Crime & Safety

St. Charles Police Train for the Worst, Hope for the Best in Thwarting School Violence

Session was planned long before the Sandy Hook tragedy, but it might serve to reassure residents that St. Charles police don't intend to be caught unprepared.

The intensity of the expressions on their faces as they moved with guns drawn through the empty school corridor Thursday morning spoke worlds about how seriously these men and women take their training.

But in light of the recent shooting calamity at Sandy Hook School a week ago, their looks of determination might equally reflect an empathy for the victims of violence. More likely, it was a mix of both.

About half of the officers of the St. Charles Police Department gathered Thursday morning at the old Kaneland Middle School in nearby Maple Park for a full day of rapid deployment training. It is the type of training they and Police Chief Jim Lamkin hope these officer never will have to use but which is essential if they are to prove effective at stopping the kinds of violence that a week ago devastated one small community and stoked the fears of families across the nation.

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While it might seem as if the timing of Thursday’s training session had been planned in reaction to the Dec. 14 rampage in at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn., Lamkin assured that it was not.

“I want to stress this just happens to be coincidental, because this actually was planned beforehand as part of our regular annual training,” Lamkin said. In fact, he added, half of his officers were in the same building a week earlier — the day before the calamity — undergoing the same kind of training the department began doing in the late 1990s.

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Still, in speaking to the media about the training on Wednesday, and inviting media observation — and even participation in the experience — Lamkin and Deputy Chiefs Steve Huffman and David Kintz acknowledged getting the word out about it might serve help calm fears locally and reassure parents that their police force is well-trained.

The importance of training is emphasized in the St. Charles department, where officers are expected to undergo on average 180 or more hours a year, although officers involved in special duty — such as special weapons and tactics, or SWAT, for example — regularly put in more than 400 hours of training a year.

But specialized training, such as Thursday’s rapid deployment training, is geared toward making the officers’ responses to particularly dangerous situation swift, accurate and instinctual.

“It’s part of our regular training, and we try to do a lot of regular training so that our officers are prepared to deal with whatever events come up,” Lamkin said.

Related:

  • Dec. 21, 2012: Rapid Deployment: Find and Eliminate Threats
  • Dec. 17, 2012: After Newtown: District 303 Parents Worry About School Safety

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