| Public Safety conducts
emergency simulation with D.C police BY MIKE UNGER  Photo by Jeff Watts
The call came crackling over the radios just a few minutes past one.
“Investigate trouble at 4400 Massachusetts Avenue. American University.” Within minutes, a cadre of D.C. police cars, sirens blaring, came whisking onto campus. As officers jumped out and were apprised of the situation by AU police, they mobilized into teams, and guns drawn, approached McDowell Hall. Thankfully, the guns the policemen clutched in their hands were red, signifying that they were fake. Mercifully, the scenario that played out May 31 on campus, a gunman loose in a residence hall, was an elaborate simulation, staged jointly by AU’s Department of Public Safety and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). The drill, which involved dozens of AU and city police officers, observers, and evaluators, was the first of its kind ever held at a university in Washington. “In light of recent events at Virginia Tech, something like this is very important,” said Andy Solberg, commander of the MPD’s Second District. “In the Second District we have five large campuses, so we’re really grateful to [AU] Chief [Michael] McNair and his officers for setting this up. We can’t thank them enough.” More than 15 AU officers and roughly 30 MPD personnel took part in the drill, which began when an actual MPD dispatcher put a call out on the radio to “investigate a disturbance” at AU. MPD officers arrived to find that AU officers had, as is called for in their protocol, secured the perimeter of McDowell. AU officers are not armed. “Whenever we have an incident on campus with a gun, we immediately notify MPD,” Chief McNair said. “We presented this scenario knowing that we’re not armed and are not going to be.” The various players in the simulation wore badges to signal their roles. The shooter, dressed in a Carolina Panthers football jersey, was situated on an upper floor of McDowell, and people playing students were scattered throughout the dorm. When officers entered the building, they found a woman slumped over the front desk wearing a label that simply, chillingly, read “dead.” Over the course of the next 45 minutes to an hour, MPD officers stormed the residence hall, securing floors and exits while simultaneously shepherding out “students” and searching for the gunman. Using information they collected from witnesses and their own work, they eventually found him on the seventh floor and “administered lethal force.” After the drill was complete, everyone gathered in the McDowell Formal Lounge to offer feedback on the day. “We were very pleased,” Chief McNair said. “We had a number of goals and objectives that we needed to meet. There are some things that certainly need to be changed as a result of looking at what we did, but by and large everyone was very pleased with the response and the professional attitude that everyone had about their jobs. We’re in good shape here. The university is in a major city with a police department that responds to these types of incidents all the time.” The drill also marked the first time that AU tested new technology that allows it to communicate with different law enforcement agencies over a radio. “What’s plagued most organizations when you have a multiple-agency response is the communications with the radio,” Chief McNair said. “We’re on different frequencies, and that’s fine for everyday stuff. But when you have a multiple-agency operation, it dictates that people must be able to talk to each other. The device we have is an ACU-M. It allows you to take one radio from each of the systems and join all of them together. We could talk to MPD, they could talk to us. If we would have had fire and rescue there we could have talked to them. It worked extremely well.” The drill was taped and observed by many professionals, and AU Public Safety will study it and implement any changes in its protocol that it deems necessary. “We’re going to take those comments from the evaluators and compile them into a report,” Chief McNair said. “The commanders will get back together and determine what kind of things went well and what kind of things we need to improve on. The whole idea is we will make some of those improvements and conduct another drill. “I think it’s a very comforting thing to the university community to know that we have such a good working relationship with MPD.” |
