SALT LAKE CITY -- SWAT personnel in Salt Lake City are training 13 students from local and international law enforcement agencies.
The trainees included three officers from Brazil’s Civil Police.
“It’s like a dream come true to me,” said Aline Albuquerque, an officer with the Brazil Civil Police. “Being here and being a part of this training with the best guys in the world.”
She was tearing through the mean obstacle course with the other guys, ranging in ages from their twenties to a 50-year-old.
At almost 43 years old, Salt Lake City PD officer Jeffrey Denning said the training looks easy, but is actually hard, especially since the team worked out for several hours before the course started.
“I want to be on the SWAT team because it's an opportunity to work on a team cohesively, and inevitably save lives,” Officer Denning said.
The team has a week of this endurance-testing work ahead of them. One of the SWAT trainers, Sgt. Andy Leonard, said it is their goal to make them more exhausted than they have ever felt before.
“When you are extremely fatigued and under a large amount of stress, you perform similar to being shot at,” Sgt. Leonard said. “So we can’t actually shoot at the students and put stress on them like that, so we make them very fatigued through the course of the week because I’d like to see how they are going to perform at high levels of fatigue. That tells me how they will perform under high levels of stress.”
After the training, the officers will be ranked by the SWAT team and some will start to fill positions on Salt Lake City’s team as openings occur. The officers from Brazil will take their new SWAT training back to their home country.
