photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Detective Sarina Robb, left, and Officer Marla Keith take notes in the mobile command center during hostage-negotiation training at Lawrence Free State High School on June 3, 2022. This mobile command center is owned by the Douglas County Sheriff's Office but is available for use by the Lawrence Police Department when a larger mobile space is needed.

Free State High School students participated in a hostage-negotiation scenario on Friday that was aimed at providing special training for police officers who find themselves dealing with a barricaded suspect.

Not to be confused with active-shooter training, hostage-negotiation training is geared toward de-escalating a situation and communicating with people who have barricaded themselves in a location with hostages, said Major Bill Cory with the Lawrence Police Department. Despite the name, the training also applies to people who have barricaded themselves alone. Active-shooter training, on the other hand, teaches officers the skills to respond immediately by locating and engaging the threat, he said.

“They (hostage takers) are in some form of crisis or they have committed a crime and we need to safely negotiate that person out of the house without anyone getting hurt,” Cory said.

Negotiation can take hours or even days, depending on the situation, and it requires officers to attempt to understand what the hostage taker is going through and to attempt to talk him into a peaceful resolution, Cory said.

The department has trained 75% of its officers in Crisis Intervention Training, which teaches officers what to do when dealing with people who are having a mental health breakdown, Cory said.

“Active shooter (training) is completely different. It is an ongoing active situation that we need to be quick in our response to put down and end the threat. To make sure everybody in that place is safe whether it is a school, a hospital, a business, whatever it is, that’s the goal. You’ve got to get in quick and end the threat,” Cory said.

Free State High School wasn’t chosen by the department for any specific reason, and hostage situations can happen anywhere, Cory said. The training is unrelated to recent mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. The hostage-negotiation training has been in the works for six months and has required a lot of coordination between the departments and the students involved, he said.

photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Lawrence Police Officer Alex Brittain, left, talks on the phone to a hostage taker during a hostage-negotiation training simulation while Officer Kristen Kennedy takes notes to relay to the negotiating team on June 3, 2022, at Lawrence Free State High School. The officers are in one of the department’s smaller mobile command buses.

Friday’s training centered on a scenario that was created by a high school student along with the student resource officer at Free State High School, said Sgt. Eric Barkley. The scenario involved a boy who was having an emotional crisis, then contacted his girlfriend after barricading himself in a classroom. In the scenario, the girlfriend contacted the police, and the negotiations began. In the classroom were an additional 10 people whom the hostage taker was preventing from leaving. The hostage taker and the hostages in the simulation were all played by students, Barkley said.

“A lot of time when you use negotiators with negotiators they know the same tactics, so using a student gives us a different angle,” Barkley said.

Complications that arose during the simulation included the hostage taker’s cellphone was running out of battery power and police needed to get him another phone to stay in contact, as well as the hostages needing to eat, Barkley said.

photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Officer Dominique Sloan prepares the ICOR Mini Caliber Robot to deliver a bottle of water during hostage negotiation training on June 3, 2022, at Lawrence Free State High School.

For both situations, police employed the department’s ICOR Mini Caliber Robot. The robot is equipped with a camera and is capable of two-way communication. Police used the robot to deliver Chick-fil-A to the hostages and to bring the hostage taker a new phone, Barkley said.

Operating the robot was Officer Dominique Sloan. He said that he had started working with the robot only recently and was glad for the opportunity to train with it in a realistic situation.

photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Officer Dominique Sloan tweaks the controls of the ICOR Mini Caliber Robot during hostage negotiation training on June 3, 2022, at Lawrence Free State High School.

Officers from Lawrence and Lenexa played roles as negotiators in the simulation and were working out of bus-sized mobile command centers in the school’s parking lot. The training relationship between Lenexa and Lawrence police started during the Missouri Kansas Challenge negotiator’s class in 2021, Barkley said.

“One of the captains for the Lenexa Police Department was our evaluator for the day, and he really liked what we were doing here in Lawrence and wanted to start training with us,” Barkley said.

The large mobile command centers are important tools for the negotiation process and give negotiators a quiet place to talk to the hostage taker and to gather information about the situation in one place, but they aren’t always available.

photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office Mobile Command Center is parked at Lawrence Free State High School during a hostage-negotiation simulation on June 3, 2022. The mobile command center is available for use by the Lawrence Police Department when a larger mobile space is needed.

“A lot of times what you see is the smaller vehicles are what we’re going to be using because that is what is quick. And then sometimes like earlier this morning when we got here this was our platform, this is what we were working out of,” Barkley said as he patted the floor of the open trunk in his patrol SUV.

Barkley said the department planned to increase the frequency that officers go through this type of training to at least four times a year. Lawrence police have the tools, training and law enforcement partners like Lenexa and the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office to help officers potentially reach a peaceful outcome in hostage situations, but not every city is so fortunate.

“There are communities that don’t have hostage negotiators and that’s where, hopefully, if they have a mutual aid agreement with us, then we could move right in and take control,” Barkley said.

photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Officer Dominique Sloan, right, controls the ICOR Mini Caliber Robot to deliver lunch to hostages during a training simulation at Lawrence Free State High School on June 3, 2022. Officer Lindsay Bishop uses a sheet of paper to keep the sun off of the remote control video display so Sloan can see the screen.