In an active shooter situation, every second matters, and sometimes the first officer on scene can make all the difference. This week, law enforcement officers from across Cascade County gathered for a Raider training course — a week-long tactical program that trains officers to stop an active threat alone, without waiting for backup.
Aneesa Coomer reports - watch:
Chris Pattie, the owner of the Raider program explains, “The goal of your active killer is the highest body count they can get. The faster we can get into the building, the faster we can stop the killing. Roughly 70% of the incidents we’ve been involved in stopping have been done by a solo officer.”
The Raider program, which stands for Rapid Deployment, Immediate Response, was created in 2007 by Greg Crane. Crane originally developed the well-known ALICE active shooter response program in 2001, but a conversation with a school resource officer led him to design a specialized curriculum for law enforcement. Pattie took over the Raider program in 2018 and now travels the country teaching the tactics.
In Cascade County, this week’s class was an instructor course, meaning participants weren’t just learning how to respond, they were also learning how to teach the program to other officers.
The training starts inside a simulated environment, often set up as a school or office building, where officers use airsoft guns in “force-on-force” scenarios with live role-players acting as the suspect. Those sessions focus on solo entry, movement through hallways and rooms, and making quick decisions in high-pressure environments.
Pattie says, “What we don’t realize when we train is, when you go into here, you’re operating at a level of reality, not qualification. You’re processing where you’re going, what you’re walking into, what you’re seeing, whether you’re supposed to shoot somebody or not - and then your targets have innocent people in the background that you can’t shoot.”
Once officers are confident in those skills, they move outside to a custom-built six-room live-fire shoot house. There, they run the same tactics with real weapons, engaging paper targets that represent armed threats while also identifying and avoiding targets representing innocent bystanders.
David Vogt, a Parole officer with Great Falls Probation and Parole was at the training this week. He says, “This is a dynamic scenario. You go to the range, it’s static, we shoot at targets. You’re not having to process going into a room where you have a hostile threat or an innocent person, and having to make that decision of what you have in front of you, and then engaging it. There's a sense of urgency to it.”
Vogt, who first went through the Raider course several years ago, returned this week to earn his instructor certification. He says, “Every repetition something is learned we can always get better. It's not like you get the certification and you're good, it's a super depreciable skill and you have to keep moving, have to keep training. The whole reason we are here doing this, to save people’s lives in a terrible event. It’s the best, most difficult, stressful training, in a good way, that I have been to.”
Pattie says the training is built on the “priority of life” principle, placing innocent civilians and hostages above officers and suspects when making tactical decisions. That, he says, is why waiting for backup can be deadly, saying “If we stand outside the building and wait for more people to come in before we make entry, we put ourselves above the innocents and the hostages. That’s not where we fall on the line.”
Both instructors and students agree - the ultimate purpose is to prepare for the worst, in hopes of saving lives.
