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Centralia Police Department officers each completed in-service training in July on active shooters, mass shootings, using tourniquets and building searches. Volunteers functioned as suspects, victims, parents, teachers and the public to make the training more realistic.
Commander David Clary described the training during a Centralia Police Department town hall July 29, telling the crowd that the recent in-service training was to train for a “full-on simulation of your worst case scenario.”
The department holds in-service training every other month for eight hours for each of its two crews.
“It was for a school shooting where officers had to deploy by themselves, as teams, coordinate command post, everything that you would have to do in a real-life scenario so that what has happened in Columbine and Uvalde doesn’t happen here,” Clary said, “and that our response is going to be one that, as a community, you can be proud of that Centralia PD did everything that they could do to stop the threat and save lives. We loop the schools in on that so they’ll know how they can help us.”
Four CPD trainers are trained in school shootings or school incidents, with two of them trained in Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate training — more commonly known as ALICE training — through funding by the Centralia School District, Clary said.
“They went to this training and then they trained the educators and employees of the different schools all within the city of Centralia. They have trained all of them so that we have a unified response when we arrive. They know what to expect,” Clary said.
“They train the teachers and the other staff that work there to know when the officers arrive, this is what they’re going to be doing and this is what we’re going to be looking for.”
