By now, most progressive agencies are into conducting patrol-level active shooter drills. But how about training to confront an in-progress killer when you’re off duty — in a shopping mall, say, alone or with your family?
Instructor Craig Dickerson has discovered just what an eye opener that can be, with in-service personnel making communication and tactical errors in training exercises that could cost them their lives in a real confrontation.
During a presentation on active shooter considerations at the ILEETA conference earlier this year, Dickerson, a tactics trainer with the Montgomery County (Md.) Police Department, alluded to off-duty drills he has been running for his officers and those from other agencies in the Washington, D.C., area. Recently in an exclusive interview with Police1, he elaborated on the realistic scenarios he and his training team have created — and the sobering results that surface when seasoned officers, out of uniform, suddenly confront a lethal loser with murder on his mind.
The set-up
The exercises take place in an abandoned range in the basement of the department’s academy in Rockville, a cavernous area about 30 by 50 yards. A year or so ago, a network of plywood walls was constructed there, largely with donated materials, to create a mock school setting, complete with hallways, classrooms, and doors and outfitted with lockers, desks, seats, and other real-world props. With open ceilings that allow for bird’s-eye videotaping, “this has proved ideal for training uniformed officers in active shooter responses,” Dickerson says.
This year, for the tactical component of the department’s annual firearms training, the “school” has been stage-dressed as a shopping mall, the “classrooms” serving as improvised retail outlets. “We created a movie theater with big posters and a working popcorn machine, a book store, a driving school, a pawn shop with old appliances in the window, a restaurant, a clothing store with dummies dressed in outfits from Goodwill, and so on,” Dickerson says. Kiosks and benches decorate the hallways, and everywhere are mannequins (the department owns about 70), 3-D shooting targets, and enlarged photographs to simulate shoppers. From a perch overlooking the training area, a control-panel operator can introduce appropriate sound effects, including music and voices in conversation.
As a group, the trainees, all dressed in jeans, t-shirts, or other casual clothing as they would be on a typical day-off shopping trip, are given a 10-minute debriefing in which a four-step sequence for reacting to trouble off-duty is laid out. Dickerson explains:
• “First, we want them to get to cover;
• “Then they should get their ID out;
• “Then communicate verbally that they’re the police and what they want people around them to do;
• “Then get their firearm out and eliminate the threat.
“For maximum safety, they should do all that in that order.”
Before entering the “mall,” each officer is armed with a training pistol that fires .43-cal. rubber balls (paintballs are “too messy and cleanup-intensive”) and is given one eight-round magazine. “We want them to be selective in firing and to pay attention to their front sight,” Dickerson says.
All participants wear a neck protector and an Airsoft helmet. The role-playing bad guy is “fully padded up.”
Scenarios
Dickerson and his teammates, who serve as active role players during the exercises, have designed two adjustable scenarios to fit the setting. Each trainee experiences both. “We wanted to keep them simple, just basic stuff to see what mistakes guys would make,” Dickerson explains.
In one format, two trainees are told to walk down to the “restaurant,” where a role-playing maitre d’ seats them. Other seats in the place are occupied by dummies or other human representations. From their table, the trainees are unable to see out into the hallway.
Once they’re seated, two more trainees are sent down the hallway as if on a shopping excursion. As they approach the restaurant entrance, a suspect without warning emerges from hiding from behind the officers and fires blanks into the floor or at the trainees. Other role-players in the hallway carrying shopping bags scream and scatter.
What do the officers — in the hallway and in the restaurant, where the shots can be clearly heard — do?
In the second scenario, the four trainees are divided so that a couple are in the “movie theater,” one is in the “book store,” and one is sitting with a child or adult mannequin on a hallway bench to simulate being with a family member. This time, the shooter starts firing in a different hallway where he cannot immediately be seen — only heard. Again, role-played shoppers take flight in terror.
The officers’ reactions during both these plots are videoed and thoroughly debriefed — good and bad — afterward. “What happened was exactly what we thought would,” Dickerson says.
What happens
Some 1,800 veteran officers from Montgomery County and guest agencies have participated so far this year. Their reactions in some cases Dickerson considers “shocking.”
“Sometimes in the first scenario if officers are hit by the suspect’s rounds, they instantly collapse to the floor,” he says. “They may even grab their ribs and look at their hand like they’re seeing real blood. It’s unbelievable!
“We ask them, ‘Why’d you go down?’ They say, ‘I got hit.’
