Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

There was a somewhat embarrassing story this week on Ye Olde Cop Web, once again featuring the can’t-catch-a-break Los Angeles Police Department. In this case, it documented that 43% of LAPD officers shot in the line of duty were shot by LAPD officers. Oops.

Those charitable folks at the LA Times take great joy in demonizing the cops that stand between them and some truly bad people (What’s the difference between a pro-police reporter and an anti-police reporter? The pro-police reporter got mugged.) , and what could be more fun than pointing out that their brave centurions are only a bit more skilled with their sidearms than was Barney Fife?

What the Times doesn’t know, or didn’t bother to tell everyone, is that this problem is hardly limited to the LAPD. Across the country, cops have a solid record of not being able to hit what they shoot at.

In 1992, the Police Executive Research Forum published an extensive study by William A. Geller and Michael Scott, titled Deadly Force: What We Know. You can get your own copy for $20, and if you have any interest in this area, I recommend you do. It’s 656 pages long, so I don’t recommend you carry it in your patrol war bag. But it does serve as an excellent reference (albeit a little dated now) on the aspects of officer-involved shootings.

The “hit rates” cited there are sobering. Here are few highlights detailing the number of bullets fired by cops that hit what they were intended to:

• Miami- Dade, FL, 1980s: 16%
• Portland, OR, 1988-1992: 60%
• Chicago, IL, 1970s: 14%
• NYC Transit PD, 1988-1990: 32%
• Dallas, TX, 1980s: 43%
• Memphis, TN, 1991: 25%

Way to go, Portland. Maybe it’s all that clean air. But when you’re dealing with something that has such a critical outcome, don’t you want to shoot (sorry about that) for something better than 60%?

I don’t think the problem is with the cops, and it’s certainly not with the guns. I think the problem is with the training.

Police officers in basic training get, at best, a few weeks of schooling in firearms. When I went through the police academy in Nevada in 1979, I got five days at the range, and fired maybe 300 rounds. This included shotgun training and qualification. The only firearms I had ever handled were Army-issued, and revolvers and shotguns were not included.

Because ammunition was so expensive, all we used in our .357 Magnum revolvers was relatively low-powered .38 Special wadcutter ammo. The “duty load” was Remington 125 Grain Semi-Jacketed Hollow Point, but we didn’t see any of those until the day we graduated, and received 18 cartridges (six in the gun, twelve more in belt-carried speedloaders) in an envelope. One of my more unfortunate classmates had an unintended discharge of his firearm shortly after graduating. Fortunately, nothing was injured other than his pride, but he almost dropped the gun because he thought it had exploded. The duty rounds packed a considerably greater wallop than the wadcutters. Try to imagine that scenario in a situation where someone was likely to shoot back.

For most of my career, we qualified with our sidearms every other month, once a year with the shotguns (which all of us carried on patrol). Later on, budgetary pressures reduced that to four times a year. Mind you, this was qualification, not training. You would drive out to the range, shoot the course of 50 wadcutter rounds, and call it a day. Our rangemaster created courses of fire that were as challenging as he could manage, with some running between targets and moving targets, but there was only so much he could do.

If someone failed to qualify, the failure was handled in much the same way as it is in other police agencies: he or she was sent through the course again (and again), until they passed. I never heard of anyone being taken off duty status because they were unable to qualify with a sidearm.

And all this was still hugely superior to the practice in some agencies, where officers qualified only once a year, and did so by firing while standing at twenty-five, ten, and seven-yard distances from their targets, like they were at the county fair. Even though no officer-involved shooting in memory has ever taken that form, that is how it was and still continues to be done in many locales.

In contrast, the English police, who rarely carry and use firearms, take this far more seriously. Officers are not even eligible to apply to be trained in firearms for several years after their initial appointment. The screening to be selected to attend the training sets the bar high. The basic firearms course takes roughly a month, and the firearms-qualified officers train for one full day or more every month thereafter. Even with all of that, most firearms-qualified officers man armed response vehicles (two officers to a car) that have the weapons locked in a special compartment. They can only bring the weapons out when directed by a supervisor of adequate rank, or on their own in extremely grave circumstances.

Of course, if one of them shoots you, there is an excellent chance that you are going to stay shot. They don’t seem to be plagued with the accidental discharges and stray bullets that U.S. police experience.

Training is always expensive. Firearms training is especially expensive. Law enforcement administrators frequently decide that they can’t afford to train. But when the risk of your cops being shot by a bad guy is almost equal to that of being shot by themselves or another officer, to say nothing of the likelihood that an innocent citizen is going to get in the way of a police bullet, can you afford not to train?