Police active shooter drill at Pleasant St. School this April will close neighborhood roads

LACONIA — In a proactive effort to bolster school safety and enhance emergency response, the Laconia Police Department will conduct a live active shooter drill at Pleasant Street School on Saturday, April 15.

The exercise, involving the Laconia Fire Department and other law enforcement partners, is designed to test and improve the department's readiness to confront potential threats in the wake of last summer's school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

The drill will run from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., and traffic on Pleasant Street will be detoured during those hours. Northbound drivers will be rerouted at the intersection of Oak Street, while southbound drivers will reroute at the intersection of Audrey Lane. Drivers can expect partial closures at Folsom Street, Tremont Street and Dartmouth Street.

“It’s been a yearlong planning process,” Laconia Police Chief Matt Canfield said. “We’ve done these in the past. We've done one in the heights, in the middle school and the high school.”

The department’s performance and response to the scenario will be graded by members of the NH Department of Homeland Security. In order to prepare for the drill, the department has held trainings focusing on technical skills like door breaching, incident command, and even tabletop, board game-like exercises.

“This exercise brings it all together,” Canfield said. “School safety is paramount on my mind. You hear what happened in Uvalde, you read that report on that, and it’s horrifying that 22 victims died in that school.”

Last summer, a shooter in Uvalde walked into Robb Elementary School with an automatic rifle and opened fire. The shooter killed 21 people and injured 18 others.

Members of local law enforcement stood in the halls of the building during the shooting. Despite being armed with rifles themselves and outnumbering the untrained 18-year-old, video and audio recordings show officers retreating and cowering from the shooter. Further reports detailed a poor chain of command during the initial response. Officers waited 60 minutes for a Border Patrol SWAT team to breach the building and kill the shooter.

“There were apparent issues with the police response. In my mind, we need to be prepared here in Laconia,” Canfield said. “We have no known threats to our schools that this will occur, but it's always a possibility.”

Canfield said the department has always empowered the first officers arriving to such scenes with the autonomy to make crucial decisions.

“I view the first arriving officer on scene as the incident commander initially,” Canfield said. “Then a sergeant gets there, command is passed off. Then a lieutenant gets there, a captain gets there, I myself get there, we’ll take over command and free them up.”

Canfield found a tactical take away from the report of the school shooting in Uvalde.

“One of the lessons learned that I read from the report is we could use a little bit more work on breaching doors,” Canfield said.

“We’re in the process to secure funding to provide breaching equipment in every single frontline car,” Canfield said. Each city cruiser is already equipped with a heavy, rifle-rated protective vest, a ballistic helmet and a rifle. “My goal would be to get the breach equipment into every car, as well, because time is of the essence.”