Active shooter training panel helps prepare Newport Beach residents in case of attack
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Newport Beach Police Sgt. Chris Kimble has frequently drilled for the possibility of an active shooter scenario over the years. It’s a topic he’s gone over with his wife and a concept educators introduced her daughter to as an elementary school student.
Despite all that, talking to her about the possibility of a planned act of gun violence targeting her at school or some other public place was one of the hardest discussions he’s had to have so far as a father.
“As a parent, yeah, it sucks,” Kimble said. “I hate that my daughter has to live in a world where [the possibility of an] active shooter is a reality.”
He added that he “wanted to arm my daughter with a little more information” so that she’s better prepared to survive, maybe even help others, in case she ever found herself in the middle of an attack. That’s also why he’s been passionate about putting on active shooter response training sessions privately for local businesses and other groups.
On Tuesday, he, Mayor Will O’Neill and Emergency Services Coordinator Katie Eing hosted Newport Beach’s first public Active Shooter Training Panel at City Hall’s Community Room. About two dozen members of the community came out to receive guidance on how to assess their surroundings and think their way through a possible mass shooting. They also got introductory first aid training that could help save a person’s life.
Members of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Orange Coast’s leadership team were among those in attendance. The nonprofit’s staff is constantly training for a variety of emergency situations, according to their senior director of operations and programs Erica Aguirre, senior director of learning and innovation, Amber Plumber, as well as the general manager of the organization’s Newport Beach location, Michael Tanagon. But discussing gun violence with children requires special care.
“On our end, it’s really about reassuring them that we as their mentors and their staff are here to protect them as best as we can,” Plumber said. “And our best way of doing that is preparation.”
Tanagon said he’s thankful to live in a community as safe as Newport Beach. But Kimble noted that active shooters are, in many aspects, unpredictable, and it can be difficult to tell what locations they wind up targeting.
“Even though it’s a community like Newport Beach, where it’s usually safe, you never know what’s going to happen,” Tanagon said. “Training’s always helpful for staff. It’s like insurance. You want to make sure you have it, but hope you never use it.”
“You don’t have to have an issue happen for us to train on this,” Aguirre said. “But when something does happen, we do tend to highlight it again, because it’s on everyone’s mind.”
Tuesday’s training session came two days after a second assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump and about two weeks after a 14-year-old shot and killed two teachers and two students at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
For many, the recent tragedy renewed debate over school shootings, a uniquely American issue that has become increasingly more common over the decades. Plumber recalled watching news reels of the 1999 Columbine shooting while she was in high school. She said frequently training for something that was once unprecedented felt like coming full circle.
“We weren’t doing this kind of training when I was growing up.”
In addition to active shooter drills and other educational efforts to prepare schools for potential gun violence, the Newport Beach City Council has increased the number of school resource officers on local campuses from two to three and has worked closely with the police department to plan for and prioritize the safety of children, O’Neill said.
Last month, the Newport-Mesa Unified School District approved a $5,221,041 contract to install AI-assisted surveillance equipment that can automatically detect gunshots.
“There’s a lot we do in partnership with the schools, because these are places we want to be sure are particularly safe,” O’Neill said.
As the term “lockdown” becomes common vocabulary for American elementary students, such measures are being seen more often at schools across the country. Some have criticized such policies and expenditures as reactionary efforts that treat school shootings as an inevitability instead of tackling the circumstances causing them. Supporters of gun reform legislation point to research suggesting that states with higher rates of gun ownership and easier legal access to firearms experience school shootings more often.
“In Newport the things we’ve been doing on the school side is really more preventative than reactionary,” O’Neill said. “A lot of the work on the school resource officer side, the capital improvement side, has been geared toward preventing, not reacting.”
He said hopes to host more public training sessions to to better prepare more residents for a possible active shooter attack.
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