When a man with a history of domestic violence shot his ex-girlfriend and newborn son Sunday inside a Selma church, police responded and quickly caught the suspect.

This week, Selma Police Department officers have participated in training aimed at preventing such incidents in the future.

“We try to reduce domestic violence assaults by giving officers the skills and the abilities to identify danger signs and to help them do a better job of investigating domestic violence calls, said Steve Searcy, law enforcement training coordinator for the Alabama Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “It’s important for the victim, and it’s surely important for the law enforcement officers.”

Searcy said over the two-day course officers took part in multiple activities including hands-on training exercises.

“It’s gone really well,” Searcy said of the officers. “They’re learning, and they’re learning from each other because all of them have been on domestic violence calls before. They have knowledge that they can share.”

Searcy said his purpose in the seminar is to help the officers recognize domestic violence from the get-go.

“Domestic violence cases have a beginning, they have a middle and they can have a very catastrophic end,” Searcy said. “So we want to get in on it on the front end, we want to give them the tools and the ability to identify one of those type cases.”

Searcy said officers need to know what questions to ask to make sure people are say or if they need to get to a shelter.

“The best advice is if they respond to a domestic violence call, that they have a check off list,” Searcy said. “The single greatest thing you can do, is once you identify a high risk victim, is to get them into shelter such as SABRA Sanctuary.”

Searcy said getting the victim to the shelter is critical and is something that friends and family can also recommend to a victim.

“They need to have somewhere to go. They need to have somebody advocating for them, and that’s the SABRA Sanctuary,” Searcy said. “Everybody plays a part in this, and it all has to fit together, but the single greatest thing you can do for a victim to keep them alive one more day is to get them into shelter.”