UR hosts 'shooter' drill
Police from U of R, VCU practice response to gunman scenarios
By TOM CAMPBELLTIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Because Virginia Tech's tragedy proved it could happen in Virginia, 14 University of Richmond campus police and four from Virginia Commonwealth University underwent training yesterday in "active shooter exercises."
UR's North Court building simulated Virginia Tech's Norris Hall, where disturbed gunman Seung-Hui Cho killed 30 of his 32 victims.
Faculty and staff simulated students and professors.
"Marking cartridges" that fire colored powder from automatic pistols simulated bullets.
Eighteen police officers simulated themselves.
Each exercise was a variation on the basic scenario: A male student has gone off his medications. His girlfriend, another student, has dumped him. Just outside a North Court entrance, he shoots her and runs upstairs to the second floor, firing at professors in their offices and students in classrooms as he goes.
Officers taking part in the exercises first came upon the "dead" girlfriend and a wounded woman, on the floor and screaming for help. Next they started up the stairs after the shooter.
The teams of two or four officers worked their way up the stairs and then down the second-floor hall, clearing the small offices as they went, checking the "dead" bodies they found and telling survivors to stay put. The teams finally confronted the shooter in a classroom at the end of the hall.
The simulated bad guy, Richmond police officer Jason Ozolins, "lost" every time by getting killed, killing himself or giving up. He and other Richmond tactical training officers took part as instructors.
And late in the afternoon, members of Richmond's SWAT team were called to UR's North Court. Those officers knew they would be called to an exercise yesterday but not where or when.
Some had a little trouble finding the building once on campus, said UR spokesman Brian H. Eckert, but the negotiation exercise with a shooter who had taken a hostage went smoothly.
Chief Bob Dillard of the UR police department said his force must be the university's first line of defense for a shooter or other life-threatening emergency. That takes equipment and training.
He pointed to the ballistic shields his officers were trained to use yesterday as part of the training.
"We have purchased the shields and put them in the police cars since the Virginia Tech incident," he said. "This [exercise] is an opportunity to use it."
Active-shooter exercises not only reinforce standard tactics police officers learn at the academy, Dillard said, they give officers experience at working together, making them better prepared for the real thing.
A new emergency notification system at UR is set to go into operation Sept. 1.
The UR Alert System will send warnings and emergency information by text-message, e-mail and voice mail to campus computers, cell phones and dormitory and off-campus student telephones.
"Members of the university community will receive instructions early in the semester on how to update their emergency contact information," said Kathy Monday, UR's vice president for information systems.
The university is also planning replacement of classroom telephones with speaker-phones that could be used to make announcements, Monday said.
Monday was one of the volunteers simulating innocent bystanders in yesterday's police exercises. She said she was never struck by one of the simulated bullets, which expelled small plastic capsules that opened like flowers and left marks from the soap powder inside.
But John Douglass, acting dean of the UR law school, said he was hit. Despite an instructor's warnings about "welts," Douglass said he got hit only from a distance, which did not hurt him.
"The shooter was very considerate," Douglass said. "When he came up close, he'd say, 'I'm going to shoot the wall. You're dead.'" Contact Tom Campbell at (804) 649-6416 or
tcampbell@timesdispatch.com.
