Erica Crittenden, a bartender at Cliff Castle Casino, stood at her workstation behind the bar in the main room on the morning of March 26. Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” played over the casino’s speakers, giving the morning an upbeat poppy vibe.
At 7:01 a.m., a man started talking to her. He acted angry.
“Why are you here at my work? You need to go home,” Crittenden shouted.
“I’m tired of you,” the man yelled. The sound of two gunshots punctuated Peter Gabriel’s airy falsetto. Crittenden crumpled to the floor.
“Attention casino team members,” the loudspeaker blared. “This is an evacuation drill.”
The gun was a prop. The man holding it was not Crittenden’s angry boyfriend, but rather a fellow casino employee. Within a few minutes, Crittenden got up from the floor, only to play-act through the violent scenario half a dozen more times over the course of the morning.
Cliff Castle Casino teamed up with the Camp Verde Marshal’s Office, the Yavapai Apache Police Department and Copper Canyon Fire and Medical Authority to test their emergency preparedness in case a real gunman showed up on the casino floor. Police vehicles, fire trucks and ambulances pulled up to the front doors of the casino in order to deposit a round of officers to go through the training and then pulled away for the next round.
For two hours, cops strafed down the slot machine aisles with guns drawn, chasing down the fake assailant, while the casino staff pretended to die over and over, followed by the emergency medical personnel who walked through and found the “victims” on the casino floor, carried them outside and put them in ambulances.
The main aim of the drill was to facilitate communication between the three agencies, as well as with the casino’s security staff, in order to better prepare all three for the worst-case scenario they performed.
“It was the first time we’ve had police and fire work together under those type of conditions,” Camp Verde Marshal Corey Rowley said. “We were able to identify the areas where we can improve.”
Rowley spoke highly of the overall drill, but said that it highlighted the importance of getting better at the direct communication between law enforcement officers who responded first to the scenario and the emergency medical personnel who followed them. According to Rowley, officers found that their walkie-talkies were severely limited inside the casino. All three agencies said that they needed to work better at getting messages to the other agencies so that operations could be coordinated better between the responders.
“We put together a unified command, so our battalion chief on the fire side established a command for us, law enforcement established a command for them,” Terry Keller, fire chief for CCFMA, said. “Those two individuals were side by side at one location and not moving around so that they could relay information back and forth from one side to the other — fire to police, police to fire — to help coordinate the efforts of all of us. That’s very, very critical and we don’t play that very well. Often, law enforcement’s doing what they’re doing and we’re busy doing what we’re doing and we don’t really share information. On something like this, it’s critical.”
Keller saw the drill as a success in preparing the various first responders for a potential crisis, but also noted how much more diffi- cult this situation would be in a real-life event.
“If that happened when the public was there, it would change the whole dynamic,” Keller said. “We did what we did to practice the movements and techniques and extractions — chasing down the bad guy and taking him out or apprehending him — but we didn’t have to contend with 500, 1,500, 2,000 screaming, running, yelling, getting in their vehicles, trying to evacuate and impeding our flow in while they’re trying to flow out.”
“When they come in and encounter, they’ve got to make decision what to do to eliminate that threat,” Rowley said. “They also need to understand that there’s a lot of people around in the background and think, ‘What’s [the] threat of this gentleman continuing shooting people?’ There’s a lot of things in a short amount of time that officers have to go through in their mind, through their training and experiences.”
