ID: Man looking for lost dog in shootout with police

[seamusTX]

This is too bizarre.

In Boise, Idaho, last night, a man looking for his lost dog tried to shoot his way into an apartment. The police showed up, as they are wont to do in such situations. The man reportedly had a handgun and a rifle. When he ignored police orders to drop the weapons, four officers fired 12 rounds. No one was hurt. The man surrendered.

He is in jail, charged with aggravated assault and discharging a firearm into an occupied dwelling. He was employed as a sergeant at the Idaho Department of Correction where he has worked for 12 years.

The four officers have been placed on administrative leave.

http://www.ktvb.com/news/localnews/stor ... 4106e.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

No word on the lost dog.

- Jim
[Edited to correct location]

[C-dub]

What were they placed on leave for? Did they need to investigate their handgun proficiency tests? Five people fired twelve shots and noone was hurt. WOW!

[HighVelocity]

Sounds like there might have been drugs or alcohol involved.

[seamusTX]

Five people fired twelve shots and noone was hurt. WOW!

I don't think you can understand that kind of chaotic situation until you have been there (which I haven't). Most small police departments can't afford the kind of training required.

- Jim

[LaserTex]

Five people fired twelve shots and noone was hurt. WOW!

I don't think you can understand that kind of chaotic situation until you have been there (which I haven't). Most small police departments can't afford the kind of training required.

- Jim

PERSONAL responsibility begins WHERE?

D

[seamusTX]

I don't understand the question.

- Jim

[dicion]

I don't understand the question.

- Jim

I think the answer he's looking for is 'With the Individual"...

As in, the cops should have the propensity to practice and train themselves at least somewhat if they're police officers.

[LaserTex]

Please don't take offense...if I were a Police Officer, I would take a personal responsibility to be proficient with my weapon. I understand the situation, but C-Dub questioned and the answer from seamusTX was lack of funding for the police force. Again, if I (stating an opinion from only my history) were a police officer, I would want to be as great with a firearm as I could possibly be...since I am putting myself in direct fire of the craziest (Mustn't Forget the 14 year old rule) from our society. I was not suggesting anything about the gun fight.

Please forgive if I offended.

D

[longtooth]

Distance was not stated in the article. I remember an incident when I was a reserve officer in Marrion County in 1983. Still revolver days & no ARs. We were called late night to a shots fired disturbance. several units arrived. All out & immediately saw the suspect running, carrying a rifle, at about 35yd. toward a trailer w/ numerous trees.

No shots were fored as he complied w/ orders to stop & put it down.
If he had fired I can see 12 rds & no hits before he took cover behind a tree.
Pistol shooting is not as easy as some think it is from watching Jerry Meculick (sp)

[seamusTX]

Please don't take offense...if I were a Police Officer, I would take a personal responsibility to be proficient with my weapon.

I'm not that easily offended.

Ideally, every police officer should be able to shoot, drive, run, wrestle, jump fences, etc., like a champion. Never having worked for a police agency, I don't know what the reality is except what I have heard and read over the years. Some forces send certain officers for advanced training. That kind of thing is expensive, and an officer who is at the low end of the pay scale may not be able to take a week off and pay for training that costs a good chunk of $10,000 when all the fees and travel are added up.

Where is Excaliber when you need him?

- Jim

[ELB]

Please don't take offense...if I were a Police Officer, I would take a personal responsibility to be proficient with my weapon.

I'm not that easily offended.

Ideally, every police officer should be able to shoot, drive, run, wrestle, jump fences, etc., like a champion. Never having worked for a police agency, I don't know what the reality is except what I have heard and read over the years. Some forces send certain officers for advanced training. That kind of thing is expensive, and an officer who is at the low end of the pay scale may not be able to take a week off and pay for training that costs a good chunk of $10,000 when all the fees and travel are added up.

Where is Excaliber when you need him?

- Jim

There is a gentleman in Victoria that has a very nice private shooting range, and he organizes formal and informal shooting classes and practice sessions, including the hosting of John Farnam every spring and fall. When he sets up one of these courses, he solicits donations from the attendees to fund one or two police officers from the Victoria PD and the Sheriff's office, so we usually have at least a couple cops in the class -- once had a DPS trooper. In addition we often have self-funded officers. Once I attended a non-Farnam class instructed by a Victoria PD officer, which also had a number of other county and city officers in it (was the first time I got to shoot a full-auto M-4. Fun!)

