Machine-gun fire pierced the air and helicopters circled
overhead as more than 150 SWAT team members
– strapped with fully-loaded weapons and clad in camouflage –
descended on the eastern hills north of Morgan Hill.
Machine-gun fire pierced the air and helicopters circled overhead as more than 150 SWAT team members – strapped with fully-loaded weapons and clad in camouflage – descended on the eastern hills north of Morgan Hill.
But their targeted suspects and the threats they were there to diminish Thursday were not real.
It was the first day of the Best in the West SWAT team competition, hosted for the 19th consecutive year by the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office.
Participating in this year’s event, which continues today, were 26 SWAT teams from police departments, sheriff’s offices, state and federal agencies from throughout California and parts of Nevada, according to Sgt. Rick Sung.
Gilroy and Morgan Hill police, who combined to form a South County regional SWAT team in 2008, competed at Best in the West, which is held at the Sheriff’s Range law enforcement training facility.
The event is designed to test the skills and training of individual SWAT units, under simulated, yet stressful conditions.
“We consider this more than a competition,” said Kurt Ashley, a Gilroy police officer and SWAT Commander.
He said the special weapons and tactics competition adds a stress element which is hard to duplicate in normal training exercises.
SWAT teams approach high-risk crime threats – such as hostage standoffs and bomb threats – that require specialized teamwork and firearms training.
Even though the threats posed at the competition are fabricated, Ashley said because colleagues from other agencies are watching and the obstacles and scenarios require intense physical output, the pressure runs high at Best in the West.
During the two-day event, each team will compete in seven exercises – all but one use live ammunition – that mirror fictional incidents of criminal encounters. Teams are timed and judged on a point system to determine the winning SWAT unit.
“The (scenarios) all revolve around things we might be called to do,” Ashley said.
One challenge simulated an armed robbery inside a commercial building, with a getaway car outside. Officers had to determine the origin of the threat and accurately subdue cardboard cutouts of suspects with their weapons.
The sniper course tested the accuracy of each team’s best marksman under a mimicked hostage scenario. The “vehicle assault” course tested the team’s ability to respond to an attack on a foreign official escorted by friendly vehicles. SWAT members had to shoot the attackers while protecting victims of the attack – each represented by human-shaped paper targets.
The event allows SWAT teams from neighboring agencies who might one day work together in a large-scale incident, to network and share ideas and strategies, Morgan Hill Detective Kyle Christensen said. He added the scenarios are designed to improve team members’ ability to think quickly, and devise solutions to potential threats “on the fly.”
“It’s very rewarding,” said Christensen, who has attended Best in the West the past four years.
Seven of the Morgan Hill-Gilroy SWAT team’s 18 members attended this week’s competition, which called for six-person teams to participate.
The Sheriff’s Office described Best in the West not as a competition but a “workshop” for SWAT teams to learn from each other and to “raise camaraderie” among SWAT officers statewide, Sung explained.
And because the local SWAT members are also patrol officers and detectives, Ashley attributes their specialized training to the infrequent need for SWAT services in Gilroy and Morgan Hill.
“They’re going to carry this training out on their patrol jobs and avoid SWAT callouts,” Ashley said. “99.9 percent of these (high-risk incidents) get resolved in a peaceful way.”
Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy SWAT team won first place at Best in the West, with teams from the San Francisco Police Department and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office coming in second and third places.
Results from this year’s competition will be posted online Monday.
