Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire 2 cops, 50 shots, zero solid hits.

I work at a range and cops, as a group, are by far the cheapest customers we have. They aren't underpaid, either. They even b*tch about the price of Blue Label Glocks.

No, it is not BS. Range days take quite a bit to put together in terms of manhours, cost and logistics. And that's certainly not the only discipline officers need continuing education/training in. Arguably not even the most important. We expect cops to be really good at a lot of very different things. To get really good takes a LOT of training time. Training takes time and it takes money. Remember that for each officer in training another officer has to cover their beat.

I shot competitively for 35 years, and LEO never impressed me as being particularly proficient under the stress of competition, always made me wonder how they performed under "real" stress? One exception I will add, United States Border Patrol, always a great group of dedicated, and very skilled at arms men and women, who always were near the top of the heap in both local, state and national competition.

Easy to sit back and judge while watching a video seated comfortably in your living room. Adrenaline dump causes a loss of manual dexterity. I've seen it happen more than a few times. Much easier to punch paper targets because they're not returning fire.

Ron

You are an attorney, yes?
Did you get paid by others to perfect your choice of occupation?

Buck fever, and some folks think that the cops can protect them.

$ and coverage?

No it doesnt.

I used to train a lot and I am not an LEO.

I read a lot, and I am not a librarian.

I got better at parallel parking, and I am not a cab driver.

I can make a wicked good moscow mule, and I am not a bartender.

I am getting better at the guitar and I am not a professional musician.

The officer in front is lucky he didn't catch a round or two from his partner.

Shooting through the windshield?

^ this

It's really no different than being out of shape. I'm not sayin you have to be in A+ shape, but look how many overweight cops you see. Don't they realize that they might have to chase or wrestle with a criminal? They might end up in 2nd place and then we'll have another dead cop.

Or the SUV.

No I am not an attorney.

OK.

Did you get payed by others to perfect your choice of occupation?

We all grew up on TV cowboys and cops, watching the sheriff kill 26 bad guys a block away with 26 bullets from a handgun from the hip. TV is a dream world but too many think that's the way it's done. At least they usually show cops using autos bringing the gun up to see the sights but they never show the hundreds of hours and thousands of rounds of practice it takes to be even remotely that good.

Spoken like someone out of touch with the realities of managing a police force.

Where would you have an officer practice hand to hand combat alone? Where should an officer practice high speed driving alone? Where should an officer practice tactical stops alone? Where should an officer practice deescalation alone. In my area I don't have a place where I can fire a practical pistol course involving moving and shooting. I'd venture a guess that most officers don't. That's just scratching the surface of the arenas in which I see officers roundly criticized on forums. There's so much more.

If you think you have the formula for cost effective comprehensive officer training, by all means start a consulting firm, because it is a problem that has confounded enforcement agencies since the beginning of time.

This would make a good training video of what NOT to do. Pistol fight at rifle range.

Why can't the officers use the training facilities provided for them on their own time?

Were you payed by others to perfect your choice of occupation?

I'm glad both cops are OK. A situation like this is very rare for most cops and often not one that they would have trained for or practiced on a lot. Like other people have said, firearms training is only one of the areas where cops have to maintain proficiency in an annual or biannual training cycle. A lot of the training is mandated by state laws which dictates specific training and further depletes any training budget.

A Patrol Rifle (usually an AR-15) from a lot further back would have been a safer approach for both cops. Since many departments don't deploy rifles, an officer is left with either a shotgun (not always deployed either) or his duty pistol. Range training with live ammo teaches you marksmanship, some elementary shooting while moving and minimal tactics. At the range, an officer can drive up to the same distance as this suspect and practice getting out of his patrol car and shooting at the target (simulated bad guy). Very few police ranges have targeting systems that can move sideways or even closer to the officer to simulate a suspect approaching them. So range training is primarily geared towards marksmanship, drawing, reloading, clearing malfunctions and other similar functions.

Tactical training with Simunitions or some similar system would have given these officers a chance to learn how to handle situations like this one while communicating to each other, taking lead and cover positions, forcing a suspect to react to one officer while the other has the drop on the suspect, etc. That does take time and money but officer proficiency in tactical situations like this goes way up. All officers in any given departments or even departments in a region are on the same page and know what each officer is supposed to do in a situation like this and learn how to communicate with each other and shift their tactics in response to suspect movements, etc. A lot (but not all) departments have this kind of training for active shooter (School shooter) training but it can be expanded for situations like this. It's impossible to devise enough scenarios to cover every single situation that has happened like this but after going through a dozen or 2 of these situations during training, your skill levels go way up and you are far better prepared to think, communicate with your partner and act in situations like this.

I am retired Coast Guard. I am a human. Nobody has any right to expect perfection out of me. They have every right to expect excellence, and I strived to deliver that. Our organization was intensely focused on training and our operational tempo allowed for it. Even with that, as a multi-mission agency, we couldn't deliver excellence in every conceivable arena with every member of our organization.

If you enter in to the discussion with the understanding of the pool of employees you have, then go from there, it helps. I live in NOLA. What kind of pool of candidates do you think are standing in line to do police work here for $45,000 per year.

https://youtu.be/yollZf8NlbM

https://youtu.be/MhoP161gpWM


https://youtu.be/qt9L5bXfC8w


Here's some better shootin for all you Billy badarses that can do better.