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Sad but necessary: Training to deal with an active shooter

RunHideFight

TOWSON, MD — You hear the crack of gunfire in the hallway of your office building, what do you do?

The Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services is training its office workers to deal with what has increasingly become an American reality: an active shooter.

Workers at the Reisterstown Plaza Office Complex spent about two hours recently gaining instruction from the department in the first of its kind training. The main advice handed out by trainers was to run, fight or hide.

About 40 office workers also learned what not to do, such as confronting a stranger in the building.

“You are not sacrificial lambs,” Major Luke Montgomery, commander of the department’s crisis management, told the class. “If he has a gun and you don’t, he’s coming upstairs.”

Charvette Henson-Smith, deputy director of the field support services, tries to deal with visitors without employee badges in the building calmly, she said.

“I ask them, ‘Can I help you?’ and then direct them to the security desk,” she said.

Major Richard Bowers, director of the department’s Special Operations Group, encouraged the class to report strangers to security.

“You can tell if something is off with somebody,” he said.

The first thing that occupants should do at the sound of gunfire is lock the door, the trainers said. Even if someone is able to call on the phone for help, law enforcement is five to 10 minutes away.

Hiding in a corner as far away from the door in hopes that the shooter doesn’t see you is the next step, the trainers said.
“They’re trying to kill as many people as fast as they can,” Bowers said.

Workers shouldn’t pull the fire alarm which would cause more people to come into the hallways, Montgomery said.
“You’re bringing them into danger,” he said.

Survival of the fittest mode takes over in shooter cases, said Corporal Alvin Lide of the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department.

“The theory is to get out, you want to save your life,” he said.

Keeping calm, however, is key, Lide said. He’s seen situations where people are so eager to hide, they run past an exit sign.
Kristina Donnelly, an executive assistant in field support services, welcomed the training. Her son was present when a shooter once opened fire at a mall, she said.

“I feel I have a better knowledge base if it happens,” Donnelly said. “I hope it doesn’t happen but I also hope that the knowledge base kicks in if it does.”

Lide believes, thanks to the training, it will.

“We perform the way we’re trained,” he said.


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