| F.A.T.S. Training Provided to Bowling Green Police Department |
| 1/4/2005 |
 It looks and feels like Columbine. An unknown number of armed students has taken over a high school. Officers arriving on the scene get into a diamond formation and begin searching the halls. They encounter frightened students running down the hall screaming. They tell those students to run past them and get out of the building.
Two suspects in different are shot and handcuffed. The officers continue. Another student — a lone female — runs down the hall toward them, also screaming in fear. “Run past us,” Bowling Green Police Officer Mike Clingenpeel calls to her. “Run past us!” The girl ducks inside a doorway. “Come out and run past us,” Clingenpeel repeats. She comes out, guns blazing. They shoot her. That was just one scenario presented to officers on the Fire Arm Training Simulator (F.A.T.S.), brought in by Mike Webber. He is a retired Findlay Post Commander for the Ohio Highway Patrol, and now works for the University of Findlay’s Terrorism Preparedness Center. F.A.T.S. is a video training screen showing real-life video that can be controlled by a computer to allow each scenario to develop differently, depending on how the officers react. Each officer involved in the scenario can use a handgun, a shotgun, OC spray, a baton, or even a taser, if needed. Clingenpeel and Corporal Chuck Broshious, of the Portage Police Department, both are connected to the system for another scenario. In this situation, the officers make a felony stop of a suspected vehicle following an armed robbery at a convenience store. Clingenpeel talks the driver out of the vehicle and orders him to walk backward toward the officers. The suspect stops mid-way between his vehicle and the police cruisers. Clingenpeel repeats his instructions to continue backing several times before the suspect complies. Once his is out of the line of fire, he is taken into custody. They approach the vehicle. Lying in wait on the passenger seat, they find a man with a shotgun. Clingenpeel takes four shots with the shotgun. Broshious unloads all 10 rounds in his pistol. The suspect is hit multiple times. In reviewing the scenario, Webber informs them that if Broshious had stepped forward to handcuff the backing suspect when he stopped walking, the man in the truck would have killed him. Another scenario involves a man who loses control during a traffic stop and begins loading an automatic weapon in plain view of the officer. Clingenpeel shoots the man before he can get a shot off. It seems like an unlikely scenario. However, after the exercise, Webber shows the real-life incident on which it was based. An officer named Kyle Dinkheller was killed in that shoot-out, execution-style. It was caught on Dinkheller’s in-car video camera. Following each scenario, the officers discuss what they were thinking at each step. “I was concerned with the hostage and him getting hurt,” Broshious said after one high school hostage situation. “I would have moved in and got a head-on shot.” In another situation that seemed under control but quickly escalated into a shooting, Broshious couldn’t believe the results: “I shot six? Really?” He had, and by tracking all of his shots, he learned that his first shot was fatal. Webber was hired to provide three days of training for all of the officers, and for any area officer from other departments who wished to attend. The training does not help the officers meet any requirements for the division. However, Webber said it provides realistic training and “provides protection against being sued for not properly training officers. You can pay it now or you can pay it later. If an officers shoots someone, you’ll...have lawsuits.” Deputy Chief Gary Spencer said nobody from the division will sit down and look at results from the training. He described it instead as more of a “self-critique” and a different way to train the division’s officers in “shoot/don’t shoot situations.” By GREGORY L. VAN VORHIS Staff Writer, Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune Photo credit to Michael Lehmkuhle, Sentinel-Tribune |
