East End PDs run school shooter drill at Southold Elementary

It’s the horror no parent wants to experience, and a harsh reality of today’s world: school shootings. More than 273 active shooter incidents have been reported in the United States since 2000. 

Preparing for the worst is something area police hope will give them an edge in the event this national terror becomes a local reality. That hopeful solace was trained on Wednesday, Aug. 13, as 40 East End police officers participated in a school shooting drill at Southold Elementary School. 

Officers from Southold, Riverhead, Southampton, Shelter Island and Westhampton Beach police departments; Suffolk County Police Department; and other agencies were involved in the training.

The priorities, as communicated by Suffolk County Police Department officers running the drills, were to “stop the killing” before they can “stop the dying,” meaning they neutralize the threat first before tending to the wounded. 

The training included four drills where groups of roughly 10 police officers practiced clearing procedures, a scenario where a pair of officers sought out the “shooters” in the school and an emergency medicine run down for injured people using manikins.

Throughout the training, emergency services unit cops continuously reminded officers to practice their training as “perfect as possible” and keep as level a head they can in the situation. Points hammered into officers’ brains were not to shoot past their partners and keep their fingers off the trigger to avoid any civilian casualties. 

Suffolk County Police Department officers Andrew Fiorillo and Elisa McVeigh reviewed information about school shootings before the sessions started. Ms. McVeigh noted that the average active shooter incident lasts roughly 12 minutes, with more than half of them ending before officers get to the scene. 

“They don’t randomly walk into a school on a nice day like today,” Ms. McVeigh said of school shooters. “Can it happen? Absolutely. But these attacks are planned. They can take several months or up to a year to plan these attacks.”

Roughly 35 members of Southold Union Free School District attended the sessions, gaining insight about how police go through the schools in the worst case scenario. 

Mr. Fiorillo said that a shooter “has never breached an interior locked door” in an active shooter scenario. He urged teachers to identify their safe zones in rooms where they are out of the line of sight on their door windows. 

“’Do I need to move a file cabinet now? Do I need to desks now?’” Mr. Fiorillo asked teachers to think about. “’Do I need to pre-stage that area because I have kindergarteners there, and they need ditto sheets and they need lollipops and so forth?’” 

“We shouldn’t see you, we shouldn’t hear you and we should be able to keep moving forward,” he continued. Southold police have the sole ability to override locks during a school lock down.

Officers were cautioned against forming a “blue tsunami,” or flooding one entrance of the building without covering other exits. Ms. McVeigh gave the example of Commack High School in January 2024, where 37 police vehicles responded to a reported active shooter incident that turned out to be a false alarm. In that situation, she said that no officer covered the rear exits of the building, and the event served as a “lesson learned.”

This year was the year Southold Police Department hosted the training in town, having hosted it at Greenport schools in 2023 and at Mattituck schools in 2024. Ms. McVeigh said the drills are conducted throughout Suffolk County on a monthly basis in schools, places of worship and businesses during off hours.

Southold Police Chief Stephen Grattan said officers found the training “fantastic start to finish” this year.

“It’s an unfortunate reality of the society that we live in today, but this training certainly enhances our officers and their preparedness in the event something like this happens,” Chief Grattan said.