By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
One of the biggest fears for law enforcement is the active-shooter situation. So many variables, the potential for a large number of victims, and the obvious direct threat from active gunfire make it a dreaded call. Fake calls do not help. On Wednesday, law enforcement officials responded to nearly a dozen active shooter calls in schools around the state, ranging from Liberal in southwest Kansas to Topeka in the northeast, and including Russell in the middle. Fortunately, they were all fake. Unfortunately, law enforcement still has to respond as if the threat is real.
"If there happens to be a police car or sheriff's deputy close, they're immediately going to respond," said Barton County Sheriff Brian Bellendir. "You have to get buzzed into these places. You just pray the secretary didn't get up to get a cup of coffee or something and doesn't buzz you in immediately, and now you're capping rounds through the door."
High-stakes training has changed over the years. In 1999, two student gunmen killed 12 classmates and a teacher at Columbine High School near Denver. With active shooters in the building, police waited for a tactical team before moving inside. Now, police are trained to take immediate action.
"The training at that time was you hang on and wait for a tactical team to get there," said Bellendir. "After Columbine, that changed. The training is now you go in, period. You try to neutralize that gunman as fast as you can."
That strategy did not go as planned in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022, when a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers. More than 370 law enforcement officers eventually responded to that shooting, and some studies indicate the shooting could have been stopped within three minutes. Instead, 77 minutes ticked by, with shots being fired for a portion of that time. Bellendir used that tragedy to train his own deputies the next day. Saving lives, he said, is a no-hold-barred duty of law enforcement.
"We've even talked, if you could, drive one of the cars through the doors," he said. "I mean if you have to get in. If you're confident there is gunfire going on, especially in a situation like that where've got multiple calls coming out of the building. You've got kids calling parents, you've got parents calling 911 where it's pretty definite what you've got going on in there, we will gain entry into that building however we have to."
Swatting calls, themselves, have proven deadly. In 2017, a gamer in California sent Wichita police to an unsuspecting home to settle a gaming feud. When 28-year-old Andrew Finch stepped outside to see what was going on, he was fatally shot by police.
Bellendir said swatting calls make the job more difficult because of the stakes on the line. Police making split-second decisions may make the wrong one based on the information available at the time. Attorneys and juries will later have weeks and months, often years, to parse out those details. He hopes that was not the intent of Wednesday's rash of swatting calls.
"It could also be aimed at law enforcement," he said. "It could be somebody who hates law enforcement and is just trying to get some cop to screw up and make a bad call. It's tough."