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Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 379
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RE: April 2009: Falls Church, Virginia
Yeah, the .357 is fun. My agency has three we are getting rid of. We kept them for use in training as simunitions guns, but we finally bought new pistols to rpelace them. I get to buy one for 60% of what it cost the state originally. To give you an idea of the rise in prices, we bought them in 1984 and I think it will cost me about $117.
Unfortunately, I was not playing with toys (well, not kid's toys) in 1986. There were a string of bank robberies int eh Miami area in 1986. The suspects were very bloodthirsty, shooting people who had complied with their orders, apparently just for the hell of it. They were also suspects in a few other killings out in the woods around the city. It turns out the two suspects were also former soldiers and military police.
One afternoon, the FBI surveillance paid off and they found the two suspects driving around. When the FBI tried to stop them, a shootout ensued. During the shootout, two agents were killed and 5 more were wounded (if I remember the numbers correctly). Both suspects were also killed.
As I pointed out, the main lesson I took from the shootout was the mindset of the people involved. The lesson the FBI took from the shootout was that they needed better weapons. The first shot fired by the FBI, the one that would have killed the bad guy eventually, went through the arm and into the chest. If it had more power, it could have penetrated the lungs and heart (in theory).
So, the FBI started better testing of ammunition (which does help us) and looking for a replacement for the 9mm. They ended up choosing the 10mm round, which is a real powerhouse round. It was so powerful in normal loadings, that some agents could not control it. The FBI developed a reduced power loading that was controllable. Someone else realized that if they reduced the loading, the cartridge itself could be made smaller. The smaller cartridge also allowed for smaller guns. Thus, we now have the .40 S&W round. This round fits into 9mm frames and gives people with a smaller hand the easier pistol to grip.
Of course, all of this history lesson is from my memory, and I am old enough that it could be faulty. I could also have some of the details wrong.
But there are several other incidents you can research on combat. Just for police, there are so many famous incidents that date back to the 60's and early 70's that we still base our training on.
The Newhall shooting in California in 1970 was one of the first we study for tactics and how things work. There are a bunch more after that. We redid a lot of our tactics after Columbine, and we are reworking more after the North Hollywood shootout.
We also looked at the incidents for other things. A great book, if you can find it, is "Officer Down - Code Three". It is now out of print, but was an LAPD detective's (Pierce R. Brooks) examination of a couple hundred police line of duty deaths. He came up with the ten deadly errors that we make that result in police deaths. I wish this were still in print because I still use it as the basis for classes (Joseph Petrocelli wrote an article a few years ago asking why we still make these same mistakes).
Another case you should look at is the Constable Lunsford killing. He was a Northeast Texas constable working drug interdiction on the highway. It was one of the first (if not the first) death of an officer caught on a dashboard videocam recording. Looking at it from the comfort of classroom, we can see several mistakes he made, such as not understanding or catching some of the warning signs that he was about to be attacked. The video used to be on youtube, but I haven't looked if it still is.
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