Just lying in wait for CSI: Brentwood's casting call
As I lay motionless on the floor of the school building, gunshots whizzed past my head.

I couldn’t turn to look, but I could hear my friend Mary, sprawled about 15 feet away, screaming in pain from a leg “injury.”

Voices on police radios got louder as the first patrol officers arrived on the scene. I could hear the dispatcher and incident commander calmly relaying instructions and updates as an officer crouched behind the bookshelf that was behind me. His response to the commander was chilling.

“10-4, Command. 59 in the south hallway. I have two female victims, one deceased, one injured.”

Mary screamed again. The officer yelled back.

“We’ve got help on the way, ma’am,” he called to her. With my peripheral vision, I saw another team of officers enter the hallway suddenly from another door. With large patrol rifles, they immediately fired at the original gunman, who had tried to flee to an exit door.

The officer who crouched behind me suddenly stepped over my body and ran toward the shooter. In seconds, he and the other officers had, shall we say, subdued the gunman and updated incident command.

Then the supervisor’s voice came over the radios.

“Cease fire. Cease fire. Holster your weapons. The scenario is over.”

Relieved to be able to move again, I sat up and pulled off the plastic helmet that protected me from stray ammo, which really were small plastic airsoft pellets. I’d been helping out the Brentwood Police Department in an active-shooter training exercise.

Fortunately, I was only playing a dead body in the hallway, and my friend Mary wasn’t really suffering from a gunshot wound to the thigh. We were helping the police by making the exercise more realistic.

It may seem like overkill in a town like Brentwood, where, as we all like to think, nothing bad ever happens. But the workplace shooter who killed nine people in Connecticut last Tuesday highlights the need for local police to be prepared for anything.

After all, Brentwood does have its share of corporate headquarters and offices, not to mention public buildings and schools. The possibility is horrifying to think about, but that’s the job of our local law enforcement officers.

“The public needs to know that we do think about it,” said Lt. Alan Hardcastle, BPD training coordinator. “We plan for it, and we train for it.”

The training is intense. For an entire week this summer, Brentwood Academy officials graciously allowed the BPD access to an unoccupied area in their school building to simulate various scenarios involving an active shooter. The officers used airsoft weapons and were never sure what each scenario would bring.

Active-shooter training is necessary for every patrol officer, since he or she might be the first on the scene and may have to approach quickly and make contact with a shooter who probably has already injured or killed someone.

The BPD already is well equipped. After the 2002 Bank of America robbery in which two officers were shot and the suspect was killed, the entire force was outfitted with patrol rifles, which even Metro Nashville police don’t have. 

But even with better weapons, facing an active shooter also takes speed, communication, organization and guts.

In a situation when our instincts would tell us to flee, these officers are trained to run toward danger and stop it.

Thank goodness my time as a casualty on the floor was only pretend.

Jill Burgin calls her column “Joyride” because you never know where she’ll end up. E-mail her at tjburgin@comcast.net.