On Thursday morning, while much of the New Iberia Police Department was responding to calls regarding flash flooding in the area, a small group of officers and instructors were focused on a different type of disaster – an active shooter. 

The training took place at the First Community Church, the site of New Iberia’s former theater. Inside the corridors and auditoriums, NIPD instructor Rusty Meaux put the group through its paces. 

“Active shooter training is, for the most part, a once-per-year thing,” Meaux explained. “We pass our entire department through it, so every officer regardless of their skill level or previous training will go through it. You want all of your officers to be able to address an active threat and for them to all respond the same way. Our training module is ALERRT – Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Group – which is a nation-wide training initiative to teach officers how to respond to active  threats.”

The officers made the most of the tools available to them. In addition to using a realistic setting for the training, officers also used real firearms modified to fire simunition rounds, low-power marking rounds similar to paintball. This realism allowed NIPD instructors to provide cutting edge training in a location the officers might actually have to respond to. 

Officers responded to a variety of scenarios, some individually and others in groups. Actors played bystanders and criminals, encouraged by the instructors to create a stressful situation for the officers to work through. 

In addition to engaging with simunitions, officers were also challenged to beef up their communication skills. Whether it was relaying information over the radio to other officers, communicating with the shooter or instructing others on first aid, instructors forced each officer to think through their actions to get the best results. 

While the instructors demanded that each officer respond to the stressful scenarios successfully, they were quick to offer pointers when mistakes were made. According to Meaux, constant communication is key to making improvements that may ultimately save lives. 

“We want to build their confidence and get them to understand that they may have to enter these kinds of situations by themselves,” Meaux said. “With the basic knowledge that we give them, they should be able to address and/or neutralize the threat by themselves if need be.”

The training, held multiple times each month at different locations throughout the city, has drawn complaints from business owners who view a large gathering of police officers and vehicles as bad for business. While the department has made changes to limit the impact of its training on surrounding businesses, Meaux said that part of the NIPD’s training mission is to build confidence throughout the community. 

“We want the public to see that the officers are training in their own community,” he said. “We also want to give our officers knowledge of how these buildings are laid out, because they can apply that to other buildings that they haven’t seen. The training is meant to give peace of mind to the public and show that we’re trying to better our officers. There are times when our training does inconvenience the public, but so do those critical incidents that we’re training for.”