Saranac Lake Police Department Chief Darin Perrotte invited dozens of officers from regional law enforcement agencies to Saranac Lake this week to do active shooter trainings at the Saranac Lake High School and former Pius X high school.

It’s an “unfortunate” reality to prepare for, he said.

Perrotte said in the 102 days of 2023 that have passed so far, there have been 147 active shooters reported in the U.S., well over a shooting a day. On April 12, the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit which tracks gun violence, had counted 147 mass shootings in the U.S. since the start of the year. The group defines a “mass shooting” as a shooting where four or more people are killed or injured.

“What a lot of folks don’t realize is they are happening in towns like ours. They’re happening in small-town America,” Perrotte said. “We have to be prepared.

Plattsburgh police Captain Emily Duprey looks down a hallway as law enforcement officers from around the region train for active shooting responses at the Saranac Lake High School on Wednesday. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

“We do live in a very safe area, I feel confident in saying that,” he added. “But we have to be prepared for the public safety of our community.”

The training, which included nearly 50 officers with the Saranac Lake, Lake Placid, Tupper Lake, Plattsburgh and Malone police departments; the Essex County Sheriff’s Office; New York State Police and state Department of Environmental Conservation forest rangers, as well as instructors from the State Police and the DEC, started on Tuesday and ends today.

Perrotte did not want the specifics of the tactical trainings they were doing to be shared publicly, but said in broad strokes, they were learning about movement — how to clear a room, hallway or stairwell; how to find a suspect; and how to stay safe and protect lives while doing that.

There was a lot of talk of having each other’s backs and not being “Keystone Cops” a reference to the bumbling police in a series of silent movie-era films.

They were training for a serious and disturbing event. Police in body armor were training guns — fake guns — around classrooms and talking about what would happen if they were to come under fire at that point.

Law enforcement officers from several regional departments train in a stairwell. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

Things were kept light with a little ribbing and self-depreciating humor, but when the police were doing the trainings, everyone was stone-faced.

After being trained by forest rangers and State Police instructors at the high school, they went over to the Pius X building for live round training to put what they learned to work in a building with a layout new to everyone. These simulate a real-life event with guns firing marking cartridges — 9mm shell casings with paint inside — and instructors acting as shooters or civilians.

Perrotte said some of the instructors acting as shooters had big welts on their arms from getting hit.

Desire to train

When he became chief a little more than a year ago, Perrotte said this was something that he wanted to do. He started reaching out to area law enforcement agencies and got such a positive response that they stretched the training out to three days to get everyone they could trained. He said all officers in the SLPD were doing the training.

Perrotte said it’s been a while since they’ve had a training like this around here.

There were officers with under a year on the job and lieutenants with well over a decade of experience there, he said, and various levels of experience in these types of trainings. He said the officers at the training were telling him they are glad to be getting this training. He’s thinking of making it an annual thing, during the school’s spring break at this time every year.

There has been criticism of police response to mass shootings, most notably, at the Uvalde, Texas school shooting last year.

“I never like to Monday morning quarterback another agency’s situation, but I think that there were several failures at Uvalde,” Perrotte said, specifying communication, training and inter-agency training.

That’s a major point of this training they’re doing now, he said — making sure everyone knows what to do to coordinate better.

In an active shooter event, he said it’s usually a group of different agencies, who might not know each other or the layout of the building they are entering. But if they all have the same training, communication and tactical skills, no matter who is going in, they’ll be able to be on the same page. There was an emphasis on both verbal and non-verbal communication in the trainings.

Perrotte said he is his own “biggest critic” and that everyone can do better. That’s why they’re putting in the work now.

Their primary job is to get in there and “neutralize the threat” first. That’s dangerous to do, he said, and that’s why they were training to keep each other safe.

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Societal shift

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Police are the last line of defense when it comes to an active shooter, Perrotte said. When everything goes wrong, that’s when law enforcement comes in. But he said they’re also trying to be the “first line of defense,” too.

“It starts with mental health,” he said.

Over the nearly 18 years he’s been in law enforcement, Perrotte said he’s seen police collaborate better with mental health professionals and schools. SLPD officers are in Saranac Lake schools every day so they know the students, teachers and administrators there, he said.

Perrotte said guns are dangerous in the wrong hands and that society needs to do a better job of screening gun purchases and improving its mental health system. Guns were around when he was a kid and there weren’t the same number of mass shooters there are now, he said. He believes something has changed in society.

Swatting

Perrotte said this training has been in planned for months, before any of the recent “swatting” hoaxes, which have hit local schools and disrupted learning, spread fear and triggered large police responses for what turned out to be false reports. But he said these false alarms were a reminder of why they plan ahead.

On the day these hoaxes were spreading around the state, impacting several North Country school districts, he said police were on “high-alert” all day. They kept a presence at the SLCSD schools all day, which he said was well-received and seemed to be comforting for students and teachers there.

Swatting is defined as a criminal harassment tactic that involves deceiving an emergency dispatch service into sending police to another person’s address. Swatting is dangerous and can sometimes be fatal.

It also can lead to a diminished sense of urgency when a real call comes in. Perrotte said the training is meant to address that, too. Proper training supersedes complacency, he said.

“It’s hard to always respond with that same intensity after you’ve had numerous false alarms,” Perrotte said. “That’s why we rely heavily on our training. Our training is to treat every incident as if it’s the real deal.”