Local police likely would have been informed ahead of time, or at least they should have been.
And if they got several calls in quick succession from civilians saying there‘a an active shooter, that could easily still go wrong.
It’s been a while now since I’ve done it much, but I’m an active shooter instructor; it’s a further course on top of our use of force instructor qualification, which is required for scenario based training. A crystal clear delineation between who is involved in a training exercise and who isn’t is essential for training and public safety. A sanitized and strictly controlled training area is as well.
An innocent bystander got falsely and, it sounds like to an extent, violently arrested by police.
He didn’t know it was training. The fact that that was able to happen at all means there was insufficient supervision by training staff. Going hands on with an unaware bystander should have been an immediate safety stop.
If the civilians in the training area didn’t know it was an exercise, then they had no way to initiate a safety stop if something unsafe happened. Or to even know that they could.
Probably a few of the unwitting participants in the training area thought for at least a few seconds that they might not be making it home to their families that day.
This is the height of incompetence, and whatever stupid fuck approved and was responsible for this should be fired from whatever role put them in a position to do this. Anyone from the training cadre who were part of going ahead with this exercise should no longer be trusted to supervise or deliver training outside of maximum supervision and control. Everyone down to the lowest level should have seen how badly flawed this was, but no, some idiots probably thought it would be cool.
Absolute amateur hour.
www.ctvnews.ca
