Students and professors could hear gunfire, screaming and other commotion yesterday, but unlike a situation in 1996, there was no cause for concern.

The San Diego State Police Department conducted a training exercise for the university Cashiers Office located in Student Services West to give employees mock exposure to some of the situations that could occur during a robbery.

“(Our training exercise) gave them various options for response, both in personal safety and for their work,” SDSUPD Cpt. Lamine Secka said. “There is no cookie-cutter response for a robbery.”

Secka said there has not been a serious incident at SDSU since a shooting that occurred in the engineering building in ’96, but that this preventative measure is one of many ongoing services the SDSUPD provides on campus.

“We also have a program called ALICE which trains civilians and non-personnel how to respond to violent intruder or active shooter situations,” Secka said.

ALICE stands for Alert Lockdown Inform Counter and Escape, and is a more generic program that teaches response in a more general situation and has been done for more than 700 people on campus.

In order to disrupt classes as minimally as possible, yesterday’s exercises were publicized with fliers around Student Services, and classrooms in session were warned before the exercises started.

Training sessions like this one happen periodically. “We do them a couple times a year for the staff because they are essentially a bank,” Secka said.