Aug. 19, the SWAT team comprised of Summit County Sheriff’s Office, Park City Police Department and Park City Fire District employees gathered at Treasure Mountain Junior High School.
They were practicing room clearing, door breaching and deploying gas. Usually they hone their skills on a gun range behind the sheriff’s office or the fire district's unfurnished training house.
But Eric Esquivel, a former firefighter turned Park City School District safety and community outreach director, says training in the same environment gets old and may not fully prepare someone for spontaneous real-world scenarios.
“You start memorizing certain props. It's like, I know how to get through that lock. I know how to get through that hinge, and I know — you get familiar with it,” Esquivel said Aug. 19. “And so this [training] opens up their experience level.”
When Treasure Mountain closed in June, he called Lieutenant Todd Davis who oversees school resource officers but also happens to be the SWAT team commander.
“Eric has been awesome to … turn it over to us and the fire department to basically destroy whatever we want inside for about three weeks, before they tear the exterior down,” Davis said. “Then we'll do some stuff on the outside of it.”
In Summit County, the SWAT team isn’t just SWAT: team members have “day jobs” as patrol deputies or detectives or firefighters.
They’re on the team because they’ve done additional training in some other specialty, be it explosives, sniping, breaching or medicine. Some then gain additional teaching certifications.
“We all have our specialties, and as I send [team members] out with these specialties to get certified, their responsibility is to come back and train the rest of the team,” Davis said.
SWAT stands for “special weapons and tactics,” meaning the team has a large toolkit to respond to a wide range of situations. In the future, the team will learn how to respond to larger scenarios at the shuttered school, such as a barricaded individual or mass shooting event.
