The reason they are useful for the police is because they are an effective low level of force. If you make the case that they are too dangerous for regular people to use then doesn’t that make them a higher level of force? I can see the defense attorney already:

“…the police then used a weapon on my client that is so dangerous, private citizens aren’t even allowed to possess it…”

I think it is a waste of time and resources for the police to run a ballistics test on any firearm that happens to come into their possession, especially from situations that are not crime scenes.

From the article it seems to me that the police have a “policy” that is at odds with the law.

A couple of quick thoughts:
The police don’t normally get as much training as the show says they do. Typically, basic law enforcement training is 720 class hours. This includes all of the law, driving, procedures, and firearms training. In my state the firearms portion of this is about 40 hours. I don’t know that they teach some zen-like control of heart rate.

Active Shooters don’t tend to be trained firearms instructors. While some active shooters have gone to the range and practiced with their guns, none of the recent ones that I know of were trained shooters.

Armed students wouldn’t always sit in the same seat in the classroom. From the video it appears that the defensive shooter was always seated in the same spot in the classroom.

There is no guarantee that there is only one defensive shooter. In the general population of my state roughly one person in twenty has a concealed weapons permit. I can’t speak to what is a normal class size, but I don’t recall many courses where we only had roughly eighteen or twenty students.

Some people in the classroom might have more training than law enforcement. There are a lot of students and teachers in colleges right now that have recent combat experience. For many of these people the active shooter scenario wouldn’t even be the second gunfight they were ever in.

Other options might include outsourcing policing to private companies. Private contractors could easily fill the gaps or even replace the entire department. Some gated communities already have what amounts to a private police force, but this only works because the community is actually private property and their “police” are technically security guards. There are numerous reasons why privatizing law enforcement duties would not be a wildly popular option, one of which, as MG pointed out, is that there would be problems with the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

My proposal is hardly original or new but I think it could help address several problems simultaneously. I suggest rejuvenating the office of Sheriff and revive the idea of deputizing responsible, capable citizens under Posse Comitatus. This would be the ultimate form of “community policing”. It would encourage active participation in the community, not only for deterring regular street crime, but also in an emergency like an active shooter situation or in a civil defense (natural disaster, nuclear attack, etc.) context as well. The office of Sheriff is an ancient one that predates modern policing and has many advantages. In the United States, it is an elected office, which adds to its appeal as far as accountability to the community.

I envision it as something like a vetted, trained neighborhood watch program on steroids, supervised and trained by the local Sheriff’s Office. It could organized in a similar fashion to the military reserves:

• an initial training program
• a small number of full time cadre
• a much larger number of part-time, on-call members
• mandatory monthly duty and continuing education/refresher training
• a comprehensive annual training seminar
• the duty (and vested interest) to respond to emergencies

This program could work really well when you consider that in any given community, there are often retired or discharged people with law enforcement, firefighter/paramedic and/or military backgrounds that already have a lot of relevant training and experience. This could create a much larger pool of people to call on in the event that an officer is sick, injured, suspended, terminated, killed in the line of duty, etc. Some of the part timers may have relevant areas of expertise and could be a great help in training academies or seminars and so forth.

In the event of an unusual emergency that is beyond the capabilities of a small number of full time deputies (active shooter, escaped convict, search and rescue, AMBER Alert, etc) a large group of trained volunteers could be quickly mobilized to address the problem. When the problem is resolved, the volunteers go back to their normal lives. This is not only more economical and more responsive to specific problems, but it also builds a sense of camaraderie and reinforces bonds of community.

The overall goals of such a program would be to reduce the burden on law enforcement, make it more accountable and encourage the citizenry to take an active interest in the safety of their own communities instead of abrogating those responsibilities to some faceless agency.

Even Barack Obama recognizes the need for a different approach:

“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.”

While I am not sure it would be a “… just as strong, just as well funded” as the military, it could be a significant improvement over the current situation in several ways. I don’t believe that merely throwing money at a problem leads to successful solutions. This idea would not require a lot of money to implement, to the contrary, I think it would make maximum use of already existing resources.

There are indications that Americans would embrace a program like this. People are already doing citizen patrols.

Against his wife’s loud protestations, the young steamfitter joined a dozen other neighborhood men and set up the Rosewood night patrol.

Armed with nothing but flashlights and cellphones, the group followed suspicious cars and even set up an impromptu sting when a neighbor left town and forgot to close his garage door. They called in police to arrest the suspects after a brief chase.

