Comanche Nation Police Department Participates in Training Events
Comanche Nation Police Officer Ed Bayones coordinated multi-agency training events. Officers from Oklahoma and Texas attended the training.
The first training included a Court Security course on May 4 at Cache Middle School led by the Director of Training and Operations for Court Security Concepts and law enforcement officer Randy Harris.
“What we did this week was a 40-hour court security specialist class. It starts with three days of classroom training, which includes learning how to be a bailiff and protect your courtroom. It also learns about court security screening and how to effectively do security screening at your courthouse with legal aspects and everything, trying to make sure that no one brings weapons into the court facility,” Harris said. “We also cover some information on explosive recognition and awareness. This is just a re-familiarization course for law enforcement. And then we talk about modern technology, camera systems, and things like that to help protect the courthouse.”
He said that then they begin reality-based training, which is force-on-force training.
“We use paint marking ammo and we do real-life scenarios. We do a screening station scenario in a courthouse,” Harris said. “We do a clerk's window scenario where there is an irate subject at the clerk's window and they have to come and try to de-escalate that situation. We also do a judge's chamber situation where there is a person that has forced their way into the judge's office and they have to go in and deal with that emergency as well. Then we do several courtroom scenarios where they are responding to either a disturbance in a courtroom or they are actually bailiffing the court.”
Then it’s off to the gun range for a practical firearms course that works on motor skills with firearms.
“We warm them up. We start working on moving and shooting techniques,” Harris said. "Some officers have never done moving and shooting. Most of them here have. And then we graduated up to a critical thinking shooting exercise where you have a crowded courtroom and you actually have to think about making the shot at the threat before you actually make the shot. We don't want any innocents hurt because once that bullet leaves the barrel, you can't bring it back. So, you need to make a good, clean shot the best possible you can if that does happen in your courthouse.”
Harris said these training exercises make the courts a safer place.
Bayones said the training was fantastic, and they learned a lot. Being put in the simulated training and the live fire brought some things to light for the officers.
“The shoot house was fantastic,” he said. “It was kind of fun, even though I got shot numerous times. But today was really, really, really interesting. It was challenging. We had to really hone in our skills as far as our shots, learning how to shoot past somebody that's innocent, to get somebody that's behind them or vice versa. It was just really, really challenging.”
Bayones said being able to react to the unknown was the most challenging part.
“Because we were getting very basic information, normally we'd be asking for as much information from dispatch as we can get, but we were given very little information and we were going into mostly unknown situations,” he said.
Bayones said the training went very well.
“It was nice working with these outside agencies,” he said. “Our goal for a lot of this, or a lot of today's training, or this whole training all week, and for any future training, is going to be to work as close as we can with outside agencies. And just because we may very well have to respond together on something. And so, it was nice to be able to work with those folks and build those relationships.”
He said the Comanche Nation Police force benefits from these types of events.
“Because you never know, we may be working the fairs that we have or things like that, going into the casinos. We're going to have, we may be in a shooting situation where there's multiple innocent people in the area,” Bayones said. “And so, I think we can actually implement some of this with our patrol division, and as well as myself and our court security officer that works up there at the courthouse. I think we can use this to just improve everybody's ability.”
