Vital training can save lives

Throughout this last year we have held a lot of training, and every time we train I say the same thing: train for the worst and hope for the best. This week I was on my way to a meeting with the commissioners when I was notified that deputies were responding to a residence on the east side of the county where a suicidal subject had weapons and had barricaded himself inside the residence while the rest of the family was out in the cold, afraid to enter.

Needless to say, I did not make it to the meeting. I responded to the location with my deputies, and we soon had a team ready to go inside the residence if needed. It is times like this that the training the deputies go through plays a vital part of the outcome in such an incident.

Studies show that a suicide occurs in the United States every 17 minutes. That is a lot of lives that could be saved if only someone were there to help, to give them hope and a reason to live. As law enforcement officers we are to serve and protect. This type of a call is especially hard to deal with. You want to help the person who is expressing suicidal tendencies, but you also want to protect others around them from harm. When responding to a call of this nature, you often remember how many cases you hear of where the suicidal person tries to force law enforcement to use deadly force against them.

On this particular occasion, the person in the residence was armed with a deadly weapon and made it clear that he would use it on anyone who got too close. Our first goal was to protect everyone around him, but our ultimate goal was the same as any call we respond to, find a way to end it peacefully and help protect EVERYONE.

The first issue you face with someone who may want to hurt themselves is keeping in contact with them. If they do not want to talk, you can only give them so much time without taking the chance that they are in the residence trying to harm themselves. But you also do not want to rush them and cause them to do something that could have been avoided.

The training the deputies attended was already showing when I arrived at the scene. A perimeter had already been made, other people who lived in the residence had been moved to a safe location, and deputies were trying to contact the troubled individual. Some of the deputies that were standing by for the entry team were equipped with non-deadly weapons like the Taser and bean bag rounds. They were thinking about how they would try and stop the threat while saving a life! After several attempts, the person in the residence was contacted by phone, and the deputy attempted to convince the person that we were only there to help him. After a short time, the door opened and the resident came out of the house, unarmed and ready to receive help.

It is encouraging to see deputies using their training to truly help someone in need, not just enforcing the law, but putting their lives on the line, protecting the citizens, and making the effort to see the best outcome.