Moscow isn’t seen as a dangerous community to many who live there, but Corporal Casey Green and Officer Mitch Running of the Moscow Police Department (MPD) said it is always better to be safe than sorry.
The first ever “How to Respond to an Active Shooter” seminar took place Monday night in the Vandal Ballroom of the Bruce Pitman Center as part of Campus Safety Week at the University of Idaho. Campus Safety Week is an event aimed at providing students with resources and education about safety on campus.
Diamond Koloski | Argonaut
Corporal Casey Green and Officer Mitch Running present an active shooter seminar as part of Campus Safety Week in the Vandal Ballroom of the Bruce Pitman Center on Monday night.
Green and Running led an informative presentation on different active shooting situations that people can be presented with and the ways in which they can react.
“A lot of times people want to duck this situation, they don’t want to talk about it, and it’s the elephant in the room,” Running said. “Just having that seed — that thought of this is how you need to at least approach things.”
The officers said that not only was this the first time that this presentation was offered on campus — it was also the first time that the MPD was able to relay the information to others.
Green said the officers at the MPD attended a training course on the subject of active shooters.
“We sought it out,” Green said. “That’s how important it was to us, because this was the first time that we had seen something for this type of information.”
In 2007, four people were killed in Moscow by a gunman — the first active shooter situation Green said he is aware of in the town. One of the people who lost their life was a Moscow police officer and a friend of Green.
“I’m trying to get a message out to help people think about these kinds of things,” Green said.
Sharon Carr, facility director for the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, was in attendance at the seminar because she said she wanted to be sure she could always be safe.
“I wanted to know more about this because we live in a little bubble here,” Carr said. “It’s a wonderful place to live, but you just never know.”
Carr said she wanted to share the information from the seminar with the women of Kappa Alpha Theta.
“I just want to make sure that if something were to happen, I would want to be on the system, and if we had an active shooter we would have some kind of plan,” Carr said.
The presentation addressed examples of past shootings such as the Columbine High School shooting of 1999 and the Virginia Tech shooting of 2007. It also covered emergency situations, such as fires and terrorist attacks.
Coordinator of Violence Prevention Programs Emilie McLarnan was part of the event as well. She leads the events for Campus Safety Week. She said the purpose of the seminar was to teach the Moscow community how to react appropriately to events that they may not realize are possible on the UI campus.
“My thinking around safety week is that we want students to feel empowered to respond to lots of different kinds of situations,” McLarnan said.
Nicole Etchemendy
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