SAN MARCOS, Texas — When Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris showed up at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, they didn't take hostages or make ransom demands — they just started shooting people.
Outside the building, Littleton, Colo., officers arrived, set up a perimeter around the school and waited for SWAT teams to arrive as they were trained to do. But by the time officers went in, a dozen students were dead, and the shooters had taken their own lives.
 Ricardo Brazziell/Cox Newspapers Through a Texas State University program, John Curnutt teaches police to deal with situations such as the 1999 Columbine High School attack. For a larger, high resolution image, click HERE |
Then-Hays County (Texas) Sheriff Don Montague was among officers across the country thinking about ways to revise tactics that police use against what they call active shooters, gunmen whose goals are massacre and little else.
Today, Montague is executive director of Texas State University-San Marcos' Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training program, which has trained about 20,000 officers in building entry techniques and rescue and survival strategies, how to deal with explosive devices and in other methods to take on active shooters.
"We saw that the traditional approach needed to be revisited," Montague said. "While the SWAT team was setting up a command post (in Littleton), people were dying."
Montague suggested that patrol officers, who typically respond first to crimes, need to be trained to take on such shooters or at least minimize the damage until SWAT arrives. He and his deputies developed a method, began training Central Texas officers and joined with Texas State in 2004 for research support.
By 2005, Montague and his team were teaching police officers from across the nation.
The program, which since 2002 has garnered about $20 million in financing from a variety of state and federal sources, is one of the university's top grant-getting operations, Texas State spokesman Mark Hendricks said.
Officers teach classes, and interns and graduate students aid instructors, Montague said. The program is attached to the university's Department of Criminal Justice, and Texas State's role is to aid in research.
Pete Blair, a Texas State professor and researcher for the program, said not much hard data exists on the frequency and location of active shooter incidents, but "they're more frequent than you might think."
"When you start to look around, you find active shooters that didn't make the national headlines," he said.
The program's tactical training in weapons safety and building entry also benefits officers in their everyday duties, said Joel Lofton, education and security liaison for the Mississippi Office of Homeland Security. In Mississippi, training in ALERRT's methods is mandatory for all state police officers.
"This training is going to keep officers alive and citizens alive," Lofton said.
ALERRT has a training facility near the San Marcos Municipal Airport. Officers take classes, fire weapons at a shooting range, practice breaching various types of doors and train in a makeshift house, complete with old furniture and wall decorations.
Tuition for the two-day, 16-hour basic course in San Marcos is free, thanks to grant money. The program also trains officers to be instructors.
However, instructor John Curnutt, a San Marcos police officer, said 90 percent of the training is conducted when agencies ask instructors to come to them. All the program requires is a classroom with people in the seats, Curnutt said. It's the smaller police agencies that can especially benefit from the training, he said, because they have fewer officers to contend with an active shooter and may lack a SWAT team.
Curnutt said officers learn to engage shooters in a way that is "correct tactically, legally and policy-wise."
"If officers don't do what they're supposed to, and do it right, they could hurt the wrong people," he said.
Patrol officers are taught the kind of tactics usually given only to SWAT and the military, including how to get inside a barricaded door safely and how to work in low light.
Part of the training simulates what it's like to be fired upon in combat — something many police officers never encounter until it's actually happening, Curnutt said. But the program has realistic goals.
If officers are able to stop the shooter, that's excellent, he said. But if they cannot, they are taught to step back and get the resources they need, he said.
"You're not a SWAT team, but you're what stands between bad things happening to good people," Curnutt said. "What can you do when you show up with what you have?"
Though they're teaching some military-style techniques, Curnutt said they teach officers to apply them in a police setting.
"This isn't Fallujah," he said. "It's Fredericksburg."
Patrick George writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: pgeorge(at)statesman.com.
