How do Greensboro Police train for taking down an active shooter? Reporter Susie Spear decided to find out
Running down a gray concrete corridor, I gulped a breath. It tasted acrid from gunsmoke — a lot like my bang caps from childhood.
My thoughts galloped.
Then screams ricocheted off walls in the long halls, throwing echoed pleas for help.
Could I shoot him?
If I found the nerve, would my grip into the "tang" of the gun handle clear, or would the recoil rip flesh from my knuckles?
Inside my black tactical helmet, I heard my pulse pounding as quickening breaths fogged my face mask's window.
Some 20 yards away, two men ran in from the left, yelling and pointing. My partner broke to the right, but, startled, I fired on them, not realizing they were trapped and innocent.
There was no time to grieve my mistake.
The officer had told us to simplify our thinking — to stop the killing, stop the dying.
Suddenly, from the right, a bullet stung my thigh. I took aim at a tall male 25 yards away, leaning against the room's back right wall and brandishing a gun.
He snagged my left arm with one of his shots, but I held steady and fired my magazine's remaining 12 rounds as my partner fired on him, too.
Finally, the killer was down.
We had stopped a ''mass shooter,'' but I had likely killed two well-meaning folks in the process.
Back in a debriefing circle, the sound of ripping Velcro replaced gunshots as we students removed masks, throat guards and bullet-proof vests.
We had joined Wednesday at Greensboro Police Department headquarters to take part in Rapid Deployment Response Training, also known as Active Assailant Response training.
Force on force
This year is the first in more than two decades of training that the department has offered officers instruction using the "force-on-force'' method made popular by the Connecticut-based company, Simunition.
Just a few months ago, about eight officer instructors put the department's 630-plus sworn officers through Rapid Deployment Training, a rigorous 16-hour course filled with role play. Officers also spent time studying and analyzing strengths and weaknesses of police responses to mass shooting incidents around the nation.
By using simulated bullets in plastic replicas of 9mm Glock pistols, officers say they can actually see how accurately they respond to a suspect.
The handguns send plastic and colored wax rounds whizzing at targets at 400 feet per second. Analyzing the trajectory informs officers about their marksmanship and their defensive prowess, instructors explained.
Simunition further outfits police with protective body armor, which includes the Darth Vader-esque helmet/masks, and throat and groin covers. Police add their bullet-proof vests during training, they said.
Training leader Sgt. John Matthews, a 16-year veteran of the force, said the act of firing simulated ammo during active shooter drill exercises is much more effective than officers going through the motions, yelling, "Bam!'' each time they pantomime a gunshot.
"We've seen some situations around the country that we wish would have gone differently,'' Matthews said. "Should this horrific event happen in Greensboro ... we want our officers to perform on the day as they're supposed to.''
Instructors spend a lot of time helping officers polish their mindset, Matthews and Capt. Kory Flowers, another instructor, stressed.
They wear T-shirts with the slogan: "Training cops to be their best when their best is needed.''
If ever a mass shooting takes place in the area, "we don't know who's gonna be a block away when this thing happens ... , so every officer has to have the proper mindset and the proper physical and tactical ability and the proper moral compass to say, 'I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go help solve the problem,' '' Matthews said.
"We have to know how are we gonna operate in this high-stress environment,'' Matthews said, describing it as "incredibly scary.''
"We wanted to put our officers through the most realistic, high-stress environment we possibly could so they could see how they performed, they could see where their deficiencies are...''
"It's offensive that we even have to talk about this, but the reality is, it's a 300,000-plus person city,'' Matthews said. "This could very well happen in Greensboro.''
Matthews was in the seventh grade in 1999 when CNN broadcast coverage of a mass school shooting at Columbine High School, considered the first such crime to draw a national network audience's attention. Two twelfth-graders shot and killed 15 people and injured 24 more during the April 20 massacre in Columbine, Colo.
"I thought, what in the world? This happened at a school? This is insane,'' Matthews said.
I was preparing to have twin daughters, children who would grow up in an era when nearly every year was punctuated with a mass shooting somewhere in the nation.
My girls would protest at their own high school in support of gun control and bans on assault weapons after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14, 2018. A lone teen gunman shot and killed 17 students and staff and wounded 17 more.
The same year, I found myself searching the internet for backpacks equipped with bullet-proof panels I had heard other moms discussing in carline. I would never order them.
That summer, while working as an admissions advisor for a wilderness adventure company, I spoke with the mother of a Parkland survivor who had witnessed the killing. The mother cried as she described her teen's brittle emotional state. She hoped that time in nature would help the teen heal.
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Columbine gave the public not only an idea of the "evil that existed,'' it also showed America that police were inadequately prepared, Matthews said.
Pre-Columbine, police nationwide depended on their SWAT teams to address active shooter scenarios.
In the 1990s, standard operating procedure for active shooter calls involved police surrounding a building and calling for the SWAT team.
But very few of the nation's police forces have full-time SWAT squads, plus such calls for SWAT add 30-45 minutes to response time.
"What can happen in those 30-45 minutes? Lots of other people can get killed,'' Matthews said. "Also people that have been shot, they need medical aid. Shortly thereafter, the Rapid Deployment Response Training came into effect.''
For the next 20 years, such training focused on police building teams of four, from the first to arrive on scene to combat active shooters.
But quicker response times by officers informed criminals. In turn, killers armed themselves with semiautomatic weapons, "wreaking mass casualties, as fast as they could,'' before authorities could arrive, Matthews explained.
Now, police realize they must be prepared to go in solo to some of the "scariest situations you can imagine,'' Matthews said.
"We prepare officers to be extremely aggressive,'' Flowers said. "They have aggression and training,'' if they must go into an active shooter scenario alone.
"Go do something aggressively. Insert yourself into the situation. You need to respond like your loved one is inside. That's a fair request,'' Matthews said.
The mantra
The universal mantra for law enforcement battling shooters: Stop the killing, stop the dying, Matthews said. Disable the shooter and get help for the wounded.
"Anytime you have a very complex incredibly scary situation, you have to simplify it. That's the only way to get through it,'' Matthews said. "You have to simplify your thought process, in order to be able to make decisions. And the way we do that. We define the mission as a two-step process. Stop the killing, stop the dying.''
"We've seen it play out where the killing appears to have stopped, but maybe the bad guy's in a room with victims. We have to come up with a solution for that, and quickly, because there are people dying in there.''
Close calls
Before training on the fourth floor of police headquarters, a no man's land of empty rooms and props for training, Matthews tells us about some chilling events that could have evolved to mass violence.
"There have been some close calls in Greensboro, where if the assailant or bad guy had made a different decision, or maybe if a gun didn't jam when it did, things could have been a lot worse,'' Matthews said, declining to be more specific.
"There have been numerous close calls over the past decade where it was like, man, wow, this could have been bad.''
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