Law Enforcement Training
Denny has worked with law enforcement on a limited basis for almost 20 years. In the spring of 2009 Denny was invited to the White Mountains of Arizona to work with law enforcement, the fire department, and the community with a school bus drill. Part of that program was to experiment with the school bus and the SWAT team from the area. Denny provided a presentation on the characteristics of the school bus LE needed to know, and then spent 4 hours in a gravel pit with the SWAT team and the bus. A presentation was made at the 2009 Minnesota Security and Terrorism Emergency Preparedness (M-STEP) conference in November of 2009 for law enforcement personnel only.
Denny has trained the Hennepin County Weapons of Mass Destruction team in Minneapolis with great success, which soon resulted in additional sessions with local SWAT teams and departments in Nevada and California. While Denny’s expertise is not with law enforcement, he has been effective in training the industry about the school bus, and things they need to consider heightening their success rate when working with a school bus incident.
Denny has a son, daughter-in-law, and grandson that are police officers in Minnesota, so he is exposed to much of the current information. He has worked with the Minnesota State Patrol doing presentations on school bus related incidences. He has been a member of InfraGard (an FBI – industry partnership) for many years. He served on three police departments, two as a reserve officer and one as a police volunteer service aide.
Denny is an avid shooter and understands firearms well. He knows how many school bus seats a 9 MM, 40 cal., and 45 cal. bullet will penetrate. He has worked with .223, 308, and 12 ga. weapons around the school bus. Denny has been very successful in explaining the school bus to LE personnel.
A recent comment from a team members admitted, “We thought we knew a school bus well, it is a tubular structure much like a transit bus or rail car, but your training has taught us what we didn’t know about the school bus.”
Denny is anxious to share his knowledge and experience with the law enforcement community and challenge the conventional methods and policies that have limited testing against terrorist in this country. Denny has studied the Beslan attack in Russia in 2004 and includes portions of that knowledge in presentations to LE and other industries.
