Fatal beauty: Snipers take aim at donated mannequins

Heads up.

To help snipers with the Walker County Sheriff’s Office hone their skills, Georgia Northwestern Technical College is donating a batch of mannequin heads to the department.

The heads have been used by cosmetology students at the college to practice hair cuts, colors and styles.

Now they’ll be used for target practice.

Snipers with the department’s special operations team will practice with the heads during their monthly drills, deputy and team member William Davis said Tuesday. The next session is set for Friday, he said.

“We set up different scenarios,” he said. “We could use the heads as a hostage situation where you’ve got one head in front of another ... or if you have a barricaded subject inside a house.”

“The more you practice and the more you put yourself in that situation, the calmer you’ll be when that happens,” he said. “When your motor senses get to a certain point, you’ll always fall back to training.”

Deputies train at Walker State Prison or in other open areas, such as forestry service land, Deputy Davis said. Although they practice shooting from long distances, snipers also play a role in maintaining the situation, he said.

“We can sit far away and be unseen and feed intelligence” to other deputies, he said. “It is not always about making a shot.”

Tammy Livingstone, instructor and director of the cosmetology program at Northwestern Tech, said this is the first time her program has donated to the sheriff’s office. In the past, she has given the mannequins to area churches or thrown them away, she said.

“Why not recycle?” she asked.

The donated heads have benefits over the team’s usual paper targets, Deputy Davis said.

“(With the mannequins) we can put ourselves in a realistic situation,” he said.