Crime & Safety

Police Recruits to Use Dundalk Elementary for Training

Baltimore County Police Academy officials will hold "active shooter" training at the Dundalk school Thursday and Friday.

If you see what looks like a lot of police officers swarming Dundalk Elementary School Thursday and Friday nights, you can rest easy that nothing serious is happening.

The school will be the site of "active shooter" training for members of the Baltimore County Police Academy's 136th recruit class, according to Sgt. T.J. Stetson, the police department's range master.

Academy cadets will train inside the building from about 5 to 10 p.m. each night, according to Stetson.

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"We aren't using Dundalk because of any particular problem there," Stetson said Wednesday. "It was the only school we could get."

The police academy has had an active shooter training program for the past 13 or 14 years, Stetson said, and venues that can house the training are "few and far between."

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The highly publicized shooting incident involving Baltimore city police officers while training at the former Rosewood Center made that facility unavailable, which forced county police officials to look for an alternative.

A school building, with its long hallways and many doors, makes for an ideal training facility, Stetson said.

And with more school shooting incidents occurring nationwide, such police training is important to school officials as well, Stetson said.

A shooting at Perry Hall High School in August seriously injured one student and brought the reality of school shootings closer to home for Baltimore County residents.

"The schools know it's very important to do this kind of training," Stetson said. "So the police department and the school system got together to make this happen."

All of the training exercises will take place inside the building and no live weapons will be used.

"We absolutely do not allow any live weapons at all inside the building," Stetson said.

The recruits will use Airsoft weapons, as opposed to another type of training weapon that fires pouches of dyed liquid.

The school will not be marked or damaged in any way, Stetson said.

Training will include a classroom session, as well as practical exercises that will teach recruits how to move down long hallways, gain entry into rooms and how to address threats, according to Stetson. Role-playing "bad guys" will act out scenarios to allow the recruits to employ tactics and lessons learned in the training.

"This is an introductory course," he said. "It's a crawl before you walk, walk before you run program for our recruits who have never had this kind of training before. It will move along, faster and faster, with the scenarios getting a little more complicated in the second day."

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