CLAREMORE, Okla. -- The Claremore Police Department is stepping into the community, preparing for the worst.
As the amount of mass shootings grow, the "alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate" or ALICE training is expanding with it.
"If you're on one side of a building and the shooter is over on this side that's what you do, you evacuate. If your only option is to barricade yourself in a room, then we teach you some better ways to do that," Officer Cassie Grettner said.
That includes stacking chairs or moving equipment in front of the door, anything but your own body. The next option is facing the intruder head-on to pin them down until police arrive.
"You're going to look at, ok, this is my last resort. We have to do something, something is better than nothing. So what I'm going to do is we're going to take a group of us - five, six, however many you have in a room, you're going to swarm that intruder, and then you're going to use your body weight," Grettner said.
Claremore Police doubled their ALICE training staff in the last year as they noticed a spike in demand from schools, churches, and businesses.
"A lot of people are just... they're nervous about what's going on and they want the extra training and that's what we're here to do," Grettner said.
Claremore Police want to continue expanding, especially watching these crimes unfold in usually less than five minutes.
"That's the average response time for police to get to an event like that. Everyone in Claremore knows we have trains to contend with, we have traffic. We get there as fast as we can but generally it's not fast enough," Grettner said.
The trainings are free to any organization. Just reach out to the police department for more information.
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