Ocean City Police Call Gunman-At-School Drill a Success

The call came in to the Ocean City Police Department Communications Center about 1 p.m. on Thursday: Somebody was firing weapons on the second floor of Ocean City High School.

Captain Jay Prettyman and Sgt. Dave Hall had scripted the emergency call and assigned a role to a person acting as a shooter in this emergency response drill, but the officers responding had no idea how the scene would play out.

Their job was to eliminate the threat as quickly as possible. And the practice session was designed to train them in a real-life scenario.

A decade or two ago, their role may have been very different—it likely would have been to "contain the threat" in the building and wait for a SWAT team to arrive.

But a frightening series of school shootings in the past 20 years has proven that the first officers responding to such incidents must respond quickly—they must be able to act quickly and decisively to save the lives of students and teachers.

The deadly shootings at Virginia Tech University (33 died) and Columbine, CO (15 died) have been the most publicized. But statistics show 371 school shootings since 1992, according to Washington Ceasefire. Ocean City Police Department Captain Steven Ang said the incidents are typically over in five to 10 minutes, often with deadly results.

Soon after the Columbine shootings, the local police department began cooperating with the school district to train its officers in responding to such incidents. This year, the department decided to include the other local agencies who would likely be called to assist in a major response.

So on Thursday, 15 agencies were in Ocean City for a drill that lasted from about noon to 7 p.m.

Ang said Prettyman and Hall had been working for about eight months in designing the exercise, and they were the only ones who knew how the script would play out.

They knew, for instance, that about 3 p.m. the officers would be thrown a curve—a second shooter would appear, a female accomplice with a shotgun.

The officers handled one situation through action and one through negotiation, Ang said.

"We got what we wanted," he said of the entire exercise.

Over the next few weeks, the agencies will go through debriefing on the exercise—they'll go over what worked, what didn't and what can be improved. That was the intent of the drill.

In addition to the Ocean City Police Department and the Cape May County Prosecutor's Office, other agencies involved in the exercise were:

• Cape May County Sheriff's Department
• Cape May County SWAT Team
• State Police TEAMS Unit (Technical Emergency and Mission Specialists)
• Atlantic County Emergency Response Team
• Somers Point Police Department
• Longport Police Department
• Sea Isle City Police Department
• State Police Woodbine Barracks
• Delaware River Bay Authority K-9 Unit
• Ocean City Office of Emergency Management
• Ocean City Public Works
• AtlantiCare Tactical Medic Unit
• Cape May County Police Academy