NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Hutchinson Police Chief Brice Burlie told Hutch Post that his department will be doing some important training later this month.
"This training is armed intruder training," Burlie said. "It's a yearly training event put on by the Reno County SWAT team. The Reno County SWAT team is a multi-agency team. It has members from the Hutchinson Police Department, Reno County Sheriff's Department, Hutchinson Fire Department, who provides medics for us, and then the South Hutch Police Department. This year the training will be held up at Hutchinson High School, and it's an opportunity for us to invite all first responders inside Reno County to train and practice simulations of an armed intruder event to make sure that in the unlikely event of an armed intruder scenario that we are prepared to handle that type of situation."
That training is especially important given how young his department is.
"We are a very young department," Burlie said. "We have a lot of officers that have less than two years of experience and a lot of officers that even have less than five years of experience. So giving them this opportunity to, as you know, Chief Beer alluded to earlier, get them into these scenarios and bring up the stress level and allow them the opportunity to make mistakes and then learn from those mistakes in an environment where it's just training and no harm comes to anybody is super important for us to make sure that they have the opportunity to be successful in a case that one of those events would occur."
Burlie also still needs officers, they have 11 vacancies right now, with six additional officers still in the midst of the initial training process.
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