TWIN FALLS, Idaho — The Twin Falls County Sheriff's Office is seeing a surge in requests for active shooter response training following the Aug. 1 shooting at an In-N-Out restaurant that left three people dead and several others injured.
The sheriff's office has offered the training for years, but Sgt. Ken Mencl said the shooting prompted a wave of new outreach from organizations across the community.
"Churches we're not normally in and our schools we're not normally in, even businesses we haven't normally been in are reaching out to our agency as well," Mencl said. "We're being asked to help them feel more prepared should something like this happen again."
The training is based on the ALICE program — Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate — the same framework used by the Twin Falls School District.
Mencl said the first step is straightforward.
"Be alert, aware of your surroundings, to not be oblivious to what's going on around you," Mencl said.
Idaho News 6 met with Mencl just after he finished a three-hour training at a small local school focused on how to survive an active shooter situation.
"We're teaching school teachers, churches, clergy, pastors — you'll have a convergence of what you can do to best give yourself every option for surviving a situation like what happened a few weeks ago," Mencl said.
Mencl said the core message of the ALICE program centers on one preferred action above all others.
"The primary thing that we teach people is that the best way to not be involved in a mass casualty active shooter situation is to not be there. The preferred method is to evacuate and simply just go," Mencl said.
The Twin Falls County Sheriff's Office offers the ALICE training free to the public and provides customized, on-site workplace safety and preparedness training for local businesses upon request.
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