Kodiak Middle School was quiet and empty on a bright and breezy summer afternoon July 19. At least, until police entered the building.
Officers partnered with the Kodiak Island Borough School District to use the facility to practice responding to a variety of potentially violent calls.
Tim Putney, the department’s chief of police, said it’s part of their annual training, meant to imitate realistic scenarios.
“I don’t want to put a label on it and call it active shooter training because it’s a lot more than that,” he said. “It’s a lot more de-escalation training, using and training with our flashlights and understanding what it is we’re walking into.”
They picked the school because it has multiple room layouts and stairwells. Putney said the middle school is also one of the district’s least used facilities during the summer.
“To some extent, we’ve always done reality-based training and active attack training – training for the worst imaginable thing,” he said. “As long as I’ve been at the police department – over 20 years – we’ve just done more I think in the last few years to make it a regular occurrence.”
Officers were given specially designed, non-lethal firearms for the drill. A few officers retained lethal weapons in case of an emergency, however did not participate in training unless they were disarmed.
Members of the public were also brought in to play hostages or suspects, like Patrick Anderson. He owns the store Kodiak Tactical, which sells gear to the police department.
Anderson said the company wanted to volunteer in part to encourage safe gun ownership. Kodiak Tactical also offers gun safety classes.
“We always encourage people to get out there and train, get familiar with your weapon system so that we can all be really safe,” he said.
One of the scenarios they trained for was clearing hostages from a suspect armed with a knife. A team of two were given a limited amount of information as they approached a classroom set up with role players.
The lights were off as hostages called for help. Officers held flashlights checking the room, and told civilians to get out as they cleared rooms. When they found the suspect, they called to him to drop the knife and practiced an arrest.
Joe Kim is a guest instructor from Phalanx Academy, a defensive training institute in Anchorage. It’s the third year he’s been brought to the island to work with local police.
“Stressful environments that are controlled to create a better place for officers to practice their decision making skills – the biggest winner’s the community,” Kim said.
Kim said the goal is to have officers practice entering different types of areas in potentially dangerous scenarios, and what level of escalation or de-escalation is appropriate.
“A response is always going to be organic in nature because it’s based on what the individual is doing, and at the heart of it, they want everybody to get home, right?” he said. “If someone’s just having a bad day, let’s get in there, get them home, figure this thing out.”
Law enforcement across the state has recently drawn criticism for lethal shootings though. That includes two in the last month – one involving Juneau police and another involving an Alaska state trooper on the Kenai Peninsula.
Putney said the Kodiak Police Department’s reality based training is designed for officers to practice good decision-making in stressful situations.
“Bad things happen in small towns every day across the United States,” he said. “So really, as a police department, you have to be prepared, or as prepared as you can be, for your worst day.”
Officers rotated training in teams through the entire workday as police practiced responding to a variety of situations.
