Training for the unthinkable

Pullman residents who heard shotgun blasts Wednesday at City Hall did not need to fret.

The sounds they heard did not come from a deadly shooter, but from a Pullman Police officer who was only pretending to be a deadly shooter during a training exercise.

Officer Ruben Harris, armed with a shotgun loaded with blanks, fired off a couple of rounds outside before entering the building to simulate what police call an “active attack event.”

The employees inside practiced the lessons they learned from an earlier presentation conducted by Sgt. Aaron Breshears and Officer Josh Bray on how to survive such an attack.

“The principles that we’re giving them is that you can do something and you don’t need to curl up in a little ball on the ground and get murdered,” Breshears told the Daily News afterward.

City Administrator Mike Urban said he was pleased with how seriously the employees took the drill and noted that they had a productive question-and-answer session with the officers.

“This is the one training I hope we never have to use,” Urban said.

Urban said he wanted to organize this event because the last active attack event training took place at the old City Hall on Paradise Street before he and many of his coworkers were Pullman employees.

The training was planned before the Oct. 25 shooting at a Boise mall that left three people dead, Urban said.

Breshears said people do not have to look further than local tragedies to know why it is important to be prepared.

He mentioned the 2015 killing spree in Moscow that left three people dead, as well as the 2007 attack at the Latah County Sheriff’s Office dispatch center that killed two people, including Moscow police officer Lee Newbill.

“It does and can happen,” he said.

The police also offer this training to businesses in addition to city departments.

“We definitely want to give employees tools to hopefully save their lives if something terrible like this ever happened,” Breshears said.

Kuipers can be reached at akuipers@dnews.com.