A team of three Bristol Police officers burst into the main entrance at Mt. Hope High School a little after 9 a.m. on Tuesday, alert, guns drawn. In tight formation, eyes scanning in every direction, they proceeded quickly and deliberately towards A wing, where the information they had received indicated there was a hostile intruder, possibly armed, possibly holding a hostage, casualties unknown.

They were quickly encountered by two teachers fleeing the wing, then another as they secured the first classroom.

Within moments, the threat was neutralized without officer casualties, and the officers quickly finished clearing the wing to confirm the gunman was working alone.

This was, thankfully, a drill, and the shots fired were simulation weapons with marking cartridges (like paintball, but smaller and less messy.)

Run by officer and firearms instructor Lt. Steven St. Pierre, the drill is an annual opportunity to be prepared for the “what if” that has happened in too many communities in the country in the two decades since Columbine.

Teacher volunteers joined police officers for the training sessions, which were held all day on Tuesday, as the entire 40-officer force took turns participating. About 20 faculty members joined in, playing roles that might come up in various scenarios, from witness to victim to teacher locking down a room. Though the role playing participation was voluntary, the district faculty and staff participated with the Police Department in a mandatory seminar about the risks and response protocol just last week.

St. Pierre said that, while they have had student volunteer actors run these scenarios in the past, they decided not to do that this year due to the proximity of recent events.

Watching the beginning of the drill, St. Pierre explained the process, with the officers ready at the front door waiting their cue to enter. “You see that they are getting instructions as to what they're going to do in this scenario… just as if they were responding to an incident in the building.”

Two officers, trainers, were given the task of developing the scenario for the series of drills, and each time there will be particular problems that the officers have to solve.

“Sometimes the problem is there’s a really difficult room to enter, sometimes it's very difficult to identify the threat. So we don't let the officers know what they're doing, and then when they're presented with this we can evaluate how they perform,” said St. Pierre. “But it’s stressful, as it would be in a real life situation.”

“This is also good for the faculty, because they get to see how we respond, So it's mutually beneficial.”

For faculty, training is stressful, surreal, but beneficial
Math teacher Mike Almeida and Dean of Students Frank Devall were two of the faculty volunteers. “It's good,” said Almeida. “It’s good to see how policemen react. I’m on the other side of the door with 25 students and so it's good to know what's going on out in the hallway. But it's a little nerve wracking.”

“You're only as good as your training,” said Devall. “So it's to me, I had to do this, knowing that I'm not really in a classroom, I'm probably going to be the first one in the hallway. But it’s surreal what’s part of the job now.”

Chief Kevin Lynch was also on hand to watch the proceedings. “Over the last couple of years that the Department of Justice has been tracking data, we've seen almost a 70% increase in active threats, and 86% of the time they are active shooter incidents,” he said. “So there has been a huge uptick in the number of active threat situations throughout our country.”

Saying that the Bristol Police Department has always had a great legacy of providing a robust school safety program, he noted in particular the tip 411 program, which allows the students to “see something, say something,” the addition of K9 Brody and the addition of a second School Resource Officer, as well as a “report card” of sorts that the department has compiled for each school; a checklist of key safety metrics.

As for the philosophy about the active threat training, Lynch had this to say: “We are not staged outside of the school, we'll do that inside. Our goal always is if there is a threat inside of a setting, we want to go in and replace the civilian person with a police person. We want to now become the target and take that away from the civilians, and the only way to do that is to get the officers and set up situations that they haven't seen before. Drilling, making mistakes, and improving — that's what training is all about.”