Washington Police practice SWAT raids

The Washington Police Department conducted SWAT team training drills at the Washington Junior High School Friday afternoon. The police officers trained to respond to an armed suspect in the school. They practiced how they would enter the school, how they would enter each room and how they would relay information to the officers inside and outside the building.

Washington Police Investigator Shawn Ellingson said that to add realism to the drills, the police used paint ball guns designed for police which resembled their real guns except that they were colored blue and could only shoot paintballs. The paintballs are not really paint and they do not stain the surface they strike.

The SWAT team conducted drills Friday in which a group of officers would enter the school and then a police sniper outside the building would relay information to the officers inside. Ellingson said that snipers do much more than fire their gun at a target.

?Snipers are utilized in intelligence more than anything else,? he said. ?We can sneak them into a spot and they can give us a lot of intelligence before the rest of us get there.?

Ellingson said that snipers often work in pairs with someone who sits beside them and communicates what they see to the other officers. He said these are known as ?sniper-observer? teams.

?The sniper is dealing with the weapon?s side of it,? Ellingson said. ?He is relaying what he sees to the observer, who is on the radio. That way, a sniper can focus on what he needs to focus on. A sniper may have to make a split-second decision. In a hostage-rescue situation, if things get jacked up and we?re afraid he (the gunman) is going to hurt a hostage, the sniper has to take a shot.?

Ellingson said that in those situations, the sniper is sometimes given a ?green light? to shoot the gunman when he has a clear shot.

?He can?t be looking through his scope and then getting on the radio and talking,? he said.

In one of the exercises Friday afternoon, officer Chad Huschka played the role of the sniper and was positioned outside the school. Ellingson and other officers were in the school attempting to arrest two of the targets, who were played by Washington County dispatchers Melanie Huschka and Jamie Mayer. In another room, dispatchers Joni Huisenga and Sandy Lovetinsky played the role of the targets.

Ellingson said he?d like all dispatchers to eventually go through the training in case they have to be called out with the SWAT team in their crisis response unit (CRU). The crisis response unit is a vehicle that was once an ambulance but has been converted to be a mobile communications center that is sent out with the SWAT team.

?We have four radios in the CRU, and one of the radios is a Des Moines County radio which we use if we do operations in Burlington,? Ellingson said.

A dispatcher will be in the CRU with access to the Internet. As the dispatcher works on his or her computer, the officers in the CRU can see what the dispatcher is doing on an elevated monitor in the vehicle.

Ellingson said the SWAT team has been used a few times recently for real-life raids such as for meth arrests in Wellman and Washington.

The police met at the junior high Monday morning to go over their electronic communication. It wasn?t until the afternoon that the police did their sniper drills.

?If you can relate it to football, we went through blocking and tackling drills this morning and in the afternoon we did a scrimmage,? Ellingson said.

Ellingson and Mayer participated in SWAT drills with the Washington County Sheriff?s Department Monday at the Mid-Prairie High School in Wellman. Law enforcement officers from Keokuk and Jefferson counties also participated in those drills.