THE Winnipeg Police Service is training its officers on how to deal with a homicidal gunman to reduce the chance of innocent people being slaughtered in a school shooting, police say.
The training is geared to have the first police officers arriving at a scene quickly hunt down and even kill an aggressive gunman before he gets a chance to kill.
"Training is going on as we speak," police spokesman Sgt. Kelly Dennison said. "Every member needs to be trained."
An RCMP spokesperson said Mounties will get similar training.
"When you look at what happened at the small Amish school in Pennsylvania last year, of course it could happen here," the spokesperson said in reference to the Oct. 2 killings of five girls and wounding of five others by a deranged Charles Carl Roberts.
The new training for city police and Mounties was in the works before yesterday's mass slayings of 30 people in Virginia by a lone gunman.
The active aggressor training, being adopted by police agencies across North America, is in response to the April 20, 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado.
Until Columbine, police typically used the tactic of suspect containment -- keeping a gunman confined to a building or area until specially-trained tactical teams and negotiators could arrive and move in.
But that tactic allowed students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to move around the school freely for 45 minutes and kill 12 fellow students and a teacher, and wound 24 others, before they committed suicide.
In 1989, during Marc Lepine's random slaughter of 14 young women at the Université de Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, it took police 20 minutes to enter the school.
In a document obtained by the Free Press, Winnipeg Police Service Insp. Jim Poole said active aggressor or active shooter training is the best way to save lives.
"As members of the policing community, we understand that our primary goal is to protect life," Poole said in the document. "It is with this in mind that swift action must be taken by initial police on the scene to locate, engage and stop the violent aggressive actions or threat of further aggressive actions presented by the suspect(s)."
According to the training, the first officers on the scene are expected to contain and, if necessary, kill a gunman.
"This may, in fact, require officers to move past any injured or frightened people, getting to the suspect(s) as quickly as possible to stop the violence," Poole said in the memo.
How the new philosophy works in practice was demonstrated last Sept. 13 in Montreal when gunman Kimveer Gill opened fire at Dawson College.
The first officers getting to the scene took only four minutes to find and corner Gill. Officer Denis Cote shot Gill in the leg. Gill then turned his weapon on himself. He had killed one person and wounded 20 others before he took his own life.
"I had a window of opportunity where I could see the shooter so I fired to simply put an end to the threat," Cote said in a report.
Active aggressor or active shooter training is to be done initially by Texas-based Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (www.alerrt.com).
The intent of the training is to give front-line officers and soldiers the tools to deal quickly with violent attacks in schools, businesses and public places by deranged gunmen and organized terrorists.
bruce.owen@freepress.mb.ca
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