Kerik to Newsmax: Use Ukraine Aid in US to Train Schools, Cops

The U.S. could find a better use at home for the billions of dollars it’s sending to Ukraine to train others to mimic the way the school in Nashville, Tennessee, and police responded to the shooter who killed six people Monday, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik told Newsmax on Wednesday.

“You could train and equip every school in the country to operate in this manner if we stopped giving them giving money away to foreign countries like Ukraine,” Kerik said on Newsmax’s “John Bachman Now,” while praising the response of the teachers, staff at The Covenant School, and Nashville police officers as a “textbook” reaction.

“Stick that money where it belongs, in our children’s safety and security in this country instead,” he added.

Kerik pointed out that it was a municipal police department’s officers, not a special SWAT team, that handled the emergency at the school in what was a “textbook response.”

The shooter, identified as Audrey Hale, 28, entered the school Monday morning and murdered a teacher, Cynthia Peak, the school’s headmistress, Katherine Koonce, custodian Mike Hall, and three 9-year-old students, William Kinney, Evelyn Dieckhaus, and Hallie Scruggs. Police shot and killed Hale within 15 minutes of the intrusion.

Kerik noted that one staff member from the school was outside, directing the police about the location of the shooter.

“The cops pulled up, took out their weapons, and went into the school, and if you listen to them, you’ll hear commands,” said Kerik. ” ‘I need three,’ basically, I need three officers to stack on the door before we enter the school. For every one of those rooms that they cleared, there was an officer holding the door and watching the hallway as they entered. This was extremely well done.”

The reaction should serve as a demonstration for every police department, who should be training every student in every academy and every in-service training about how to react, Kerik added.

Further, the reaction of the school, from the person outside doing the communications with 911 to Koonce’s reaction, to run toward the gunfire, showed that all of the school’s staff has gone through training for a shooting situation.

“They had practiced this before,” he said. “This is what every school in this country should be doing.”

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