Page 90 - NIXBOOK

There I am at a police team training for an active shooter scenario at a school. The setting: a large high school during summer
break. Now traditionally, it had been standard operating procedure for patrol officers to set up containment and wait for a SWAT
team to go in and combat a loose gunman, but on a national level everybody everywhere began to realize that waiting any length
of time for a SWAT team to show up and deploy was ridiculous. So patrol officers were then taught to wait long enough to get
a two or three man team formed and then go in and solve the active shooter situation themselves instead of waiting, but then
that evolved of course into the protocol that the first officer there should just run in solo and end it ASAP. But when I went to
this training, it was still the 4-man response theory. And there was a really official way to go, and that’s what the training was
all about. The first four officers to show up (from any police agencies) would group very close together into a diamond formation;
one officer points a gun straight ahead, two officers behind him and to the sides cover the right and left side each, and one
officer in back faces backward. Looks great on paper but it needs a lot of coordination and training to do in practice, because
going around a corner - like in a hallway – requires a bit of leapfrogging in place, with the entire squad rotating positions. Once
a team gets it figured out it’s impressive to watch, but the whole afternoon we practiced this I kept thinking “There is no way
that we’re going to remember these dance moves if there is an actual shooting going on…we’re just going to run in and not even
think about all this fancy rotating around corners nonsense..” But I was able to master the technique enough though to figure
out where to start out during the practice runs; after the first couple run throughs I saw which guy wound up in front at the last
corner when the actor playing a gunman would be confronted down the hallway, so after that I always started out in the lead,
so by the time we got to the final scene I’d have already rotated myself to the covering the rear. Not because I was a coward, but
because there was just a lot of pressure on the front shooter at that final moment, since all the instructors were watching nearby
then. In my career, we only did that fancy training once. I think everybody (else) eventually concluded that regular old patrol
officers in an active shooter event are going to be too busy and distracted to try to remember how to tactically maintain a
formation while rotating around a corner while advancing down hallways toward a gunman and so just never mind all that.

One day a large open-top trailer truck drove through town with a large load of dead fish of some kind, to be processed as fertilizer
somewhere. The smell. Oh god the smell. It lingered for about 3 hours along the road. Kind of amazing, really.

Snowy winter day. Some lady driving on a curve slides off and goes down an embankment, rolls her car upside down, and is
stuck there. I come across the scene and help get her out of her car, which had landed in a mass of bushes and deep snow,
fortunately had just missed landing in a nearby creek. The woman was one of my coworker’s mother in law.