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A barricaded gunman, an incident involving hazardous materials, a potential bombing – none of these situations typically occur on college campuses. But the Boston College Police Department is determined to be ready for such events, and recently took part in a training exercise to aid in its preparation.
BowMac Educational Services of Honeoye Falls, NY, held a series of simulated emergency scenarios in mid-July with BCPD and other area public safety professionals to help reinforce best practices and provide first-hand experience in a training environment. BowMac’s instructors have decades of police, fire, emergency management, and training experience in public safety.
BC Director of Public Safety and Chief of Police John King invited representatives from the Boston and Newton police departments, Massachusetts State Police and Armstrong Ambulance Service to the training sessions.
“We have a very good relationship with the local and state public safety partners, and we do a lot of planning for major events such as football games, Commencement, the Boston Marathon and other kinds of events,” said King. “Hosting this program at Boston College provides us the opportunity to come together from a training standpoint using the BowMac program to strengthen our skills, to look at best practices, and to spread this knowledge among more members of our staff so that we can be better prepared in the event that we have to respond to a critical incident.”
For the other participants, the training sessions provided more familiarity with BCPD operations, resources and equipment.
“We’ve enjoyed a good partnership with the colleges and local public safety agencies, including those near BC, so training with them is always a great opportunity,” said Massachusetts State Police Lt. Martin Gaughan. “The assets that the colleges and other agencies possess, if we know about them ahead of time, can be extremely useful to us in dealing with critical incidents.”
“We usually get a call after an incident, when an agency is reacting to a problem that has occurred,” said Vince Faggiano, critical incident management project manager for BowMac. “We’d always prefer it when an agency has the vision to say, ‘Let’s be prepared before something happens.’ It’s great that BC falls into that category – they’re not waiting for something and then trying to correct a problem. They’re trying to be proactive and be prepared to have a good response should something happen.”