Posted on 11/16/2014 8:33:28 AM PST by Whenifhow
Students, teachers and parents were taken by surprise after an “active shooter drill” brought the Winter Haven middle school into lockdown as armed police officers burst into classrooms with their weapons drawn.
Students at Jewett Middle Academy said they were terrified when police officers burst in the doors for a planned active shooter drill – but students and teachers are irked they were not told ahead of time.
snip
“We actually thought that someone was going to come in there and kill us,” the station quoted her as saying. But police say they conduct these drills for the absolute safety of the students.
“These types of drills are vital in order to evaluate not only law enforcement response, but more importantly to educate the students and school officials in case an actual event were to occur,” Chief ...Bird said in an email to media.
.... many parents, however, received panicked texts from their children as the drill was going on.
snip
Stacy Ray told WTVT that she received a text from her seventh-grade daughter Lauren Marionneaux after two armed officers burst into her classroom. ... police told The Post that one of the officers had his duty firearm – a handgun – drawn.
The gun was loaded, as is required. The other officer was carrying an unloaded AR-15. According to Ray, one of her children texted: “I thought he was going to shoot me.”
In a statement...spokesperson Jamie Brown for the .... police department said they were only aware of one student who texted a parent during the exercise.
“Unfortunately, no one gets an advanced notice of real life emergencies,” Polk County Public Schools spokesman Jason Gearey said in an e-mailed statement to The Washington Post. “We don’t want students to be scared, but we need them to be safe.”
(Excerpt) Read more at tampa.cbslocal.com ...
If you’re concerned this might happen to your kids, consider that this would never happen if you were home schooling them.
“Yeah sure....cops say it’s for “safety”....biggest load of BS coming from the jackboots. Exposing & pointing real weapons to children, for “training”. Real classy.....”
This is LE attitude to handling weapons now. Point them at everyone, for nothing. Forget all concepts of weapon safety. Forget that we no more enjoy having guns pointed at us, than cops enjoy having guns pointed at them. But we aren’t people to them.
IT’S ALL BOYS WITH TOYS. That is what guns are to cops. Or penile extensions. What they really wanted was an audience to their commando games.
Do your training when kids aren’t in school. They need to focus on study, not constantly be given the idea death is around the corner.
Ping.
I think its a great idea for testing lockdown procedures. Althou unless the officers want to get shot it may not be the best thing to do unannounced certainly never out of uniform.
You might assume after all a insane gets his hands on one of them uniforms and uses it to bypass some of the security not that there is any meaningful security given that nobody else on campus is equally armed.
They are also trained to confine and search the surviving victims on the theory that a second shooter may be hiding among them.
A shooter who stops firing and abandons his weapon is supposed to be arrested without further injury, regardless of what has happened to the victims.
Prospective victims are supposed to "shelter in place" - that is, lock themselves in and hide until the authorities clear the area.
There are a number practical difficulties implementing this doctrine.
Stupidity and malicious purpose are not exclusive choices. This incident appears to have combined both options.
A "Training drill" using live ammunition and involuntary civilian participants is an invitation to a lethal incident.
The commanders for this operation should be fired and imprisoned.
It’s probably also a violation of federal civil rights law as the police were acting under color of law.
All officers present should be under criminal prosecution for ADW amongst other things. Their supervisors and anyone in the school administration should be charged with accessory before the fact or conspiracy. Then all should be hit with federal civil rights charges.
And, it doesn’t matter if the firearms were loaded or not.
It’s permissible for a police officer to unholster his weapon and point it at someone where there is reasonable necessity, e.g., a felony stop. Here we have no consent and absolutely no reason to believe any criminal conduct was ongoing.
But, I know exactly what will happen. Nothing.
These types of drills involving children can be done in an empty classroom or with other LE personnel representing occupants. Don’t need to have live rounds. There are abandoned schools or office buildings that have long served LE for training.
SO CAL area officers used to use the old Fort MacArthur buildings in San Pedro for all sorts of training, been there several times. What was the school thinking if they signed off on this? Obviously there needs to be a plan for these situations, but not like this. Not exactly a fire drill.
It’s sick that we have to even worry about kids being shot in school. In the 50’s we kids practiced ducking and covering for bombs and whatever we did for earthquakes(CA), plus fire drills, but thankfully not for getting rushed by armed police or being shot by nut cases. The trouble with random shootings is that no two are alike. And in some cases students have been told to remain in classrooms when they probably should have gotten out. All of these cases are horrible in all respects.
I wonder if Chief Bird would have the same opinion of a drill being conducted by a local militia that might have to deal with some kind of situation which required them to encircle and detain the occupants of the police station. Perhaps to recapture it from some terrorists who had taken it over.
For safety's sake the militia would make sure their AR-15's were unloaded, but their handguns were loaded. Oh, and since they are probably smarter they'd call ahead and tell the Chief not to worry when a couple of pickup trucks full of guys wearing hoods arrive at the station because its just a drill.
I'm sure the Chief would say "sure, good training idea. I won't tell my men ahead of time"
Two seconds of thinking about it should have lead the Chief to realize that having an unannounced, armed training drill at a school is a really stupid idea. Just like having an unannounced training drill at the police station would be a stupid idea.
Somebody with more common sense should teach the Chief how to conduct training operations in a way which does not create fear and risk for everyone involved.
There are many reasons to homeschool. But this administration is not going to allow homeschooling for very much longer (a hunch). They want to control everything, so anyone who has a voice, should express it now.
More reasons to homeschool - the #1 reason common core is teaching Islam.
examples, MA, MD, CA, TN, MS
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3226924/posts?page=22#22
I wonder if Chief Bird would have the same opinion of a drill being conducted by a local militia .....
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Your response described a scenario that is an excellent analogy.
The one thing that stood out was the word “stupid”, calling to mind the recent Gruber videos.
The elitist arrogant thinking has pervaded more than the administration. When you look around this type of thinking is everywhere. (soda bans, for example)
It seems someone thought it was a good idea to run a drill like this “for their own good” (to protect the students).
So in order to “train” for the extremely remote possibility of an active shooter scenario, the police expose children to the very real possibility of a negligent discharge during the heat of this unannounced exercise? Just wow. If my kid had a loaded cop gun pointed at them for no reason, I’d be demanding heads roll.
School administrators and cops each trying to prove who is more stupid.
They’ll be strorming into houses soon.
This ping list is for the “other” articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
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Another one that is so out of line that both lists need to know about it.
There are so many good reasons to homeschool, this is another big one.
That said, I'd like to know who was behind this idea... I doubt it was Polk County Public Schools spokesman Jason Gearey... or even the Winter Haven police department...
That would be considered EXTREMELY bad form where I come from (USMC, 1967-1993) and likely would get the one who done it a mouthful ofknuckles from the one who was did. Then the instructor or the skipper would have more than a few words for the doer, absolutely NONE of them kind or endearing.
I’d opt for choice “B” myself.
“We don’t want students to be scared, but we need them to be safe.”
If they’re in a public school, no way they can be safe.
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