Officers Test Their Mettle at High-Rise Training Site

DALLAS —  His machine gun perched between two taps of Black Dog Ale, a drug dealer waits behind the bar of a dimly lighted tavern for the SWAT team to arrive.

As soon as their shadows brush the pool table, he starts firing.

“Police!” an officer yells, but the suspect has already vanished through a door behind the bar.

SWAT team members in gas masks and combat boots charge past the pinball machine and through the door as the jukebox jams Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.” After a blitz of bullets, the suspect, cornered under a storeroom table, surrenders.

“Like a baby,” mutters Cpl. Jimmy Lee, lowering his gun. “He had his thumb in his mouth asking for mama.”

The officers from the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch peel off their masks and burst into laughter as the drug dealer, played by Patrolman Branden Adams, offers congratulations. They’ve survived another raid in one of the country’s most challenging training venues: the Earl Cabell Federal Building.

On the 18th and 19th floors of the high-rise that houses federal courts and offices, the U.S. Marshals Service has built a survival camp -- complete with a bar, launderette, abandoned warehouse and full-scale crack house spiked with paper hostages and gun-toting bad guys. Since 2001, the training camp has drawn about 1,300 officers from 70 agencies throughout the world.

In any given month, officers from agencies as varied as Farmers Branch, the Turkish National Police and the Secret Service test themselves in the 11,000-square-foot center, which is about the size of a chain drugstore.

They practice arresting drug dealers, rescuing hostages and investigating crime scenes. Their simulator guns are loaded with paint bullets, which sting but don’t injure.

There’s nothing quite like this training venue in the country. For most agencies, this sort of practice happens in abandoned houses, apartment buildings or motels that become less challenging as officers become familiar with them.

But at the Marshals’ course, walls on wheels and doors painted the same color as the walls allow trainers to create a variety of scenarios and settings.

Forty-four mounted surveillance cameras allow teams to review their performances later. An interactive reality program with movie theater surround-sound works like a video game to let officers practice shooting, negotiating and other challenges.

Secret Service Agent Shane Zidermanis said the training camp wasn’t as big as the mock towns at the FBI academy or Camp Pendleton Marine base in California, but it was more versatile.

“This place you can move walls so you can make your own layout,” said Zidermanis, who’s based in Dallas. “In fixed buildings, it’s hard to change things up.”

Pat Smith, an acting supervisory special agent for the Department of Homeland Security, said the ability to change floor plans provided realistic training. That’s crucial for his team, which specializes in high-risk narcotics searches and arrests.

“In the space of five minutes, I’ve got a scenario running, and five minutes later, we’re debriefing it and on to the next one,” Smith said.

At a time when the economy forces law enforcement agencies to scale back on training while security demands rise, the course is an asset to smaller departments. Instead of payment, the Marshals Service asks agencies to contribute what they can in equipment, props and the volunteer hours it takes to keep the place going.

“In a small city like ours, without this, we may have to go a long time without a place to train,” said Lt. Darran Dyer of the Farmers Branch Police Department.

His SWAT team used to train in abandoned houses. They pointed empty guns and pretended to shoot each other because they couldn’t afford the paint bullets that the Marshals facility provides free. Training in neighborhoods sometimes alarmed residents, and pretend shooting didn’t present a real challenge.

“When you’re not getting shot at, you get lazy, you get lax,” Lee said. “When it hurts to get hit, you practice more realistically.”

The Marshals camp began three years ago as the brainchild of Trent Touchstone, a supervisory deputy U.S. marshal. He talked the agency into spending about $135,600 per year to rent two neglected floors of the building and got the Marshals Service to cover the costs of cameras, equipment, paint and wood.

With sweat and ingenuity, he and other deputies built the rest of the camp, using furniture found at garage sales and salvage stores or brought in by friends, colleagues and officers.

The work isn’t done for Touchstone, who never stops crafting the next “worst-case scenario.” He’s already got darkrooms with strobe lights, attics baited with booby traps and a long hallway that officers call the “fatal funnel” because there’s no easy way out. He wants to expand to the 20th floor to create a driving course.

His motivation?

“This training is going to keep officers alive,” he said.