By John Holler,
Wright County Communications Specialist
For those who saw footage of the shooting incident on Monday, Jan. 23 in Winsted, many would have thought the incident happened in Wright County given the number of Wright County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO) vehicles and personnel on the scene. It wasn’t a coincidence. When McLeod County asked for assistance after two officers had been shot and a standoff was underway, help was on the way from Wright County within minutes with more to follow within an hour.
“When that call went out for mutual aid, we had two or three squads and a sergeant heading down to Winsted immediately,” Wright County Sheriff Sean Deringer said. “That’s what we do. Others have done it for us and we do it for others.”
Part of the coordinated response was the byproduct of an idea WCSO Sergeant Josh Hinton had following the two-day standoff last July in St. Michael that brought numerous outside agencies into Wright County to assist in the apprehension of the suspect and a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
“After our St. Michael incident last summer that turned out to be a 48-hour standoff, we had a lot of SWAT teams up here that were assisting us with manpower and equipment,” Deringer said. “Josh Hinton came up with the idea of doing more to form these relationships ahead of something really bad happening. It’s only a matter of time that it’s going to hit every county in the state. It’s just a matter of when. Seeing as we are each other’s neighbors, it made sense to start getting to know these people on a first-name basis.”
Following the St. Michael incident, Hinton reached out to every team leader in other law enforcement agencies in the area and set up a meet-and-greet at the Sheriff’s Office Training Center in Maple Lake, asking all of them to send representatives. Team leaders from all the SWAT teams in the area attended and it began to forge the relationships between the agencies that made the deployment of Wright County personnel and equipment snap into action immediately to render mutual aid after the call for help in Winsted was issued.