Role-playing the Unthinkable
Michael Guido, Dickinson’s captain of operations for public safety, prepares volunteers for the day's activities. Photo by Carl Socolow '77.
With local law enforcement agencies, DPS stages preparedness exercise
by Tony Moore
A campus catastrophe isn’t something anyone wants to think about, but to be ready in case one occurs, a lot of preparation has to go into an emergency plan. So Dickinson's Department of Public Safety (DPS) recently staged an exercise to prepare for one particular unthinkable event: the presence of an armed assailant on campus.
“If we get into a situation like this, a lot of outside agencies are going to need to respond to our campus,” says Michael Guido, Dickinson’s captain of operations for public safety, a former police officer and 30-year veteran of training Cumberland County SWAT teams. “So in working with these agencies, training with them for the last few years, we got to the point where it was time to put the whole scenario together.”
The collaborative efforts included such law-enforcement agencies as the Carlisle Police Department, the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department, the North Middleton Police Department and Carlisle Fire and Rescue Services, all of whom sent a significant number of officers. Also on hand was a group of 40 local volunteers, a contingent that Guido says was indispensable to making the proceedings work.
“Without the community volunteers, the scenario training wouldn’t have been worthwhile,” he says of an all-day event that included working on communications, medical response and search-and-rescue, among other elements of the volatile situation. Those volunteers helped complete the role-play, taking on such roles such as both wounded and non-wounded evacuees and those in hiding waiting to be found by emergency personnel.
Across its more than two-century history, Dickinson has never had such an incident on campus, and organizers of the exercise made sure volunteers stayed involved throughout and worked with law enforcement in meaningful ways.
“The working relationships between all the agencies that would come out to help our community, and the way the community rallied ... that's the most important aspect,” Guido says. “This is such a big thing, there's no way in the world that we could do it without having this sort of interaction and participation."
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Published June 15, 2015