The Tactical Response to Suicide Bombing Incidents (TRSBI) course provides law enforcement tactical officers and staff with the knowledge and skills to prevent and respond to suicide bombing incidents. While the residential version of the course has been offered for more than a decade at Playas, a mobile course is currently being piloted.
Developing a mobile course requires a substantial amount of time and effort; in many cases it can take years from start to completion. For the TRSBI course, that timeframe spanned six months, a shorter period than normal since the content from the residential TRSBI course already existed. The process involved a team of curriculum developers and subject matter experts.
The result is an 8-hour mobile course that delivers information to tactical teams as well as law enforcement officers, hostage negotiators, sergeants, and command staff at their home jurisdictions. The live-explosive field demonstrations from the residential course are replaced by videos of those same demonstrations. As opposed to tactical exercises used in the residential version of the course, the final hours of the one-day course include a scenario-based tabletop exercise where participants are encouraged to use the learning objectives and apply these skills to the scenario. The participants are divided into 3 breakout rooms, and then return as one class and share their tactical planning and resolution to the real-life-based scenario.
Currently awaiting FEMA certification, the course was piloted this Fall in Columbia, South Carolina. John Stamatopoulos, instructor and one of the course developers, described the interactions of course participants and instructors as comparable. He noted, “when instructors are engaging the participants and encouraging discussion and feedback …the interactions are very similar between the residential and mobile.” As is true with any pilot course, the instructors gained information regarding the length of time to devote to course concepts and made modifications as necessary. They presented the pilot twice, with over 20 participants each day.
Numerous other locations including Alaska, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have requested course delivery once the course is FEMA-certified. By taking this valuable training to law enforcement professionals at their jurisdictions, there’s the potential to make police departments better aware of the current trends that threaten the communities they serve. Participating in training to better address these threats can assist departments in stopping threats and saving lives when high-risk events such as Pulse Night Club, Colleyville Synagogue, and Uvalde occur.
