Police often lack critical gun skills, many experts say

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Police often lack critical gun skills, many experts say http://www.nola.com/crime/t-p/index.ssf?/crimestory/copguns10.html 09/10/01By Jim Nesbitt Newhouse News Service She ripped the semi-automatic out of his holster, stuck it in his face, and pulled the trigger -- and Wayne Dobbs knew there was only one reason his life didn't end in a flash of brain, bone and blood:The mentally unbalanced woman had failed to flick off the thumb safety of Dobbs' cocked-and-locked .45-caliber pistol. On that New Year's Eve 20 years ago, this not-always-reliable mechanical device was the difference between being dead and being scared to death.Staring down the barrel of his own gun, Dobbs, then a 23-year-old patrol officer with a suburban Dallas police department, had this thought: "This is it. I'm finished."After he wrestled the gun away and had the woman safely handcuffed, he had another thought: "I'm not nearly as squared away on this as I need to be."The harrowing moment transformed Dobbs into a relative rarity in American law enforcement, a true believer in the notion that he needed training beyond the police academy and the bloodless calm of the gun range.Problems under pressureWhile almost every American cop wears a gun every day and many can hit a stationary target with admirable accuracy, academics and other experts say that few are masterful at handling a gun under pressure. They don't do enough realistic training to prepare themselves."Most officers don't get decision-making training," said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina who has studied police shooting incidents. "It's not enough to be able to hit the target. You have to be able to make decisions and shoot accurately under stress."Consider this: More than two-thirds of the shots police fire in a gunfight fail to hit their intended target, according to a recent study by the Police Executive Research Forum, a law-enforcement think tank based in Washington.In a particularly graphic incident a decade ago, Dallas police facing a shotgun-wielding man in a residential neighborhood fired 112 rounds to kill him. They hit him only five times. Officers had to go door to door to make sure residents weren't harmed by the other 107 shots.Cops such as Dobbs are the so-called "5-percenters," the experts say: motivated officers who take the issue of deadly force and tactics so seriously that they routinely seek outside courses to sharpen their gun skills and ability to deal with a crisis. Driven by a brush with death or a higher sense of duty and responsibility, they search for a regimen that goes beyond the annual requirements of most police agencies.Firefights not that commonThere are a bevy of reasons why so few cops are truly competent gun users, experts say, from the infrequency of firefights and the expense of more realistic training to a macho law-enforcement culture that mistakes bluster for ability.Contrary to the plots of movies and TV cop shows, police shootings aren't a regular part of the action.A March 2001 study by the U.S. Department of Justice found that police killed an average of 373 felons a year between 1976 and 1998, about two people per 1 million residents older than 13. Guns were the weapons used in 99 percent of cases over the years studied.Meanwhile, the relative number of officers killed by criminals has declined. The 2001 Justice Department study found that while one in 4,000 cops were murdered in 1978, by 1998, the rate had dropped to one in 11,000. An average of 79 officers were killed annually during the years studied, and guns were the weapons used in an average of 92 percent of cases.Experts peg these trends on several factors, including stricter rules on police use of deadly force, use of body armor by patrol officers and the decline in violent crime that accompanied the economic boom of the 1990s.Another contributor, they say, is that many police agencies now incorporate some form of shoot/don't shoot realism into their courses.Even this training, however, falls short of what's needed to hone an officer's skills."Not one in 10 really knows how to handle a weapon in a stressful situation," said Steve Moses, an instructor in the Dallas branch of Options for Personal Security, a firearms and self-defense training firm headquartered in Sebring, Fla. "They don't know how to do a good draw. They don't know how to hold a gun in a safe fashion."These officers think when a firefight comes, they'll rise to the occasion," Moses said. "It's not that easy."