By Dori Modney (@Dori_Modney on Twitter)

Practice makes perfect for Police critical incident teams

Oct 19, 2016 | 5:48 PM

LETHBRIDGE – Lethbridge Police took advantage of the good weather Wednesday (Oct. 19) afternoon to engage in specific training exercises.

Those who work in the 500 block of 30 Street North may have witnessed the tactical team engaged in a hostage situation around 1:45 P.M.

Then, from 5:30 to 9:00 P.M., crews enacted another hostage situation with different scenarios at Fleetwood Bawden School on 9 Avenue South.

The scenarios involved critical incident teams, which includes incident commanders, negotiators, the tactical team, K-9 units and an explosives team.

Support Services Sergeant, Kerry Cherpin, manages the critical incident teams. He says while each team trains within their own unit throughout the year, the individual groups get together a couple times a year to train on a full-scale scenario that includes all of the teams.

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With any situation, Cherpin says the primary goal is to ensure public safety and reach a negotiated settlement.

“However, we’re cognizant of the fact that may not always be the case and the suspect may choose other options, so we have to be trained in a number of different possibilities, and these scenarios allow us the opportunity to put our members through some ongoing and foundational training to ensure that we’re ready for those different outcomes.”

Every critical incident will pose varied and unique circumstances. Cherpin explained they deal with different levels of authority that include command and compromise authority, but there is also reactive authority.

“Every officer has re-active authority under section 25 of the Criminal Code, essentially, if they believe anybody in the public is at risk they can react to save a life or to prevent injury. The reason for the necessity for that is often there’s not enough time to relay that information to an incident commander.”

According to Cherpin, information gathered at the scene by each police unit is used to determine the best course of action in each situation.

They have best-practices and national standards for each unit. When the practice has concluded, each unit sits down and goes over the criteria for their team, and determines which practices were done well and which areas in they could have done better.

Cherpin says they have the opportunity to learn something from every incident as officers are always looking to throw in new ‘twists’.