There is little doubt that nearly every Illinois resident watched as events unfolded at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park. The parade began as a typical community, family fun event and turned into tragedy. Not only has Highland Park been changed forever, but so has the nation.

What you may have seen broadcast were scenes of police officers, hundreds of them, responding to assist the village of Highland Park on a call where a mass shooting had taken place.

This active shooter event happened on the morning of the Fourth of July as the parade started in a downtown area. Then came breaking news broadcasting live from Highland Park that the massacre was unfolding.

I would like to explain what is involved with regard to the assistance provided by mutual aid organizations, specifically NIPAS, the Northern Illinois Police Alarm System, when something like this happens.

NIPAS is a multijurisdictional organization comprised of roughly 100 communities that include those from the Wisconsin border on the north all the way down to communities that border the Stevenson Expressway. Communities that would be farthest south and involved in NIPAS include Riverside, La Grange and Burr Ridge, just to mention a few.

What stood out most prominently is the emergency service team members you saw on the news, commonly referred to as SWAT officers.

Most communities are members of numerous multijurisdictional task forces. There are task forces for criminal investigations, gang activity, major fatal crash investigation units and the SWAT operations for extremely violent incidents, including hostage barricades.

On July 4, NIPAS was called to provide Emergency Service Team SWAT members. NIPAS has two functions. It has a Mobile Field Force, which typically responds to civil disturbances, riot control and large crowd control situations. It also has an Emergency Service Team, a SWAT operation that responds to active shooters, hostage barricade situations and other armed encounters. There are more than 200 member officers in these units.

I served on the NIPAS board for 12 years (2009-2021) and in every capacity on the board, including NIPAS president from 2020-21. NIPAS originally formed because of the chaotic North Shore shooting in Winnetka, commonly referred to as the Laurie Dann shooting. After that 1988 tragedy, NIPAS was formed.

A call for NIPAS assistance unfolds as follows: First, the chief of police, or top command officer on a large incident, makes a phone call to a consolidated dispatch center, which NIPAS has a contract with, to page members.

That dispatch center gathers information on what type of callout is needed – Mobile Field Force or Emergency Service Team. In Highland Park, it was the Emergency Service Team.

Officers then are advised to report to the scene where a staging area already has been designated. Officers typically respond in personal vehicles – squads from their municipalities or NIPAS owned vehicles. NIPAS will deploy armored vehicles, such as BearCats, which are vehicles intended to drive directly into live shooting scenes; personnel transport vehicles (also armed); command vehicles, which are Winnebago-type mobile homes set up with all communication and video needed to run a command center; and numerous other personnel vehicles.

NIPAS also responds with medical personnel and numerous K-9 units. K-9s will be brought in as part of the overall callout. They are attack dogs, bomb-sniffing dogs and dogs capable of detecting weapons and gunshot residue.

If the situation is totally chaotic and on-scene commanders are deeply involved in the incident, NIPAS commanders will take up operations at the center and deploy their personnel to assignments. In Highland Park, NIPAS officers walked the downtown central business district clearing businesses, looking for the offender and making sure paradegoers, who ran into stores and businesses to hide, were found and escorted to safety.

Additionally, NIPAS Emergency Service Team officers were used to secure the offender and family homes where the offender may have fled. NIPAS was deployed to the scene where the offender was eventually apprehended on Route 41 near the Lake Forest border.

NIPAS has a competitive selection process, and its task force officers are highly trained. Members for these Emergency Service Teams are selected by both NIPAS command staff and the local chief. They go through an extensive selection process including application, medical, physical and psychological exams as well as physical fitness testing.

They also go through extensive firearms and de-escalation training. NIPAS officers train with local, state and federal agencies. They have been deployed in the past to help secure presidential visits and inaugurations, civil unrest and highly violent barricaded hostage situations.

It has been common practice, in most municipalities, that they must be part of a mutual aid organization as no suburban municipality can handle these types of situations on their own.

NIPAS takes in communities as small as McCook (about 400 residents) and as large as Evanston (about 74,000 residents). Both communities are NIPAS members and neither could handle these very complex, manpower intensive, complicated situations on their own.

Some municipalities’ leaders do not understand the importance of being a member of these multijurisdictional task forces. Most chiefs must justify their membership in NIPAS every year because as municipalities cut budgets, they look to cut these types of operations. Why is that?

Well, when a municipality has not had an incident (for example) in 10 years, many times the city manager or political leaders will ask the chief, “Why do we need to be involved when NIPAS has never responded to the community?” Well, the answer to that is clear. You never know when you will need them.

It is basically an insurance policy that if a tragic, horrific incident such as Highland Park were to happen in your community, you would have a professional, mutual aid organization to respond immediately and assist your municipality.

I would like to point out some glaring differences in the response in Uvalde, Texas, versus Highland Park. The Uvalde shooting was within a school building and the Highland Park shooting happened at an outside venue. In Highland Park, I saw every single police officer who was responding to the scene going toward it, assisting paradegoers out of the affected area and actively moving forward to engage the shooter if he was to be found.

Information was released every hour to the media and community. There was no jurisdictional fighting going on. Highland Park cooperated with all agencies, which led to the offender being arrested within eight hours.

This did not happen, from all accounts thus far, in Uvalde, where there has been widespread criticism of the police response. While the committee is still reviewing the after-action report there, when parents of the children at Robb Elementary School were screaming at the police to go into the school, you know there is a failure.

One final difference to point out it is that the Highland Park community expressed their gratitude to the police and the first responders for a job well done.

Tom Weitzel is the former chief of the Riverside Police Department. Follow him on Twitter at       @chiefweitzel.