Itawamba Co. officers learn how to face shooter without backup

Instructors with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement teach the realistic two day class for local officers

ITAWAMBA COUNTY, MISS. (WCBI) -The goal of this training is straightforward.

“We are teaching you don’t have time to wait for back up, seconds count, in killings, we are teaching the officers to launch,  don’t have time to wait,  bad guys aren’t looking for us, looking for victims, that is why we are teaching them to go in quietly.”,” said Tim Stanley, an inspector with the FDLE.

Instructors with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement training unit teach the two day class, with realistic scenarios.

“We are hands on, touching, grabbing them with live guns,” Stanley said.

Itawamba County School District Police Chief Terry Johnson was at a class on the coast and wanted to bring it to Northeast Mississippi.

“Our children’s lives and staff members lives are most important thing we have in the county so we have to be able to protect them,” Chief Johnson said.

Officers learn tactics focusing on posture, maintaining control of the firearm,  finding, and advancing on the threat.  Instructors are teaching from real world experience.

“We wouldn’t be teaching anything we haven’t lived, and that has been missing in law enforcement for a lot of years,” said Pete Soulis, an inspector with the FDLE.

FDLE provides this training at no cost and instructors with local agencies are also taking the classes, so the training will continue.

“Our thought process is  we are going to make these trainers better than us, they will in turn take this program and make it their own and we have had that attitude for the last four or five years,” Soulis said.

Students in the active shooter class will also learn how to shoot from the ground, and also how to survive an ambush.

The active shooter training was approved by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis .  The training started after the Stoneman Douglas school shooting in 2018.

fdle.state.fl.us