Critical incident training is a must for Wilmington Police Department

CASTLE HAYNE, NC (WWAY) —  The recent school shooting in Charlotte proves that an emergency can happen in the blink of an eye.

Law enforcement agencies practice dealing with those situations by performing critical incident simulations.

The goal — to make these scenarios as realistic as possible to be well prepared.

Wilmington Police Department staged an active hostage stake out at Cape Fear Community College’s North Campus.

The officers involved were made aware of the simulation ahead of time, but were not told exactly what the incident would be, in order to realistically deal with the situation.

Lt. Kelvin Hargrove with Wilmington Police Department explained that repetition in training allows for the best solutions.

“We train for different types of scenarios that may happen throughout our communities,” Hargrove said. “In order to be prepared for it, we train for it over and over and over again to make sure we have the resources and respond to these incidents effectively.”

Some of the resources used include a robot that hands off a phone to a suspect so that officers involved can contact them from a distance.