BENTONVILLE — All the hostage-taker wanted was a pizza, a six-pack and some meth.
What he got was an exercise in negotiations from various Northwest Arkansas law enforcement agencies.
Four police departments — the Benton and Washington County sheriff’s offices, Pea Ridge and Centerton — took part in Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Sunday at Ruth Hale Barker Middle School in Bentonville.
The goal of the program is to train police officers to safely and effectively respond to and stop an active shooter.
Goal number one, though, is recognizing if the emergency situation is for real, or just a guy having a bad day.
“They go through a half-day of classroom work learning how to react to different situations,” said Sgt. Thomas See, an instructor and a deputy with the Benton County Sheriff’s Office. “Then, they go through simulated situations to see how they react.”
Reaction is important. Officers use real guns loaded with “simu-nition,” a real bullet with a paint-marking cartridge on the end.
“It’s basically a soap pellet,” said instructor Matt Mills with the University of Arkansas Police Department. “You know when you’ve been hit. That’s part of the reinforcement tool. You learn what you need to work on.”
Todd Clow, another instructor, said the University of Arkansas Police Department and the Benton County Sheriff’s Office are the two sponsoring agencies for the training.
“We’re trying to get as many officers trained in this as possible,” Clow said.
This weekend’s two-day class had approximately 60 officers.
Sunday afternoon, the group worked on a hostage situation where a man had a gun with two hostages seated in front of him, three hostages in the doorway of a vacant classroom and a second armed man out of sight of the responding officers.
The team’s job was to assess the situation to see if they had a shooter or not. Once they determined it was a hostage situation, they established a dialogue with the gunman and coaxed him out.
Afterward, Clow points out weaknesses in the team’s approach.
“Whoever starts the initial negotiations should go all the way through with it,” Clow told the group. “Push off all his requests to command. Tell him you don’t have the authority. He had the cover of two hostages, you all spent too much time in the door. Get some kind of cover.”
Clow pointed out a few other things, but said the group generally did well because nobody fired of a wild shot.
“For reference, the two officers who responded to the Fort Hood shooting had been through the entire 16-hour course,” Mills said.
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is accused of killing 13 people and wounding dozens more in a shooting at Fort Hood last month
Hasan faces 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder stemming from the Nov. 5 shooting.
Civilian police officers rushed to the scene, and Hasan was shot and paralyzed from the waist down.
Mills added the University of Arkansas Police Department have been teaching the program for the past four years.