The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office and their SWAT Team participated in a life-like training session last Thursday night. The training was conducted to be as realistic as possible for the officers involved.
The first training scenario involved patrol officers discovering a barricaded suspect holding a hostage. As would occur in a real situation the patrol officers requested SWAT and gave SWAT members a briefing of what they had discovered. They relinquished command of the tactical situation to the SWAT Team.
Training scenarios also incorporated a downed officer rescue, a hostage release, a homicide and finally the taking in custody of the hostage taker.
The Sheriff’s Office Hostage Negotiators were deployed and used just as they would have been in a real life event.
The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office armored vehicle Nemesis and the Tactical Drone was used in the scenario to ensure the safety of the officers just as it would have been used in a dangerous or rescue type operation.
Sheriff Larry Pierce stated, “It is necessary to practice these types of scenarios so that when a real life situation occurs we will be ready to go. In every incident we respond to we discover what we do well and what we need to improve in. When we get new equipment such as the Nemesis and the drone we have to train to how these tools would be or could be deployed to give us the greatest advantage. We learn from every training and real life incident so that we will be able to deploy our equipment to save officers and citizen’s lives.”
