Nassau County Police Department lays out school resource program at safety forum

With prop guns in hand, huddled together like a diamond, five officers of the Nassau County Police Department demonstrated a new defense formation as they crossed the floor of the David S. Mack Sports and Exhibition Complex at Hofstra University. 

During a school safety forum on Sept. 25, Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder detailed a newly implemented program aimed at improving security procedures in Nassau County school districts in the event of an active shooter.

“It’s no longer if it happens, it’s when it happens,” Ryder said at the top of the forum.

The program includes protocols such as frequent patrol visits by Nassau County police officers, routine local lockdown drills and the use of the RAVE Panic Button System – a rapid alert system designed to directly connect school administration to law enforcement and emergency dispatchers in the likelihood of a life-threatening event.

Ryder said the police department’s goal for the RAVE System is to take time away from an attacker by responding to instantly, as shooting incidents typically last only eight to 10 minutes.

In March, Nassau County Executive Laura Curran and Ryder debuted the school resource program at the Nassau Police Academy in Massapequa Park.

“We are collaborating to be as quick and responsive as possible in any emergency involving a school,” Curran said in the announcement. 

“School shootings are an epidemic in this country, and it’s horrifying seeing that these elementary and middle schools now have to incorporate mass shooting procedures essentially into their curriculum,” said Gabrielle Spann, a senior community health major at Hofstra who attended the forum. “I’m glad that Nassau County is doing something to better protect their schools, but at the same time tragedies like this just shouldn’t be happening.”

Sgt. Kevin McCarthy, of the Nassau County Bureau of Special Operations, told the audience that when he began his police training three decades ago, he never would have believed he would be training officers about what to do in a school shooting.

“It’s just not what we were trained to do 30 years ago,” McCarthy said.

With more than 215,000 students at 217 schools having experienced gun violence at school since Columbine in 1999, as reported by ABC News, active shooter preparedness has become a more evolved and elaborate part of training in schools as well as outside of them. 

Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security developed a software to train teachers in an active shooter situations using a realistic computer simulation that depicts the chaos of an actual shooting, The New York Times wrote.

The tagline of the resource program reads: "A prepared public, is a protected public." Employing a tactical plan serves as the basis for the comprehensive initiative that is currently being rolled out in Nassau County’s 450 public schools and will soon be extended to private schools and college campuses within the county, according to Newsday.