Law enforcement trains against terrorism

September 11 — The Pittsburg County Sheriff’s Office is training with the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol this week.

LASER (Law Enforcement Active Shooter Emergency Response) training is active shooter training that specializes in school shootings and terrorism involving active shooter attacks on mass population centers.

PCSO is offering two two-day courses at the Southeast Expo Center in McAlester. The first course ended on September 10 and the second course is on Wednesday and Thursday, September 11 and 12.

PCSO MP Ryan Dalley, who took the course to become a trainer, says the big difference in this training compared to the past is that there is a lot of practical role-playing.

“This is the most informative training I’ve ever had in my career,” Dalley said, adding that the course could easily last three days because there is so much to learn.

Matt McFarland, PCSO assistant and trainer, says it is not just a PowerPoint presentation, but is supported by exercises and practicing what is shown.

According to the OHP, this course addresses the technical aspects of planning and implementing rapid law enforcement deployment to an active shooter incident through classroom presentations, performance-based hands-on field training, and scenario-based practical exercises.

The target audience for this course includes individuals who respond to any type of active shooter incident, including state and local law enforcement, shooting instructors, firearms instructors, school resource officers, first responder emergency services instructors, and first responder frontline supervisors.

This training program is based at Louisiana State University and replaces a previous program called ALERT.

Brian Wilkerson, an ODPS instructor, says the training is replacing ALERT primarily because of the flawed response to terrorism in Uvalde, Texas.

The Uvalde mass shooting occurred on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School, where 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, a former student at the school, fatally shot 19 students and two teachers, while injuring 17 others.

LASER training looks at past incidents like the one in Uvalde and highlights normal patterns. Wilkerson added that there can be outliers, but 95 percent of the time, there is only one shooter and no explosives. “That shooter is either going to be looking for a mass casualty or they are going to be targeting individuals,” Wilkerson said.

He also said that every 30 seconds, a life is statistically lost and it takes about three minutes to arrive on the scene. “You can do the math,” Wilkerson said.

He stressed the importance of training by showing a slide from his presentation and in two short sentences. “That’s our job: to stop the killing. To stop the dying,” Wilkerson said.

Departments across the state receive this mandatory training and it underscores the importance that all units are trained the same way, so everyone can respond in the same way.

At Monday’s training, Wilkerson stressed that officers from all local agencies must be able to work together during large-scale terrorist incidents. He suggested they make sure to incorporate a tactical frequency into their communications, something they currently do not do.