Following the decision by a grand jury to not indict police officer Darren Wilson with the incident with Michael Brown, riots broke out all over Ferguson, Missouri.

Greene County Sheriff Steve Haupert says riots are a dangerous situation for everyone involved, including law enforcement.  He comments that they don’t receive a lot of riot control training at the state academy.

Haupert talks about why the state doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on riot training.

“The larger cities, I’m sure, they do a lot of the riot control scenarios but for the smaller communities out in the rural here, it’s probably kind of on the back burner.  If we did have to go in and help another community, put together a riot team, we could do that.  But for just for everyday training on the street for rural Sheriff’s office and police officers, there’s not a lot of training out here.”

The training they do receive is how to extract a downed officer and form a V-Shape with law enforcement to control a crowd.  Officers also have helmets, shields and less lethal weapons such as guns with bean bags and chemical agents like pepper spray for riot control.

And like what happened in Ferguson, when crowds lit structures and vehicles on fire, Haupert notes that for the safety of fire personnel, riots are not an ideal situation to bring in those agencies to do their jobs.

“You bring in all that equipment and they’re trapped in the middle of a riot and then their equipment brings to burn or is destroyed.  Course the equipment can be replaced but its the safety of the firefighter themselves.  If its not a complete safe scene, you probably don’t want fire units in there risking their lives to save a building.”

Riots are not a big concern for Sheriff Haupert, but he feels, they are adequate numbers of law enforcement to handle other situations like active shooters or smaller crowd issues.