SWAT Teams Put Their Crisis Skills to Test

It wasn’t an actual hostage situation: a suspect with a multi-round shotgun barricaded inside a school building with two dead bodies and a third hostage in fear for his life. But you’d never know the scene was make-believe judging by the sweat pouring off the face of officers from the Oxnard Police Department SWAT team.

The six officers made up one of 10 teams from Southern California participating in a daylong SWAT competition Monday sponsored by the Ventura Police Department.

Events intended to put SWAT officers into real-life situations were held on the hour from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Camarillo Airport and at various sites around Ventura.

Each team competed in eight “scenarios,” including sniper shooting, a hostage rescue and flushing out suspects from a crack house. The teams represented police departments in Oxnard, Simi Valley, Santa Barbara, Torrance, El Segundo, Santa Monica and Irvine, as well as two Ventura County Sheriff’s Department teams and one representing the Santa Barbara County Sheriff.

The winning team--which survived a grueling day of running, shooting and lots of cooperation--was from Santa Monica.

A 1.25-mile obstacle course at the Ventura County Fairgrounds took officers east along Shoreline Drive to the Texaco marine terminal on Figueroa Street, through a 3-foot-diameter tunnel, up the stairs of a 50-foot-tall storage tank and back again. Along the way they carried a 100-pound log half the length of a football field, and then a 180-pound “person” the same length.

One of the officers who made easy work of the course was Oxnard SWAT officer William Crisostimo, who barely broke a sweat. Two other team members, Sergeants Ron Whitney and Daniel Christian, were involved in an actual raid earlier this year that claimed the life of fellow Officer James Rex Jensen Jr. Christian fatally shot Jensen in a room filled with grenade smoke, having mistaken him for a drug dealer.

The officers competed not only for the glory, but also for the training.

Ventura Police SWAT Officer Al Davis, 33, supervised the hostage simulation at Ventura’s old Washington School. The dilapidated building was used to test officers’ ability to free a hostage being held by a suspect with a shotgun capable of firing 15 rounds before reloading.

“Since you have SWAT officers putting on the scenarios, they tend to be rather challenging,” said Davis, who has spent eight of his 11 years as a Ventura Police officer on the SWAT team.

Adrenaline is sure to pump whether the incident is real or make believe, Davis said. Make a wrong move and the team loses points; err when the bullets are real and the officers may lose one of their own, or innocent people may be caught in the cross fire.