Alameda County law-enforcement teams train for disasters, attacks
HAYWARD — This is what the tactical team knows: They are protecting a speaker who is strongly against immigration. The day before she is set to deliver an address to students at Cal State East Bay, someone calls in a death threat to the university. The tactical team’s job: keep her alive.
This is only a drill, but an important one.
Across Alameda County, tactical teams from 25 law enforcement agencies are going through 48 hours of simulated disasters, terrorist attacks, riots and jail breaks, from 6 a.m. Saturday to 6 a.m. Monday. In all, 1,700 people are involved in making look real a long list of answers to the question: What’s the worst that could happen?
Urban Shield, as the training exercise is known, is in its second year. It builds off law enforcement experience from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and 1991 Oakland hills fire.
“It’s been 17 years since those,” Sgt. JD Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said. “We have people in our department who were in kindergarten when that happened.”
He added: “Unless you operate all your gear and test all your people, you don’t know how they’ll perform when the real thing happens.”
At Cal State East Bay, deputies from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office are running the dignitary protection scenario. Every agency team will do this, with the same threats, and each team is scored. The overall operation aims to find the best practices, and to make sure every agency knows what worked and what didn’t.
The Santa Clara team has been briefed and is prepared to secure the speaker’s location, but a gas leak forces a last minute venue change. Now, Dr. X, as the stand-in dignitary is known, will speak in the open plaza outside Meiklejohn Hall.
There’s no standard solution to this puzzle. Every agency handles it in a different manner, some better than others. In the first five run-throughs, Dr. X was shot once, in the back. A bystander took another hit by accident. Everything is a lesson here.
When the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office team comes in, there is a smattering of applause and chants of “USA! USA!” A Doobie Brothers’ song is playing. Deputies sweep the area and the speaker approaches the podium.
A flash-bang grenade detonates. Students flatten themselves on the pavement, and members of the tactical team push Dr. X — the pill, as they call her — to the ground. Other deputies branch out as shots erupt from two sides of the plaza.
The flash-bang pulled everyone’s attention away from the two shooters. “Every team is turning around and looking at the bang,” Sgt. Chris Hummel, a tactical evaluator from the Fremont Police Department, will say later in debriefing.
The Santa Clara deputies neutralize the shooter to their left, then the one on the right. Later, the Alameda deputy acting as a would-be assassin will show off the bright-pink splash of paint on his helmet front, where a deputy’s simulated bullet hit him.
As the team backs out of the plaza, with two shooters down and Dr. X still standing, a safety officer ends the exercise. Just before he does so, the right-side shooter flinches and a deputy shouts at him: “Stay down or I’ll put another one in your head.”