Community members, business owners and church goers are hoping to learn how to prevent an active shooter situation. The Thomasville Police Department is hosting a two hour civilian active shooter response training to help people know what to do in case there's an active shooting.
Thomasville PD is hosting the class after receiving requests from businesses and churches about safety trainings.
Bret Bush is the Security and Safety Director at Gatlin Creek Baptist Church. His team will be at tonight's training to learn how to better keep their congregation safe. "To learn more about what we can do on a proactive basis to help actually prevent any sort of interruption to our worship service."
Tonight, Major Wade Glover will go over a few preventative measures to help stop a potential shooting from happening.
"This is what we're going to do. We're going to start locking the doors. We're going to have somebody posted at this location. We're going to have the exit signs up here. We're going to make sure we have people watching out and making sure if they see something, they should say something," said Glover.
Glover said having a plan can help you stay alive until law enforcement can respond.
"We need the citizens to understand how important it is of what your role is, what you need to do because the national average for police response is around three minutes and, as we know, a lot of things, a lot of bad things, can happen in three minutes," said Glover.
Although nothing has happened, Bush understands this doesn't mean their immune.
"Fortunately, Thomasville is a great community. It still has that small town, home town feeling, and while we don't want to think it can happen here, unfortunately I'm afraid we all realized that it could," said Bush.
Glover tells me over 100 people are signed up for tonight's training. However if you missed it, he said they'll plan to have another one later on this year.
