding Active Killer Response Training this week at Parkway Local Schools, with 52 officers from police agencies in Mercer County and neighboring Portland, Indiana, signed up to participate.
Failing to follow training and respond in a timely manner to mass shooting events, especially at schools, can lead to termination and even prosecution, as seen recently with the Uvalde Police Department. Uvalde Police Chief Pete Arredondo was indicted last week on 10 state felony counts of abandoning or endangering a child in the May 2022 attack that killed 19 children and two teachers.
Former school officer Adrian Gonzales, one of the first officers to enter the building after the shooting began, was indicted on 29 similar charges that accuse him of abandoning his training and not confronting the shooter, even after hearing gunshots as he stood in a hallway.
"We try to train them so they don't have to think; they know how to react," Grey said. "It's just instinctive reaction. One of the biggest things we've got to get them to do in a school situation is you have to get in there and you have to find the bad guy. You go into a school shooting, there's probably going to be people shot. We're going to go right past them. Normally we go to a traffic crash or something like that and somebody's injured, we stop and help them. That's more important than investigating the traffic accident. But in a situation like this, we have to get to the shooter because the more time it takes us to get to the shooter, the more victims you have."
A Rockford police officer detains a simulated active killer in a smoky locker room during a training day at Parkway High School on Tuesday.
Training is spread out over two separate, eight-hour days. It's the same training each day, so police departments can split up their staff between the two sessions. It's been held at different locations throughout the county over the years, including various school districts and a former residential facility.
Following an hour classroom lesson, officers undergo numerous life-threatening scenarios in which they encounter assailants armed with air soft guns or claiming to have a knife or a bomb, while they endure chaotic distractions such as fire alarms, smoke and screaming staff and students.
Prior to each scenario, training officers are given just a small snippet of information about what they might encounter, chief deputy Doug Timmerman said. Following the scenarios, officers are evaluated on their responses, both good and bad.
"I think we're getting better at (training), but it's hard to simulate the actual chaos that would be there," Grey said. "I mean, we've got several people in here that are role players that'll be students and running and causing distraction. But it's not like we have a full school during a school day where you got 600 kids trying to get out while you're trying to go in, but we do the best we can with it. …You hope and pray that you never use it."
A pretend victim lays injured on a bench.
The sessions allow local law enforcement to train in a variety of structures to better prepare for mass casualty circumstances.
In addition to local law enforcement, anonymous school staff members throughout the county that are authorized to be armed on their district campuses also underwent the training this week.
Ohio House Bill 99 which took effect in September 2022 allows local school districts to decide whether to permit certain school staff members to be armed on school grounds.
-The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A Portland, Indiana, police officer and a pretend active killer face off during a bomb simulation.
A Mercer County Sheriff's Office deputy stands after handcuffing an actor portraying a bomber.
