An inside look at LCSO’s sniper training

The Lee County Sheriff’s Office‘s snipers in the special operations unit train for every situation.

“They go through extensive training, over 140 hours of training; they train twice a month. They just got done training for almost the exact scenario and shot that suspect took with President Trump,” said Sheriff Carmine Marceno, Lee County Sheriff’s Office.

Training from varying locations and setups.

“Every Sniper will come up with their own way, their own method on how they’ll do it,” said Lt. Bryce Hardin with LCSO.

Not only is there a rigorous selection and try-out process to become an lcso sniper…individuals have to be chosen from their elite swat team, and pass a 2 week sniper training camp with 100% accuracy.

I got to take a look through the scope myself…and let’s just say these guys make it look easy. But being a sniper isn’t just about taking the long shot.

“If we do a sniper and initiate entry, I may not be shooting the person, I may be shooting the door lock. Or I may be shooting just into a window up into the ceiling for a distraction,” said Lt. Paul Nader.

These snipers are the eyes and ears of many operations.

“We do observations as well. So we’ll deploy for our Narcotics Division, and we’ll set up a house and give them real live intelligence,” said Hardin “Our job is to really to report not really the anomalies that one shot we get to take but 90% of it is the eyes and ears of the commanders.”

But when they do have to take the shot, like in the Bank of America hostage situation.

Where a man, Sterling Alavache, with a knife, held two hostages inside with him.

This highly trained sniper, hidden behind their team, fired one shot through a computer monitor, took out the suspect, and allowed those hostages to escape to safety.

And just like this one shot…every single shot that’s fired is accounted for in these data books that logs the accuracy and consistency.

“Sheriff Marceno holds us to an extremely high standard you know, as maybe a miss on a one inch target at 200 yards is acceptable in training but in a real life scenario, it is not so we always trained for that point. 1%,” said Hardin.

LCSO’s snipers are highly trained, selected from the top, and ready to take on any challenging mission in Lee County.

“Presence surveillance, we strategically placed them on rooftops and buildings, first of all people see them. Secondly, they can engage the crowd in every direction, at a vantage point, to ensure that people on the ground that attend events are safe,” Marceno.