The policemen were universal in saying that in general cops don't practice near enough, and most of their brethren were not particularly good shots, nor very familiar with the tactical use of their weapons. The Victoria guy ran us through his department's handgun qualification course, and frankly it was trivial to pass -- way below what we had done in class. Another cop I know told me that when he took over his department's qualification tests, he finally got an officer in that had managed to dodge the annual (annual!) qualification course for years. The officer was unable to draw his revolver from his holster -- it wouldn't budget. They finally cut away the leather holster from around the gun and found it had worn through the leather to a steel reinforcing strip, and had rusted itself to the steel -- it had been that long since he had taken it out of his holster. One of the other cops at a course I attended said one his fellow officers came to an annual course some years before and was unable to get the trigger or cylinder on his revolver to budge -- just would not move. They eventually figured out that when he was in a divorce with his wife six months earlier, she had superglued his revolver and he hadn't noticed until qualification time.

All these cops were pretty much in agreement that keeping up one's proficiency is an individual initiative and responsibility, you can't just meet department standards and expect to be any good at it. And they said it was often the case that the department provided free ammo to practice with, just most cops would not take advantage of it. (Remember the case in NYC of the lieutenant in the police station who ran to her office to call 911 when a guy with a knife came into the station because she didn't have her gun with her? Think she practices much?)

Then there are the statistics that turn up in NYPD's annual SOP 9 report...*

On the positive side, I haven't kept a detailed count, but it seems to me that the San Antonio PD has had good results when shooting at BGs.

As for the officers in the OP, I have no idea how much their general proficiency and how much the general confusion contributed to the "12 shots no hits," but it is a at least a reasonable hypothesis that they might need more practice.

elb

*NYPD tracks hits and misses from their shootings... their hit rate runs around 30%

[DoubleJ]

yeah, cops don't have the benefit of a SafetyOfficer/Timekeeper standing to your side yelling "MISS!!!" when you fail to hit the target.
or a "spotter" for you long range folk.

besides, maybe they were 12 "warning shots..."

my question is, "What was the rifle for?" was he gonna shoot the dog after finding it?
methinks he believed someone stole his dog, and they lived in the aforementioned apartment. thus the armed entry.
musta really loved that dawg!

[Excaliber]

Please don't take offense...if I were a Police Officer, I would take a personal responsibility to be proficient with my weapon.

I'm not that easily offended.

Ideally, every police officer should be able to shoot, drive, run, wrestle, jump fences, etc., like a champion. Never having worked for a police agency, I don't know what the reality is except what I have heard and read over the years. Some forces send certain officers for advanced training. That kind of thing is expensive, and an officer who is at the low end of the pay scale may not be able to take a week off and pay for training that costs a good chunk of $10,000 when all the fees and travel are added up.

Where is Excaliber when you need him?

- Jim

Since Jim won't let me off without saying something here, I'll try to provide a bit of perspective on how something like the performance described in this post could happen and how much effort it takes to do better.

Length warning: This post is 'way long, but I hope those who take the time to wade through it will judge it to be worthwhile.

Back when I started police work (1974), "qualifications" consisted of an annual run through of the PPC (police pistol course). After several warmup rounds, a scoring round was held and everyone who passed was done. Those who didn't pass fired another round.... and another....etc. until they passed. Very few officers out of the 200 man agency did any shooting outside the required 1 day per year. Proficiency levels could charitably be described as dismal, but because shootouts were relatively few and far between in those days, the administration was OK with this because costs were kept low and the state requirements for qualifications were being met.

You can get away with lots of things on good days....until you have a bad day. On one such day in the mid '70's, members of a sizable terrorist group committed a kidnapping in our city. One subject engaged several teams of both uniformed and plainclothes officers in a running gun battle. He was wounded in the arm and captured. A few days later he overpowered his corrections guard in the county hospital and was about to execute him when he was engaged and killed in a close range gun battle by one of our off duty officers who happened to be nearby visiting an ill family member, but that's another story.

