SWAT Team Finds Itself in a Sore Spot

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"It was just a nightmare," Sgt. George Hinkle, a member of the Lakewood Police Department SWAT team, told the Washington Post. "What parents need to understand is we wanted teams in there as quickly as we could. We were going into the situation blind. We had multiple explosions going off. We thought there could have been a band of terrorists in there. We had teams inside there doing good work from the get-go."

TIME Washington correspondent Elaine Shannon is the coauthor of "No Heroes" with Danny O. Coulson, founder and former commander of the recently formed FBI Hostage Rescue Team. She's ready to assume that the SWAT team in Littleton, which was a hodgepodge of officers from the Denver and Jefferson County police departments, did the best they could. She also thinks they could have done better.

"The whole reason why the Hostage Rescue Team was founded is that dealing with situations like this really requires special training," she says. "Every member is trained to deal with explosives, every member has medical training, and the team trains year-round. The close-quarter combat skills you need to handle something like Littleton have to be constantly kept sharp." Local SWAT teams like Littleton's, by contrast, tend to train once a month. Equipment and specialized training varies wildly from team to team, and indeed the Littleton team did not have explosives training.

In Paducah or Springfield or Littleton, there is no crack FBI team waiting around the block. The crisis falls to local officers who are more like SWAT reservists, training together once in a while and spending the rest of their days minding what is often a sleepy suburban community -- until terror flares. They do their best; certainly the team that waded into hell last Tuesday saved hundreds of young lives. Can all of America's cops be ready for the worst to happen at any time? Probably not. But Shannon thinks if the apparent epidemic of school violence is to be addressed in terms of containment, readiness across the country must be ratcheted up. "There needs to be more planning, more training for everybody," she says. "Everywhere."

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