Sheriff’s Office Uses Elk Creek School For Active Shooter Training

ELK CREEK – An active shooter training course hosted by the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office moved to the Elk Creek school on Thursday. Johnson County Sheriff’s Deputy Byron Klauenberg said he reached out to TIII Operational Solutions, a training and consulting company based in Lincoln, because of its focus on smaller departments. Company co-founder Andrew Yates said the training not only keys on single or few officers, but on situations when getting inside a building is paramount to the survival of the people inside. He said the traditional response was typically to set up a perimeter and make a contact a team, but modern examples show that law enforcement does not have that much time. He said training single-officer response is important because it is risky. Yates: “Statistically there’s a 30 percent chance that in a single officer response, the single officer gets shot in that shooter incident.” Agronomist Andy Thies was among five volunteers from the Midwest Farmers Co-Op to assist in the training in the role of hostages and victims. Thies: “It got your heart racing a little bit. Me and another guy were barricaded in at one of the classrooms and he just cleared rooms as he went.” Klauenberg said he will bring the training to the rest of the sheriff’s office. He credited donations from the county and local businesses for air-soft rifles that can be used in training.