Cops, educators prep for shooter at Roxbury school

ROXBURY – Derek Jones entered the classroom and found about a dozen people hiding in the corner. He walked up to each of them, one by one, and pointed a gun at their heads.

“Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.”

Jones, a detective from Georgetown, Mass., was running a drill for more than 80 law enforcement officials, educators, and business owners gathered at Roxbury High School Tuesday and Wednesday for an ALICE training program.

“How did that make you feel?” Hopeless? Horrible?” said Jones, who was in charge of the ALICE program. “You guys allowed me to shoot you in the head. I executed you. In five minutes and 25 seconds, I basically killed 80 people. I think we got our point across, that’s a traditional lockdown for you.”

ALICE stands for Alert Lockdown Inform Counter Evacuate, and the national security training course offers methods for how to survive an active shooter scenario in the crucial minutes before first responders arrive that are different from a standard lockdown method of sheltering in place.

“This is about providing options. Do you evacuate, barricade, lockdown? It depends where the gunmen are. If a person is right there, should you counter?” Jones said. “You should do anything not to be a victim. We want people to go from apprehension to feeling empowered through the training. I find people that come in apprehensive come out saying, ‘this is fantastic, this makes sense,’ feeling better about it.”

The program took place during Roxbury’s Spring Break, so no students were at the high school during the intense simulations. Instead police departments, school officials, and businesses from Roxbury, Chester, Jefferson Township, Morris Plains, Rockaway, Rockaway Township, Dover, Chatham, Montville, Boonton, Pequannock, Riverdale, Randolph, and more from several organizations and states packed into classrooms for the two-day event.

“You’ve got a broad spectrum of responsibility here,” Roxbury Police Chief James Simonetti said. "Corporate offices, police officers, schools including stakeholders like superintendents, who are the ones who will make the choices on whether or not to use this training. Because this is just a suggestion by law enforcement. We would love for this to be a county-wide approach but that’s a decision the schools would make.”

Simonetti said he was told this week’s session featured the largest crowd ever for an ALICE program, and attendance included eight Roxbury police officers and 10 teachers. He said school officials will take what they learned and bring it back to their peers.

“When you get buy-in from the administrators, when they’re here taking the program, that means they’re buying into the program firsthand,” Simonetti said.

Jefferson Township Schools Superintendent Patrick Tierney attended the training along with two of his district’s principals and was in favor of bringing the new techniques to his schools.

“This is obviously a change from what school districts typically do. We’re always told to lockdown, hope, pray and wait for law enforcement to come,” Tierney said. “But things have changed and this seems like a common sense approach to adopt, that people can get away if the opportunity is there. If we can save lives or disrupt the flow of the bad guy, we should employ those techniques.”

After they take the information back to their schools, Tierney said he plans to propose a change in policy to the Board of Education.

“But I want my people to see the benefits and embrace it first,” Tierney said. “This shouldn’t be a top-down approach.”

Jeff Paul, director of Morris County’s Office of Emergency Management, was also present for the training.

“ALICE is another component of a better chance for overall survival, God forbid, in a situation that’s becoming our reality,” Paul said. “We have to get out of the mindset that it can’t happen here. This is not a question of when it’s a question of where. We don’t have a crystal ball so we have to be prepared. It can happen anywhere. No community is immune to acts of violence and terrorism.”

Paul said the ALICE training is part of a larger initiative to prepare more people for a mass casualty incident. He said 600 law enforcement officers in Morris County have been trained and issued Individual First Aid Kits (IFAKs).

“We’re looking to change the odds of survivability,” Paul said. “It’s going to be a game-changer for the greater level of survivability and getting these people to a hospital. Because there is no formula for how to survive an incident like this.”

Emergency medical squads are also training to become part of response teams for mass casualty incidents, and every squad that puts 10 people through the course will get a larger IFAK kit to keep in their vehicles. Once the county’s police, EMS, and fire departments are fully trained, Paul said OEM will bring the courses to school staff.

“We need to leverage what is on site. At Columbine, it took three and a half hours to remove the last student from the school. But only takes three minutes to bleed out,” Paul said. “The whole goal here is survivability, to get to a hospital alive. We’re preparing for these things that don’t happen every day, thank God. But they do happen more and more.”

Though training took place in a school, the scenarios practiced apply to workplaces, hospitals, and more, which is why local businesses and organizations also participated.

The instructional portion of the program featured statistics about potential dangerous scenarios, including the fact that professionally trained police officers miss about 70 percent of shots in a dynamic event, and the “bad guy” is typically not nearly as good. That point was used as justification for use of the “swarm technique,” which encourages people to gang up on a single shooter.

“Growing up, we learned about fight or flight, but there is apparently a third option, freeze, which is a lockdown,” Jones said. “It’s not very good. So let’s go back to fight or flight.”

After spending the morning going over the history of ALICE and its methods, participants returned ready to put what they’ve learned to the test. They split up into groups of about 12, sat down in classrooms acting like students, and prepared for the worst.

Participants checked their firearms at the door, and had to wear protective masks to shield themselves from the “shooters,” who fired small white plastic pellets during the simulations.

After putting participants through the lockdown scenario, in which they said they felt helpless, Jones started letting them become more proactive. They used a variety of techniques, including barricading the door, trying to escape if they were far enough from the shooter, and finally by attacking their aggressor.

In between scenarios, Jones broke down what worked and what didn’t for participants.  They said those actions felt significantly more empowering than sitting, waiting, and hoping someone didn’t enter their classroom and point a gun at their head.

Go to http://www.alicetraining.com/ to learn more.

Staff Writer Michael Izzo: 973-428-6636; mizzo@GannettNJ.com