Active shooter training planned

Never say never, and that’s Eunice Police Chief Randy Fontenot’s motivation to send some of his officers to an active shooter training event this coming spring.
“Training like this is important because of everything that has been going on,” Fontenot said. “We don’t know where the threat is going to come from now. It’s not just in your big cities in other states. Look at Lafayette. And even where it’s happening at, these schools and stuff and other places, they are probably the same as us, thinking that’s going to happen in the bigger cities, somewhere else, not here. Nobody expected it to happen where it happened at, so I think it’s important for all first responders to be prepared.”
The department and the ALICE Training Institute will hold an ALICE Instructor Training at LSUE March 21-22. ALICE stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate. The course is designed to teach and certify instructors in proactive survival strategies for violent intruder or active shooter incidents. The certified instructors will be able to train others at law enforcement departments, schools, universities, hospitals, businesses and any other places of work shop. The training provides individuals with survival enhancing options for the time between the start of a violent situation and the time when law enforcement officers arrive at the scene.
The registration fee for the training is $595 per person and can be completed on line at www.alicetraining.com. The training is in line with recommendations from the U.S. Department of Education, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The training event at LSUE is open to anyone who would like to participate.
Lt. Varden Guillory, who is organizing the event, said, “We have 12 signed up so far from different parishes, jurisdictions, departments. We have people from Lake Charles, the Lafayette area and Opelousas.”
In addition to bringing the training event to Eunice, Guillory also plans to put together an active shooter awareness presentation to show at local businesses, schools and churches.
“We want to give them an idea of what to do to prepare,” Guillory said. “It’s better to be prepared and have a little information, just in case. We want people to have the knowledge of what to do.”
Guillory plans to have the presentation ready by early next year.
Under Fontenot’s administration, which began in January of this year, the department has been working with the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Department, the Eunice City Marshal’s Office and Louisiana State Police to organize an active shooter response plan. Many of the department’s officers have had formal training in active shooter situations, and the department has also worked with St. Edmund on the school’s emergency plans and hasspoken to staff at LSUE about the campus’ security plans.
“Hopefully we will never need to use it,” Fontenot said of the plan. “We started organizing from scratch this year with the other agencies. The things that we learned when we started talking, while working with St. Eds, their plans were different from ours. We need to all be on the same page because we are all going to be responding to that situation.”
“We need to know what we are going to be doing. We started having meetings with other law enforcement agencies and first responders in the area, everybody who would be responding and coming together on our plan, and hashing out our differences and settling on one response so that we would all be doing it the same way.”
Fontenot said once the plans for St. Ed are finalized, the department will work with the other schools in the city to develop a similar type plan.
“From the schools, we will fan out with others and businesses,” he said. “Basically, it will be a generic plan that will apply to any business, school or public building in the city.”
Officers from the department have also participated in teacher training events at East Elementary, and Fontenot has been in touch with Acadian Medical Center regarding the hospital’s emergency plans.
“With the ALICE Training, if something were to happen at a facility at least those there will know what we will be doing when we get there and they will know how to take care of things until we get there,” Fontenot said. “Our training is a work in progress and will be continuous and continuing.”