Then we have to reinforce: ‘We don’t die! We fight to the end and never give up!’ ”
In the first scenario, cover for the officers caught by surprise in the hallway is “only two steps away,” Dickerson says, “but occasionally they try to shoot it out from where they are. Big mistake. They have to turn to ID the target, they have to draw…. You can’t outdraw an offender who’s already shooting at you. And they don’t know if there might be another shooter. The best thing is to first get to cover fast.”
If they duck into the restaurant and take barricade positions at the doorway, which Dickerson says is the proper response, they should be yelling, “Police! Police! Everybody down!” while getting their identification out and visible. In Montgomery County, that may be a badge or a bright yellow band with POLICE printed on it that off-duty or plainclothes officers are encouraged to carry in a pocket. The band can be whipped out and visibly dangled in the support hand while in a firing stance. “Communication that’s both visual and verbal is important,” Dickerson says, “because some people don’t hear well when they’re under stress.”
However, trainees commonly burst into the restaurant with guns drawn before they announce their office or produce ID, leaving them vulnerable to being mistaken for assailants by the off-duty officers already inside. “The cops inside have just heard shots from the hallway and now two strangers are running in with guns out. We’ve definitely had blue-on-blue shoot-outs inside the restaurant,” Dickerson reports.
When the first shots are heard, one of the inside officers is supposed to call 911 or tell the maitre d’ to do so — there’s a phone on a counter near their table — and report to dispatch their off-duty status, location, and descriptions to lessen the chance of outside responders experiencing the same confusion. The inside officers, too, should immediately get their badges or yellow bands evident and shout, “Police!” These steps, too, are commonly overlooked. “Officers are accustomed to being in uniform where the uniform is their ID,” Dickerson says. “Off-duty in stressful moments, it’s easy to forget about that.”
Mistakes often compound at the entrance. With officers from the hallway and inside grouping there to take on the shooter, they may fail to assume proper high/low barricade positions to maximize their firepower and limited cover. The tendency to “crowd” cover and thereby cut down on the field of view frequently crops up. And trainees tend to forget to keep one officer surveilling the interior for possible shooter allies.
“If the officers are positioned correctly, they should see all of the bad guy in the hallway, with him seeing very little, if anything, of them,” Dickerson says. “If he shoots at them, they’ll sometimes jump back, instead of staying in position and maintaining their visual. He’s able to move closer then and surprise them from a new location or duck out of sight completely.”
In the second scenario, the trainee on the hallway bench is supposed to shepherd his “family member” to a safe location as the top priority before moving toward the sound of gunfire in search of the shooter. “Often forgotten,” says Dickerson — as are good tactics for advancing down the hallway, rounding corners, using available cover, and avoiding blue-on-blue cross-fires.
As they advance, the trainees ideally will grab fleeing shoppers and quickly gather whatever intel they can, but that too gets ignored frequently.
The most unfortunate mistake sometimes occurs when instructors send a robot careening around a hallway corner toward officers who are making their way toward the shooter. The robot is typically wearing a dress to simulate a fleeing female shopper. “It’s unexpected and catches them by surprise,” Dickerson says, “and sometimes the robot gets shot.”
When the suspect is finally confronted and taken out, there may be problems in managing the scene after he goes down. For example, Dickerson says, “We’ve had officers who’ve kicked the suspect’s gun to get it away from his hands, and it goes sailing into a store out of sight or lands where somebody in the crowd can pick it up.”
“Many officers do very well under the stress,” Dickerson says, “but others experience problems they didn’t expect.” For the post-exercise debriefing, Dickerson likes to start by asking each officer what he did once he heard the shots in the ‘mall.’ “Then we show the video of what they actually did,” he says. “Many times, there’s a big gap, and that gets their attention for the discussion that follows.”
What’s ahead
“We’ve gotten tons of email from officers who’ve been through this training, saying they really enjoyed it and benefitted from it tremendously,” Dickerson says. “They’re now more open to force-on-force exercises than before and are willing to learn from their mistakes. A lot of agencies are now copying this approach.”
For in-service next year, he’s working on scenarios for a “Mumbai-type terrorist attack,” including gas and multiple assailants and potentially involving a hospital setting with patients who are bedridden and security officers who are unarmed.
Sound elaborate? No problem, Dickerson says. He has a strategy that has proven effective for getting cooperation in his training efforts from departmental brass. He shows them the videotapes from the mall exercises so they can see first hand that performance under stress in volatile life- and liability-threatening events is not yet perfect.
For more information, Dickerson can be reached at: craig.dickerson@montgomerycountymd.gov.
