PARSONS – Safety is important, especially when it comes to the safety of our children. Local law enforcement officers participated in training in Parsons recently, learning what to do if there would be a situation in a school or on a bus – how to take control of that situation to assure our children would not be harmed.
The class was led by Harry Teare, who is a Sergeant with the Eleanor Police Department, located in Putnam County. Teare said he teaches in-service classes to other law enforcement officers throughout the state. He said the training in Parsons was active shooter training.
“An active shooter situation is when someone is causing great harm or violence to a school, mall or just the community as a whole,” Teare said. “What I train the guys to do is to go direct to the threat and either detain the individual, disable the individual or arrest the individual. It is a dynamic situation where the threat needs to be eliminated very quickly.”
Teare said the training included classroom work as well as a simulated situation.
“We did classroom work in the morning, teaching the officers how to move into classrooms, room clearing techniques, hallway clearing techniques and how to work together as a team,” Teare said. “We had different agencies present, so we worked on that.”
Teare said he offers these trainings several times, and learned his skill by taking classes through the FBI, and other training facilities throughout the state.
Tucker County Sheriff Brian Wilfong was one of the participants in the active shooter training.
“This is good training to have so you know what to do in this situation,” Wilfong said. “These types of trainings help us keep our eyes open to what’s going on around us. Still, it’s something we hope we never have to deal with.”
Wilfong said deputies in the Sheriff’s Office need approximately 16 hours of in-service per year. “We usually have much more than that to keep on top of things.”
During the training, law enforcement officials practiced using one another to build a ladder to gain access to a school bus through a side window, as well as techniques to mobilize a perpetrator through the main door of a school bus.
