By Krystal Smalley
ksmalley@wbcowqel.com
The pops and bangs coming out of the Wynford Elementary gymnasium aren’t the sounds someone wants to hear at a school but on Wednesday they were a necessity.
The Crawford County Sheriff’s Office and the Ohio Attorney General’s Office hosted an Advanced Building Searches training program July 7 and 8 at Wynford Elementary. Roughly 45 law enforcement officers across Crawford and Wyandot counties took advantage of the free training offered by the Attorney General’s Office.
“Attorney Mike DeWine offers a mobile teaching lab,” explained Crawford County Sheriff Scott Kent. “This is advanced building clearing.”
Law enforcement training officers set up a makeshift room complete with tight turns in the gym. Officers and deputies were taught how to clear a building without overly exposing themselves at corners and went through shoot and no-shoot practice scenarios. The officers were outfitted with simunition, a non-lethal training ammunition that looks like a small lipstick tube, in their training weapons.
“We have people here from Bucyrus PD, Galion PD, Crawford County Sheriff’s Office, Wyandot County Sheriff’s Office, and I see that we have one of the medics from the Bucyrus Fire Department that had an attachment to our special response teams,” Kent said. “We kind of opened it up to a broad group of people.”
The program is offered free by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office and Kent said they had been on the waiting list for a while.
The Sheriff’s Office is always working to keep its deputies qualified and up-to-date with yearly firearms qualifications and policy and procedure reviews but this kind of training adds to their capabilities.
“If we can pick up little stuff like this along the way we’re not going to turn that down, especially with situations like Ferguson and stuff,” Kent said. “I think having training where the guys go through real-life scenarios and have to make that split second decision, it’s going to be looked at later on down the road by someone else. So it’s important that we put them in these scenarios like this.
“Heaven forbid, they ever get in a situation like this but if they do, you revert back to your training, how you’re trained. So this is stuff we hope they retain and take with them into the field,” Kent added.
One of the biggest advantages of training with different local agencies, Kent believed, was that when it came time to respond to a call, his deputies would know exactly how officers from Bucyrus or Galion would act in the situation.
Bucyrus Police K9 Officer Curt Bursby and Crawford County Sheriff’s Deputy were participating in exercises on properly clearing corners Wednesday along with a handful of other officers. Both felt that the training would help out immensely on the job.
“You don’t the opportunity to do this kind of stuff out on the street. The training keeps you going so you don’t forget what you have to do,” Bursby said.
“Over the days, on the road, or whatever, sometimes you get in the everyday activities that sometimes you forget about training,” Martin said. “It kind of gives us the opportunity to go back to what we went through in the academy. It kind of gives us the awareness that this could happen someday. A call that you think it going to be an ordinary call could turn into a really bad situation.”
A photo gallery of the training can be found on the Photos page.