Law enforcement officers from different agencies in Chilton County participated in an active shooter training seminar Tuesday and Wednesday.

The training was held at Jemison Intermediate School and focused on equipping police officers with skills on how to react to an active shooter.

“This course is designed to train patrol officers with how to deal with active shooters,” said Scott Kellenberger, who was one of the course instructors. “SWAT teams are great, but in cases where a shooter starts opening fire, you often have very little time to wait for a SWAT team to arrive. In most cases, an incident with an active shooter takes less than 20 minutes.”

Kellenberger said the term “active shooter” is used to define an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people where multiple shots are fired.

Kellenberger said a recent case with an active shooter was the situation in Chattanooga, Tenn., where an individual opened fire at two military facilities, killing five American service members.

“You just never know when these situations will arise,” Kellenberger said. “This training equips patrol officers with the ability to know how to handle a situation in a short amount of time.”

Four instructors trained 25 local law enforcement officers in approaches to crisis sites, breaching, team movement and room entries.

The Alabama Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission made it mandatory for all certified police officers to have active shooter training by October 2016.

Jemison Police Chief Shane Fulmer said he wanted to go ahead and have local officers receive the training.

“With the things happening in our world today, places in small towns could be subject to an incident like this at any time,” Fulmer said. “We wanted to do this as quick as possible. I think it is important for every officer in this county to know how to respond to an active shooter.”

Fulmer said many active shooter incidents that have occurred within the last several years were in small towns.

“I think the realization that something like this could happen here was something that we as police officers want to be properly trained for,” Fulmer said. “We just want to be prepared to dissolve the situation and to save as many lives as possible in any situation. The training is teaching us how to do it in the right way, in a tactical way and keep everyone safe while being able to respond to an active shooter situation.”

Equipment for the training was provided by the Department of Homeland Security including plastic training pistols, helmets, video lessons and glock simulation pistols.