High foreclosure rates, a spike in brazen break-ins, and slashed police budgets are causing turmoil in America’s transitioning urban communities, auguring what Atlanta anticrime activist Larry Ely calls an “urban war.”

Why not organize, train and deputize them? No doubt many people, who are quite comfortable with the idea of an almighty state and a dependent, helpless citizenry squealing for the federal government to “do something!”, will decry this idea as promoting “vigilante” justice. I am sure they will invoke the images of Billy the Kid, the Lincoln County Wars and the Lattimer Massacre. I would counter by pointing out that significant numbers of innocent people are already being killed by allegedly professional SWAT teams. Many people made dire predictions of rampant duels and blood running in the streets if concealed weapons permits became commonplace and that has proven to be completely inaccurate.

Obviously, there could be nepotism, corruption and incompetence in a program like this, but I don’t think that those problems would be any worse than in any currently existing situations, and actually, they would probably be less frequent. Widespread, active citizen involvement in the program makes it more likely that a whistleblower could draw attention to problems within the office. Also, I think that active involvement by local citizens makes it less likely that deputies will kick down the wrong door when serving a warrant, unlike what we see today with SWAT teams frequently raiding the wrong home (and often killing innocent people in the process). After all, many of them could be your friends and neighbors.

(HT: Walls of the City )

The use of force chart is useful for private citizens to understand how the police (and the courts) tend to view a particular tool or technique. I make a lot of references to the use of force and forgot I hadn’t posted this graphic. There are a few inconsistencies: the order of pepper spray, taser, and arrest control/pain compliance techniques tends to vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. An individual police departments use of force policy will dictate where these items actually fall on “their” version of the chart.

I remain unconvinced that “disorder” is a cause of crime. It seems to me that the increased police presence and attention to particular high crime areas are probably the main factors in the reduction in calls to the police. If the criminals see an increased police presence in an area I am betting that they change areas rather than permanently stopping the commission of crime. I am all for cleaning up a neighborhood, but I am not expecting that alone to reduce illegal activity.

The article doesn’t explain how the police chief is going to go about accomplishing this, and I am sure the devil is in the details:

“It’s going to take a whole lot of people to help us do that,” said Demings, who pledged to work closely with the public, prosecutors and legislators for stricter gun control.

“It’s not about keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens who have every right to possess them,” she said. “Our initiative will focus on the people who are not supposed to have them.”

The most interesting bit of the article is here:

Data released Wednesday show the male murder victims and suspects share a common background of repeated arrests without imprisonment.

At least 95 percent of the victims and suspects had criminal histories. One-third of the suspects had been arrested at least 20 times. One quarter of the victims had been arrested at least 10 times. And about 40 percent of the suspects and victims had been busted for dealing drugs.

If 95% of the people getting murdered are actually criminals then taking guns away from them has a very good chance of increasing other types of crime. The sample size is pretty small here, but it would be interesting to know how many people killed by firearms (other than suicides) are in fact criminals.

This is a very good article that illustrates why SWAT raids are such a poor general-purpose, law enforcement tactic.

A Denver Post investigation found that in 80 percent of no-knock raids conducted in Denver in 1999, police assertions that there would be weapons in the targeted home turned out to be wrong. A separate investigation by the Rocky Mountain News found that of the 146 no-knock warrants served in Denver in 1999, just 49 resulted in criminal charges, and only two resulted in prison time.

A 30% arrest rate is very poor performance for such a dangerous, high-risk, tactic. I have to wonder about the financial costs associated with the other 70% of the raids: wasted hours in training, planning and execution, lawsuits and settlements, medical costs for injuries, etc. Those costs could get pretty high for operations that don’t even produce arrests, let alone convictions.

Particularly telling is the mindset expressed here:

Lima police apparently aren’t as concerned. When told of the Lima News investigation, police spokesman Kevin Martin said, “That means 68 percent of the time, we’re getting guns or drugs off the street. We’re not looking at it as a win-loss record like a football team does.”

Clearly this police spokesman doesn’t pay attention to the metrics, and doesn’t understand the tactics employed. One of the major arguments for using Dynamic Entries against drug dealers is to prevent them from destroying evidence. If SWAT raids are turning up drugs but not convictions then ultimately the destruction of evidence (which also gets drugs off the streets) is the best outcome they normally achieve. If arrests and convictions are not the ultimate goal then giving the criminals ample opportunity to flush or destroy the drugs would be just as effective and far less dangerous for all involved.