Editor’s note: For the purpose of this article, the term “active shooting” will refer to a situation where gunshots are fired openly in a public space, causing harm to innocent people.
Local law enforcement agencies prepare to respond in the event of an active shooting by taking measures like officer training, building task forces and tweaking their protocols depending on how active shootings in other places occur and are handled.
Longmont Police Department Sergeant Craig Mortensen is the commander of a local SWAT team, composed of officers from LPD, the Longmont Fire Department and public safety agencies in Frederick and Mead.
The SWAT team’s current protocol surrounding an active shooting involves two main components: Stop the killing and stop the dying, Mortensen said.
“As police officers, we’re trained to do whatever is necessary to stop the killing,” Mortensen said. “If that means taking someone into custody, that’s what we’ll do. If that means using deadly force in order to save others, that’s what we’ll do.”
While police officers focus on stopping the source of the killing, the SWAT team’s medical personnel are tasked with locating individuals who are wounded, bringing them to a secure spot of the building and providing them with medical assistance, according to Mortensen.
Medical assistance for victims was added to the SWAT team’s active shooting protocol after 12 people died in the Aurora movie theater shooting in July 2012, Mortensen said.
While the Aurora shooting led the SWAT team to bring medical personnel on board, an earlier tragedy similarly influenced LPD’s active shooting response plan.
“One of the things (LPD) learned because of Columbine is that we can’t afford to sit outside, waiting for the SWAT team (during an active shooting),” Mortensen said. “Since our SWAT team is a part-time team, it can take us up to 45 minutes to get together, get our gear on and start operations … We don’t have that kind of time.”
As a result, LPD implemented a standard response protocol, to teach all of LPD’s officers and employees how to respond appropriately in any dangerous situation, Mortensen said.
While Mortensen and his fellow officers look at the details of active shooting cases in efforts to strengthen their own protocols, “people who are intent on hurting others will do the same as us,” he pointed out.
“As much as we study these events and try to figure out how we need to change our tactics, bad guys study us too. They’ll say, ‘this was the police’s response, so this is how I’m going to do it’ … So we need to be prepared to make changes … We have to be prepared for, really, anything,” Mortensen said.
“Here in Longmont, we haven’t had any (active shootings) in recent memory yet, and I emphasize the ‘yet’ because they can happen anywhere, anytime, day or night, and on any day of the week,” Mortensen said. “We put such a high priority on these types of responses and we take them very seriously.”
