By Alex Husting
Opelika-Auburn News
AUBURN, Ala. — There were 503 mass shootings in 2024, according to the Gun Violence Archive. While it’s not a common phenomenon in our community, Auburn police train to ensure the department and local first responders are prepared if something like that ever occurred in the area.
The APD collaborated with Auburn University’s Emergency Management Department and the Lee County Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday to conduct an emergency response training exercise designed to simulate an active shooter scenario at Neville Arena. Another is planned for Wednesday.
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Patrick O’Hara, emergency services manager at Auburn Public Safety, organized the active shooter training and said the goal was to learn from it and adjust the department’s tactics and strategies should an event like that ever unfold.
“You can have a great plan and you can have great tactical training, but until you put it all together in an exercise, you don’t know exactly how well your plan or how well your tactics mesh together. So you test the plan and adjust it,” O’Hara said. “So that the next time we either train it or...If it does happen, we’d be better prepared. I’d rather us make mistakes in training than in real world.”
To “put it altogether,” APD collaborated with AU to stage the entire event at Neville Arena. The idea was that the scenario would what if an active shooter opened fire at an Auburn basketball game. Police could not do a one-to-one scenario, which would have to involve around 10,000 in the arena, but the training did have several volunteers sitting in seats as music played over the speakers.
Then, shortly after 1 p.m. , a “shooter” walked onto the floor and fired blanks before being “subdued” by an officer. Another “shooter” fired shots in another area of the arena and third “escaped” for another portion of the training, a hostage situation scenario in the arena parking lot.
As the blanks rang out, many of the volunteers played the role of scared victims running to the nearest exit with their hands up while some were given cards detailing the “injuries” that they had to act out. From there, police participating in the training entered the arena and assessed those wounded and carried them to two triage points, including a bay at the arena where ambulances would arrive to take the “victims” to treatment.
Training took months of planning and preparation
Jamey Pressley , an assistant chief of police with APD, said that planning for this exercise began in fall 2024. He said that there were plans for an exercise of a similar size and scope in the works in 2019 and 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic brought all of that to a halt. Pressley said the department and public safety engage in trainings at a smaller scale throughout the year but nothing like the active shooter scenario at Neville Arena.
Pressley said the planning involves APD partnering with the Auburn Fire Department , EMS, Lee County EMA and campus partners at Auburn University . Ashley Gann, public information officer at Auburn University, said the City of Auburn had reached out to the university first about holding something like this training. The university then offered to host the training at Neville Arena.
Gann hoped the training would provide an opportunity for law enforcement and first responders to learn a lot about responding to active shooter situations and that it could foster the relationships between the organizations involved as they work to protect the community.
“We have big events every fall, every basketball season,” Gann said. “So this is great preparation every single year, because this gives us a way to understand how we can better serve our community, visitors to Auburn, our students, our faculty and our staff.”
Pressley has been with the Auburn Police Department for over two decades and cannot recall a time when APD faced an active shooter situation like the one being trained for on Tuesday and Wednesday. Even as the city has not faced that
“Because it can happen everywhere, and if you don’t train for it, in reality, you’re not prepared,” Pressley said. “And in reality, nobody’s ever truly prepared, but if you’re training, you’re doing what you can to be prepared in the future.”
O’Hara said the exercise was only a fragment of what would happen in a real life scenario, which would involve Opelika police, Lee County Sheriff’s Office, federal law enforcement and much more. Even on a smaller scale, it took a lot of preparation and work, which he thinks will be well worth it.
“That’s why we put a lot of labor and sweat, luckily no blood, into this exercise, so that if something bad happens, we can be that much better to take care of the citizens, civilians and the students,” O’Hara said.
O’Hara has been with the APD for six years and he said this is the first time Auburn Public Safety has done an exercise to this scale. He said that Auburn police and Auburn fire do well on their own but that there are situations where communication and working together is needed. Trainings like the active shooter scenario help first responders hone those necessary skills.
“In the real world, I always say, you can’t control what criminals and civilians do. So it’s trying to hold back water with, a rock and it’s a gushing. You can’t. You’ve got to adapt,” O’Hara said. “That partnership with all of your partner units, that is incredibly key, and communication is your number one tool when it comes to that. And one of the things we got to exercise in this is communication.”
O’Hara said officials learned a lot from the Tuesday exercise, specifically on adjusting the way the scenario plays out to give the officers more to learn from. He also said that he feels Auburn police and Auburn fire already learned a lot that they can incorporate into the next trainings.
Speaking of that, O’Hara said that this is the first and certainly will not be the last training of this scale. He hopes to hold one every year, with different scenarios that first responders can train for. As the first one on Tuesday, he felt it was a good starting point.
“It’s designed to be super stressful, to stress the system, maybe even beyond its capabilities. But that’s good, because that’s what we want to do. We want to break things now, so we don’t break them for real,” O’Hara said. “The next time we do it, it’ll be even better. And then five years from now, it’ll be exponentially better, because you’re constantly evolving.”
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