Columbine altered police procedures

GOLDEN, Colo. (AP) — The first officers on the scene had never trained for what they found at Columbine High School: No hostages. No demands. Just killing.

In the hours that followed, the nation watched in horror as the standard police procedure for dealing with shooting rampages in the U.S. proved tragically, heartbreakingly flawed on April 20, 1999.

Two officers exchanged fire with one of the teenage gunmen just outside the school door, then stopped — as they had been trained to do — to wait for a SWAT team. During the 45 minutes it took for the SWAT team to assemble and go in, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot 10 of the 13 people they killed that day.

The killers committed suicide around the time the makeshift SWAT team finally entered. But the SWAT officers took several hours more to secure the place, moving methodically from room by room. One of the wounded, teacher Dave Sanders, slowly bled to death.

“It was really frustrating,” said Marjorie Lindholm, a grief counselor and speaker at police training seminars. Lindholm was a 16-year-old student in a science classroom where two classmates used their T-shirts to try to stanch Sanders’ bleeding. “We were told ‘They’re on their way, they’re coming.’”

Ten years later, Columbine has transformed the way police in the U.S. deal with shooting rampages.

After the tragedy, police across the country developed “active-shooter” training. It calls for responding officers to rush toward gunfire and step over bodies and bleeding victims, if necessary, to stop the gunman — the active shooter — first.

Sgt. A.J. DeAndrea, a patrol officer in the Denver suburb of Arvada, and now-retired sheriff’s Sgt. Grant Whitus, two of the SWAT team members who searched Columbine High that day, now train police with the idea that a gunman, in a mass shooting, kills a person every 15 seconds.

Around the country, police say the strategy has saved lives time and again.

In North Carolina, active-shooter training became part of the state’s law enforcement academy curriculum in 2001. Last month, a rampage at a Carthage, N.C., nursing home that killed a nurse and seven patients was cut short when 25-year-old Officer Justin Garner entered the place alone and wounded the gunman with a single shot. Garner had undergone active-shooter training.

For three decades before Columbine, law enforcement had followed a contain-and-wait strategy calculated to prevent officers and bystanders from getting killed: The first ordinary cops at the scene would set up a perimeter to contain the situation, and then wait for the experts — SWAT team members trained in military tactics and equipped with special protective gear and assault weapons — to go in and bring down the gunman.

That strategy and the creation of SWAT teams were prompted by the 1966 sniper attack at the University of Texas at Austin, in which Charles Whitman climbed a clock tower and opened fire with a high-powered rifle, killing 14 people.

Police in the U.S. now employ so-called contact teams, in which patrol officers from any jurisdiction band together to enter a building in formation to confront the gunman and shoot it out with him if necessary.