BILOXI, Miss.–Imagine getting a phone call in the middle of the day. It’s your child’s school and the voice on the other end says there’s somebody shooting a gun in there. The school’s on lockdown, so you can’t get in. You have to trust the school resource officer. Those officers are getting training to handle that situation this week.
School resource officers are essentially armed police officers in schools. The training is for officers from all over the state. You can see the different police cars outside Biloxi Jr. High.
“All law enforcement officers in the state now are required to be trained in an active shooter type setting,” said Paul Cannette. He’s the chief of police for School resource Officers in Biloxi, and he helped organize the training. “So it doesn’t matter who responds to the school, those officers are trained and it cuts the response time.”
Cannette said the officers who are getting the training at e current event are limited to school resource officers, but every one of those gets the same training, so they know what to do.
And if you’re asking exactly what they do, Cannette would not go into specifics about the actual plan.
“We do have a plan in place. we follow it. We practice it. We do drills with the school administration. Every school does it.”
As far as predicting shootings, Cannette said there are some kids who are “on the radar” of the administration, and are known to have problems, then there are some who are not.
“There have been some that, you talk to friends and neighbors and, oh he was a great kid. He was very outgoing. We never would suspected have this. And then you start looking into the child’s past and find things that he left behind and you start to wonder how could we have helped this child?”
Cannette said that training, and knowing what to do, could mean saving lives.
“We stop the killing. It doesn’t necessarily mean we shoot the shooter, but we sop the killing.”
