Caledonia Joins SMART Response

If there is ever - God forbid - an active shooter scenario in the village, Caledonia police will get assistance from local agencies, of course, but also from Milwaukee and Waukesha counties.

Trustees Monday night unanimously approved a resolution authorizing the addition of CAPD to SMART (Sububan Mutual Aid Response Team).

SMART includes all the police departments of Milwaukee and Waukesha counties, with the exception of the Milwaukee Police Department, and it's designed to make calling for assistance during a major incident faster and easier.

"If we get a large-scale incident, we know we'll get a large assistance response in no more than an hour," CAPD Chief Toby Schey told the board.

Sturtevant trustees are expected to approve a similar resolution Tuesday, and Mount Pleasant will take up the matter Monday.

SMART is a tier system of eight levels, with Level 1 at the bottom - more local response - and Level 8 being the most dire, which would bring assistance from departments as far north as Fox Point.

"The fire department has had something like this for years so now police can rely on a system that gets help here pretty quickly," Schey added.

The system was also set up with an eye on not taxing police departments who respond to a SMART call, so the rule is that only one officer from each PD would answer a SMART call at a time. Response time without lights and siren has to be within an hour from answering agencies.

Lt. Gary Larsen compared responses like a series of rings; the worse the incident the larger the ring.

"For smaller situations, we'll just continue to rely on our neighbors like we all do now," he said. "But for something really serious, like the Sikh Temple or the spa shooting, we'd put out a call for the biggest response to get as much help as possible."

Most often, local agencies need help with traffic control while they take point for the incident, but SMART also triggers the need for supervisors.

"If there's something big going down, and we have all these responding officers, we would also need additional incident command," Sturtevant Chief Sean Marschke noted.

Mount Pleasant Police Chief Tim Zarzecki said becoming members of the SMART system is good policy because major incidents, from crime to damaging weather events like tornadoes, are unpredictable.

"We don't have to reinvent the wheel, which saves time," he noted. "But when something happens, SMART allows a quickly coordinated response of law enforcement."