Transportation ready can mean having enough squads to carry your mobile field force teams. Being communications ready can range from having enough radios to talk with each other to having a working long range acoustic device, as well as a trained operator to communicate with the crowd. Are you communications ready?īeing communications ready is a key ingredient during these personnel-intense events. They must all be experts in the display and use of the baton. Are you baton ready?ĭo all team members possess a police baton and carrier of the type your team trains with? Team members must be highly trained in the disciplined use of this valuable crowd control tool and have a carrier, or ring to retain it, when not being used. It not only detracts from the continuity of the formation, but it also invites taunting/targeting by violent crowd members. If you don’t accommodate the left-handed officer, the shield they are carrying will display police or sheriff upside down. Most shields are designed to allow for changing shield-handle locations to accommodate the right-handed officer or left-handed officer. Determine if any shields have been set up for use by your left-handed officers. Shields need to be a part of every yearly inspection, since they are often damaged in storage.Īnother issue with shields can be corrected with a quick fix done in advance of an event. Flopping broken equipment can restrict or block access to your weapons under stress. Protective gear that has broken straps should not be repaired but replaced. They also can replace or tighten the inevitable loose and missing screws in the helmets.
They can assist new team members with donning their protective gear. The team quartermaster can conduct and standby with the “spare parts kit” as officers don and check all equipment at training. There should be a yearly line-item in the budget for this grenadier to draw from to allow them to quickly purchase items and parts for equipment that need to be replaced/repaired. It is a good idea for every team to have a quartermaster, whose responsibility it is to conduct and assist with inspections of all equipment, conduct the fit testing of masks and check use-by dates on chemical munitions. Munitions beyond the use-by-date should be replaced with new stock. Chemical munitions have an absolute shelf life. Grenadiers absolutely must inspect their inventory on a yearly basis. They will undoubtedly have someone in-house that can help you get started. If you have just formed your team and have never done such testing, check with your local fire department. All of these circumstances can compromise the fit of a mask. Masks age, new helmets are purchased, and sometimes officers gain weight, grow beards or have longer hair. The fit-test should be done yearly since conditions change.
If the officer can detect the smell, the mask is not fitting properly. During this test, an officer dons his/her mask and an identifiable smell is introduced into their environment. One other simple check that can be done in-house by a specially trained officer is a fit-test. Breathing through a mask is difficult and it should be determined in advance that wearers do not have a pre-existing cardio-respiratory conditions, or claustrophobia, which will make the wearing of a mask itself dangerous.
Is the officer fit enough to wear the mask?Īll officers required to wear a gas mask need to have a doctor declare them to be “OK” to wear a gas mask. The perfect storm of crowd control is when untrained officers are wearing equipment they have never even tried on before, much less trained with, along with an untrained commander, who are sent out to face highly-trained (yes, they do train) rioters. That is someone remembers that they have it somewhere, buried away in a long-forgotten location. Some agencies are only in possession of the memory of equipment. Most agencies not only have no trained team, but they have no crowd control equipment either. 7 keys to successfully policing a potentially unruly crowdĭoes an agency have a well-equipped and highly-trained unit to respond to such an event?ĭoes the unit have the equipment it needs to do its job?ĭoes the unit commander have the authority to order the actions needed to do the job?
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