Cherry Hill officers drill to save lives

If Cherry Hill police officers were to respond to a mass shooting or bombings like the situation in Boston two weeks ago, their job would not be limited to stopping the perpetrators.

They would also have to save victims from bleeding to death, an emergency medical services coordinator from Cooper University Hospital told them Monday.

"You're not going to wait for EMS. You're going to go in there and engage," Chris Taylor told about 20 officers at the Camden County public safety complex in Lindenwold, where they recently completed state-mandated firearms testing.

They later returned to the shooting range - this time to practice using tourniquets on a bleeding mannequin while other officers fired guns in the background, aiming at targets downrange, to simulate an attack.

The training is a pilot project by Cooper to teach officers to respond to mass attacks.

The hospital, a state-designated trauma center for severely injured patients, offered the program to Cherry Hill free and would like to expand it to other departments if grant money is available, said Ryan Sexton, an emergency medicine doctor.

"The first people going into these situations are the officers," Sexton said, referring to the shootings last year at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Police can save lives if they know how to address injuries quickly, Sexton said, noting that many victims of the Boston Marathon bombings lived because people placed tourniquets on their legs.

But training is needed. "Nobody's an expert in mass casualty until you go through the rare scenarios," Sexton said.

As he lectured officers, Taylor instructed them on prioritizing injuries according to a color code.

Walking into the scene of an attack, officers should tell people who can move - classified as greens and yellows - to "keep crawling," Taylor said.

"We've got to get to the reds" - people who are bleeding out, Taylor said. "If nothing moves at all, you tag them black."

On the shooting range, teams of three to five officers participated in simulations, treating leg and arm wounds on a mannequin spurting fake blood.

Meanwhile, other officers fired nearby "to simulate a real, live shooting incident," said Cherry Hill Lt. Sean Redmond.

Redmond said the training was planned several months ago, proposed by the police after researching how the military trains soldiers in critical combat care.

"We just took that theory . . . tweaked it a little bit, and made it applicable for law enforcement," Redmond said. "We're obviously not in a war zone, but, God forbid, officers can get shot."

All Cherry Hill patrol officers completed the training. The department, which has more than 130 officers, split them into groups for training sessions over the last few weeks, Redmond said.

Police hope to buy at least 15 to 20 medical kits with tourniquets and pressure bandages - enough for one in each patrol car, Redmond said. He estimated that the kits cost $80 to $100 each.

"What we're looking to do is to stop the bleeding and get them where we have to get them," he said.