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Posted by: kwflatbed

By Michele McPhee
Monday, December 10, 2007


Photo by Mark Garfinkel (File)
A Boston police officer searches for a suspect earlier this year.

Boston cops have spent the past year undergoing specialized training on how to confront and stop a crazed gunman such as the teenage killer who walked into a Nebraska mall last week and murdered eight people in a shooting spree, BPD Commissioner Ed Davis told me.
The program - called Active Shooter Training - has also been extended to local university police officers to prevent massacres such as the one that broke out at Virginia Tech this year that left 32 students and faculty members dead, Davis said.
Active Shooter Training is a change in protocol that once dictated police officers to contain a madman and wait for a SWAT team sniper. Now cops are trained to immediately take down a gun-toting whacko who wants to be famous by spilling the blood of innocent people.
“Everyone in the department in uniform has gone through the training along with university police. So everyone is on the same book and page as to the protocols to respond to a terrible tragedy like the one that happened last week,” Davis told me.
“In the past, our mission was to contain a situation like that and wait for SWAT team officers to arrive at the scene. We now teach an immediate confrontation. We try to identify the location of the shooter, put together a team of officers, and immediately confront that person,” Davis said.
The move is an important one in a city that is famous for its universities, and has already seen one spree killer, Michael “Mucko” McDermott, storm into a Wakefield office park and slaughter seven of his coworkers as they pleaded for mercy.
That massacre took place in 2000, when it was still a big deal to gun down seven innocent people in cold blood; an event that garnered front page headlines for weeks and profiles of all the victims involved. Now, so many massacres later, it barely registers in the public perception for longer than a few days.
Just last week, videos of Penn State students dressed in heinous bullet-riddled and blood-stained clothes that mimicked dead Virginia Tech victims surfaced on YouTube mocking their deaths. The Nebraska mall shooting isn’t even news anymore, and frankly, even I could not tell you the name of a single slain victim.
The first mass shooting spree I covered came nearly a decade ago in Jonesboro, Ark., when four little girls and a teacher were shot dead and 11 other children were critically wounded by a couple of heavily armed losers who were just 11 and 13 years old.
I was working for the New York Daily News then and the paper had me stay in Arkansas for more than a week. We covered every funeral, interviewed every family member of the child-killers and wondered how something like that could happen.
Then came Columbine, and the school shootings haven’t stopped since.
In 2007, there were three American schools riddled with bullets; Virginia Tech, Success Tech High School in Ohio; and an elementary school in New Jersey. In 2006, there were seven school shootings, including the horror show that played out in a tiny Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania.
And now it’s not even safe to shop in a suburban mall.
What the Boston Police Department is doing is smart. But the fact that the training is even necessary is a sad commentary on how gun violence continues to have a dramatic effect on this country.

http://bostonherald.com/news/regiona...icleid=1049824

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