The Orange County Sheriff’s Department is planning a $15 million training center that will provide officers a physical space to better practice response tactics for public safety threats.
The 7,600-square-foot, two-story facility in Orange will be designed to replicate multiple indoor tactical scenarios, simulating what officers would encounter in a high-risk, emergency event.
Once complete, the Special Training and Response (STAR) facility will become one of the most advanced tactical training facilities in the country, according to the department.
“This could be the greatest investment for saving lives,” Sheriff Don Barnes told the Business Journal.
The department began fundraising last October through its nonprofit organization, the Orange County Sheriff Advisory Council, and estimates that it’ll reach $10 million within the next several months. The council has currently raised around $7 million.
The project has garnered support from notable figures in the business community, including a $2 million donation from Henry and Susan Samueli, as well as contributions from Palmer Luckey. Carl Nolet of Ketel One gave the initial $1 million.
Officials were hoping to break ground this month, but once fundraising is complete, the department will move onto the groundbreaking. Construction is expected to take a year.
“We can try to replicate training, but we can’t make it real. This will make it real to the point that when they show up at an actual event, God forbid, the personnel may have already addressed those issues 100 times over with the facility we’re going to provide them,” Barnes said.
The Orange County Business Journal issue this week includes a special separate supplement on philanthropy, with a highlight on corporate donations.
Muscle Memory
The STAR building is being designed to recreate multiple scenarios within a realistic environment.
“It’ll be the greatest benefit for physical training that we will have,” Barnes said.
Both the exterior and interior will have the ability to simulate different public settings, such as a place of worship, school or retail establishment, with moveable walls.
The reconfigurability of the building is expected to expand the number of training exercises that can be performed, including exercises in response to calls for active shootings, burglaries in progress and bomb threats.
It will be used to train academy recruits, deputies and tactical units, according to the department.
The new facility will be added to the current training center that sits across from the Honda Center in Orange, which the sheriff describes as a “scaled-down city” with a restaurant, a bar, a gas station, a bank and surrounding houses.
The training environment was recently re-designed to include two 50-yard and 25-yard shooting ranges with adjustable lighting and targets.
It re-opened in February, and the department also chose to celebrate the renaming of the Sandra Hutchens Regional Law Enforcement Training Center, in honor of the late sheriff who passed away in January 2021 from breast cancer.
The facilities are not currently equipped to prepare officers for more high-risk scenarios like an active shooter response because they are static and predictable, Barnes said.
“It builds bad tactics into the muscle memory of solving [tactical] problems. So, we have this physical environment that’s become somewhat dated,” Barnes said. “What we lacked was the physical space to recreate the reality of these high risk, low frequency events that [they] can function in.”
In the past, the department has borrowed space from local elementary schools, churches and retail centers such as South Coast Plaza after-hours.
Now, with the STAR building, officers can be asked to report to the training facility during any time of the day to respond to either one or multiple simulated situations.
The officers will be given the training environment tools and enact the proper response. Afterward, they will debrief about tactics in a separate room.
It will be interactive and performance-based with certain objectives to meet rather than pass or fail, according to Barnes.
“The goal is tactics,” he added.
Model of Training
The department has been investing in training tactics and resources for decades, Barnes said. This year marks his 36th year with the OC organization and the sixth as sheriff.
When Barnes took over the command that included the training division around 2012, he had the goal of reworking the entire training model that was set in place.
Separate booths in the shooting range were taken out, allowing for more creative use of the space opposed to just shooting at moving targets while standing in place.
Every January, each officer is required by the state to qualify for shooting proficiency. Every other month after that, officers train in a variety of areas like de-escalation tactics and crisis intervention as well as response tactics.
In training, they learn to control the environment when it comes to high-risk situations.
“There are two things that we can hope to control in any interaction – the pace in which we’re operating, and the distance between the risk,” Barnes said.
He said the department’s investments have paid off especially within the last two years in light of the mass shootings at Cook’s Corner bar in Trabuco Canyon and Geneva Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods.
Deputies who engaged in an active gunbattle with the shooter at Cook’s Corner reportedly came back saying they applied what they learned regarding finding cover and tactical communication.
“I would say without any reservation, if we had the traditional model of training, we may have lost deputy lives that day,” Barnes said.
At Geneva Presbyterian, officers breached their way into the church and had the shooter in handcuffs in under four minutes from the time the dispatcher received the 911 call, according to Barnes.
Officers and deputies’ responses to both situations had the proper training in communication and leadership that other incidents like the Uvalde school shooting lacked, Barnes said.
“We keep focusing on failure instead of looking at, replicating and emulating success,” Barnes said. “We have a model in place (that) should be a platform that we are training on nationally.”
Funding Now
The department opted to privately raise funds for the STAR building rather than through the general fund because Barnes felt there’s an urgent need in the community for it to be built.
“This is something I think that’s important enough,” Barnes said.
There are tens of millions of dollars worth of projects that are waiting in line to get funding, according to Barnes.
“I can’t wait 10 or 15 years because when something else happens that doesn’t end as well as the other two incidents we’ve had, I would have a hard time explaining that to the public,” Barnes said.
Departments nationally have grappled with the movement calling to defund the police in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.
For Barnes, the answer to the problems plaguing law enforcement isn’t defunding them, but adequately funding the programs responding to social issues such as mental illness, homelessness and substance abuse disorders so there is less law enforcement contact.
“Investing in these challenges early on, and not through policing, prevents them from collapsing into law enforcement in the first place,” Barnes said.
OC Sheriff: Uvalde was failure of leadership
The 2022 massacre of children at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas became infamous for that town’s poorly trained police officers.
Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes, who received a classified debriefing 24 hours after the shooting that killed 21, said he immediately saw failures in several areas like leadership, communications, training and weaponry.
“I’m not picking on Uvalde, which will be forever on the map for all the wrong reasons that it’s known for today, but there were just this series of failures or inability to prepare,” Barnes told the Business Journal.
Orange County sheriff deputies have spent years preparing for such mass shootings.
Barnes said it came in handy three weeks before Uvalde when a shooter started firing at Geneva Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, killing one and wounding five others. The parishioners were able to disarm the shooter and within four minutes of the 911 call, Sheriff deputies had the suspect in custody.
“Why do we keep talking about failure when we had a totally different outcome?” Barnes said.
After his election in 2018, Barnes turned to improving existing community programs and implementing new ones that address local issues such as drug addiction, homelessness and mental illness. These efforts became known as the County of Orange Integrated Services Plan, which has attracted national attention for Barnes.
In 2020, Sheriff Barnes joined a subcommittee called the Social Problems Working Group under the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement. The commission issued the first comprehensive study reviewing the criminal justice system since 1967. It referenced several practices from Orange County for rebuilding certain treatment services in communities, including Barnes’ integrated services plan.
Barnes also serves as chair on the Major County Sheriffs of America’s (MCSA) Intelligence Commander Group as committee chairman and vice president for Homeland Security, where he works to maintain open communication among local, state and federal law enforcement. He is also MCSA’s representative to the Department of Justice’s Criminal Intelligence Coordinating Council (CICC) and serves as president of the California State Sheriffs’ Association.