The shooting incident investigation on the first situation revealed that officers had fired somewhere north of 80 rounds of .38SPC RNL to achieve that single hit on the intended target. Needless to say, each of those other rounds also scored a hit - on an unintended target. The department bought a lot of windows, car body work, and even some refrigerators to make the local property owners whole. While the local news outlets were relatively charitable (because only the bad guy got hurt), it was not a glorious moment for the agency and firearms training was identified as an area that could use some improvement. Courses of fire and tactical exercises were upgraded somewhat, but they were still a long ways from street realistic and everyone still passed.

I was assigned to manage the firearms training program in the early 90's, one year after the city's transition to 9mm semiutos. We were seeing an increasingly aggressive use of firearms in crimes, and officers were engaging suspects more frequently. Inadequate training and increasing need for the skill is a recipe for a real bad day. I proposed a radical rewrite of our firearms training program to include the psychophysiological effects of life threatening stress, tactical movement, control of light, cover and concealment, a qualification target change from the B26 to one very similar to the current FBI Q target, and a complete redesign of the qualification course that emphasized accurate close quarters shooting from the holster in short time frames (3 shots / 2 seconds at the first stage). I also instituted a program of secondary annual training during which officers were pulled from the street and put through the qualification course in full street gear for that day, whatever that was - winter coats, rain gear, whatever - with no warmups. The first round counted for score - just like on the street.

I reported qualification failures as failures - and the few officers who thought it too much trouble to maintain basic proficiency were temporarily removed from street duty,learned that they could lose their jobs if they couldn't meet basic standards, and received individualized instruction to give them the opportunity to enhance their skills. Everyone got the message.

Many cops don't mind not being proficient with firearms, but they hate being shown to be less than proficient in front of others. The initial reaction from the troops was weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth and everything short of death threats. What I asked them to do wasn't fair. They protested that they couldn't be expected to draw their guns and fire in such short time frames - and I showed them the time analysis of incidents of firefights where the time frames were what I allowed and less. They argued it was too hard to get the gun out of the holster and shoot accurately. I asked them where they kept their guns most of the time on the street. I then asked them whether they would like to find the kinks in their weapon systems and techniques on the range where we could analyze and fix them, or during their final exam on the street - the one with no do-overs.

When they thought that one over and realized everybody was getting embarrassed by guns that didn't come out of holsters, or holsters and belts that came with the gun when it was drawn, fumbled reloads, missed shots at close range, etc., they settled down and focused on analyzing how performance failures happened and overcoming them.

Firearms training became a time to focus on improving skills, and it became highly competitive with the addition of exercises that included man on man drills that incorporated critical skills but were performed in front of the rest of the class. The peer pressure of hooting and hollering when someone messed up was enough to inspire him to go back and relearn the skill to the point where he wouldn't embarrass himself. Proficiency and safety both increased exponentially, and officer confidence jumped to match the new competence. During my remaining time with the agency we had no negligent discharges, no bad guys who should have been shot who weren't, and nobody who shouldn't have been shot who was.

This was an expensive and resource intensive effort that required major support from the department's administration. Small agencies seldom have the internal resources to design and administer a program of this type without joining forces with other agencies to pool training resources and facilities. This is a reality, but not an excuse. It takes a great deal of creativity and dedication to reach and maintain a consistent agency proficiency level that lets an aware agency head sleep at night.

Thoughtful and dedicated officers will supplement their agency supplied training with whatever they believe they need to perform successfully on the street. Many spend a great deal of time, money, and effort doing so. Just like in other professions, there are others who look upon police work as just another job and see it as the agency's problem to give them what they need. They invest as little effort as possible, and see even an annual trip to the range as a chore they'd rather skip. In an impressive demonstration of how resistant ignorance can be to education, no amount of reasoning can move them to the point where they can think through the potential personal consequences of this position, because they think all those bad things we tell them about will never happen to them.

There is no question that it is the clear responsibility of the agency to provide firearms training and qualification programs that will enable their officers to successfully manage the situations they can reasonably expect to encounter on the street. That being said, if the agency fails to do so and that failure cascades to an incident failure in the street, the officer is often the one who pays the immediate and heaviest price, wth the agency and its administration not far behind when clear neglect of a duty to train can be shown.

[joe817]

Excellent post Excaliber. Thank you.

[DoubleJ]

worthwhile.