HURON – It might sound cold and callous, but the first priority of SWAT teams arriving at the scene of an active shooting is not to help critically injured victims, Police Chief Kevin Van Diepen said Thursday.
Named Huron’s chief just a few months ago, he said he had spent much of his morning on Thursday reviewing the police department’s policies and procedures in the aftermath of Wednesday’s deadly school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
“When a police officer shows up at an active shooter situation, everyone thinks that the officer, the SWAT team, is there to render aid to the victims,” Van Diepen said.
“And that is the farthest thing from the truth,” he said at the District 22 Democratic Forum. “What we are there to do is to prevent more victims.”
Van Diepen has been with the department for 30 years. Late last year, he succeeded Chief Denny Meyer.
To best respond to situations with the potential of becoming violent, the police department created its own SWAT team, which it calls the Special Response Team, a cooperative effort between city and county law enforcement officers.
Evacuation plans are in place at both the high school and middle school in Huron, and officers train yearly on a rapid deployment strategy at all of the schools, Van Diepen said.
When people see officers stepping over injured people, they often think they are disregarding someone’s life, he said.

“If I stop and help them and he keeps shooting we’re going to have 20 more victims,” he said. “We are there to stop the shooter from doing more damage.”
Once the threat has been neutralized and the area secured, medical teams can come in to help the injured, Van Diepen said.
While he hopes Huron never has to experience the horror of an active shooting incident, he said law enforcement officers do have the daily reality of dealing with methamphetamine and opiates, also known as opioids.
He said he recently talked with an officer in another part of the state who is working a case in which someone was prescribed 7,000 opiates in one year. That comes out to about 19 a day.
“A person who takes that cannot function,” Van Diepen said. “ So I will tell you the person is selling those drugs.
“And they are legally prescribed drugs, so we can’t go after that person that’s receiving these pills because doctors are legally prescribing these drugs,” he said.
He said he would like to work with legislators on a way to reduce opiate prescriptions. A state computer program could inform doctors if their patients are already getting the drugs from somewhere else so they don’t prescribe them, too.
Last year, Huron police dispatchers fielded 16,000 phone calls, and patrol officers alone took 2,200 reports, he said. Of those, 43 involved methamphetamine, with as many as 15 to 20 people involved in each case.
“These officers are continuing to battle drug addiction that’s out there,” Van Diepen said.
He agrees that a drug crime itself isn’t violent. But he said while drug possession and distribution aren’t violent crimes in themselves, they can lead to violence.
Recent homicides in Sioux Falls and some of the murders in Huron in 2009 involved drugs, he said.
As he watches the aftermath of the latest school shooting and makes sure Huron has plans in place, Van Diepen said he can’t imagine what his counterpart in Florida is going through.
“Because he’s going to feel responsible for what happened in that school,” he said. “Even though he wasn’t there, his officers weren’t there, but he still has to stand up in front of those people and try to explain how those people lost their lives for no reason.”

ROGER LARSEN/PLAINSMAN
Huron police chief Kevin Van Diepen spoke to the District 22 Democratic Forum Thursday at the Huron Event Center.