GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Green Bay police have been participating in a large-scale joint training exercise over the past couple weeks.
The drills are focused on responding to large threats that would need multiple jurisdictions.
Bay Beach amusement park has been the scene since early last month for the training exercises.
A shooting drill was done inside the pavilion and the bumper cars building.
“It’s including all law enforcement, fire and EMS within Brown County and not all the agencies at one time. It’s a mix of all different ones together each day,” said Emergency Preparedness Lt. Jeff Engelbrecht with the Green Bay Police Department.
Engelbrecht tells FOX 11 the scenarios use incidents from the past.
“We learn from going back to 2017 when we had an incident at Lambeau Field that was called out as an active shooter. Then, unfortunately, with the Oneida incident where we did have a loss of life.”
According to the Gun Violence Archive, mass shootings have been on the rise since 2018. It defines a mass shooting as a minimum of four shooting victims.
There were 691 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2021. So far in 2022, there have been 548.
“Law enforcement will escort fire and EMS into the site and begin treating any victims of the incident and work on getting them evacuated as quickly to the hospital,” said Rob Goplin, assistant fire chief of Green Bay Metro Fire Department.
Goplin says training’s like these are important because of the teamwork that has to be used.
“It’s a lot of coordination between agencies, that you might work together daily, it’s not necessarily in this circumstance where you’re working kind of in a more hostile threatening environment.”
“I can’t think of another topic that collectively between law enforcement, fire, EMS and Brown County that we’ve trained as hard as we have for the last five years for,” said Engelbrecht.
The training was put to the test last Thursday after fake active shooter calls were being reported around the area.
“Having had that happen yesterday and its timing with the training going on, the officers, fire, EMS from all the different jurisdictions in Brown County responded to that call at East High School as exactly as they were trained doing what we were doing here today,” said Engelbrecht.
The training runs through this week.
If you find yourself near the location of the exercise officials ask you to avoid interfering or interrupting.
