Sgt. Rick Wheeler of Polk County Sheriff’s Department quickly walks down the hallway, loud pops ring in his ears as he makes his way to a room with a killer inside. His goal: neutralize the shooter before anyone is hurt – or at least that’s what he was training for in a prepared simulation Friday, June 18, at Haralson County High School.

Sgt. Wheeler was the first officer to walk the training course in an exercise that was part of an Active Shooter course, which was organized and hosted by the Tallapoosa Police Department in an effort to prepare area officers for possible violent situations. Officers from area city and surrounding county departments were all welcome to take part in the day-long course.

Tallapoosa Sgt. McKinley Pate says that the training doesn’t just prepare officers for violent situations in schools, it also prepares them for situations dealing with terroristic threats, work-place violence and domestic violence.

“Any situation can easily escalate from harassment to a violent shooting,” Pate said, “and we want our officers to be prepared if that happens.”

Pate says many police departments have begun implementing regular Active Shooter training after the incident at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999.

“Up until Columbine happened, the thinking was ‘It will never happen here,’” Pate said. “But when something like that happens, it makes you think: ‘if it can happen there (in a suburb community), it can happen here.”

According to Pate, the way law enforcement deals with violent situations also changed after the Columbine shooting.

“Before, the first officers on the scene would secure the perimeter and wait for SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) to arrive,” Pate said. “And at Columbine, students were still getting killed while they were still waiting on SWAT to arrive. This course teaches the first officers on the scene to neutralize the threat.”

While officers can’t disclose the plans they reviewed in class that morning or practiced that afternoon, Pate says they do practice a wide variety of scenarios throughout the course.

Officers began the day in the classroom, reviewing strategic plans and past shootings in schools and businesses. In the afternoon, the officers put several strategies into practice by navigating a kind of obstacle course throughout the school’s campus, both individually and in teams, before gearing up and firing against each other with plastic BBs. Officers also practiced with a variety of firearms.

The course, according to Pate and Tallapoosa Police Chief Scott Worthy, is paid for by the department’s drug fund. The drug fund is supplied by funds raised by auctioning off property, such as confiscated vehicles, awarded to the department by the judicial courts in drug cases that result in guilty verdicts.

Though this is the department’s first time hosting such a course, Pate says they hope to do several a year in the future and even include school officials in the classroom review. However, according to Pate, the Haralson County School System already has an emergency plan in place, so it isn’t necessary for school employees to attend and would simply be open to them in addition to officers.

“I’ve seen their emergency plan, and it is on target with what they should have,” Pate said. “We’re just here to give advice. And we really want to emphasize [to teachers and employers] that there is no ethnic, financial or social profile for this, and we want to raise everyone’s awareness of it.”

While Pate says he hopes a violent shooting never occurs in our community, he says it is vitally important that local law enforcement be prepared to handle the situation if it ever occurs.

“I hope and pray nothing like this ever happens, but if it does, we want officers to be trained to handle it,” Pate said. “The more prepared we are, the better we can handle it.”