Spokane police take aggressive stance against 'active shooters'

April 17, 2007
by Jeff Humphrey
KXLY-TV

SPOKANE--Ever since the 1999 murders at Columbine High School in Colorado local enforcement agencies in the Inland Northwest have adopted much more aggressive tactics to deal with deadly hostage situations so that situations like the one that unfolded at Virginia Tech Monday won’t happen here.

The scenario is called "active shooter"; a person is firing a weapon at other people, requiring an immediate response from officers arriving on the scene. In this type of situation, when there’s an imminent threat to life, the first four officers that arrive on the scene don’t form a perimeter to contain the gunman. Instead they go looking for the shooter in the hopes of saving lives.

Cellphone video shot on the campus at Virginia Tech Monday showed that while shots were still ringing out police officers were securing the perimeter rather than heading in the direction of the shots in the hopes of possibly saving lives.

That delay in stopping the shooter wouldn’t likely happen here in Spokane.

“From Columbine law enforcement has learned that if you're gonna stop these things and save lives you gotta go in immediately,” Former Spokane Police Chief Roger Bragdon said during a 2003 interview.

In the wake of Columbine the Spokane Police Department began developing its active shooter training program. Sergeant Dennis Walter developed the protocol that meets deadly force with deadly force without delay.

“We determined in an active shooter situation you have to be aggressive, put together a team and get in there as fast as you can and remedy the problem,” Walter said.

Under Walter’s protocol when a gunmen is inside a building actively shooting the first four police officers on scene band together to search out the suspect. In situations like the 2003 standoff at Lewis and Clark High School, waiting for the more heavily armed SWAT team is a thing of the past.

“The response I've gotten from most of the officers on the department is that if my kid is in that school I'm not going to wait therefore we had to train in that manner and get in there as soon as possible such as we did in L-C,” Walter said.

The task of finding and isolating a gunman has also been made easier by ‘Rapid Responder’, a laptop computer program. In Spokane, every school and public college campus has been mapped and photographed so arriving officers can both evacuate students and track down the threat faster.

“How to get kids out of a building and away from a situation so that they can be safe, I guess that's our number one goal keeping students safe,” Walt Pegram, District Resource Officer for Spokane District Schools, said.

Several locations in the Spokane area have not been mapped out as of yet for the ‘Rapid Responder’ program, including Gonzaga University, Gonzaga Prep and several area shopping malls, but the Spokane Police Department’s goal is to have those places mapped and photographed in the future.