WordsTwice made a comment in another post that I felt I should expand upon:

I don’t think that upgrading police firepower is going to make a damn bit of difference in fighting crime.

Firepower is the junction of volume of fire and the lethality of the weapon. Politicians frequently clamor about the police being "outgunned" or that they don't have the firepower to do the job. They make it sound as if the bullets of the police are just bouncing off of the bad guys.

There is no law-enforcement agency in the U.S. that issues a firearm in a caliber that is not capable of killing people, but after a high profile incident somebody always decides that the weapon system isn't up to the task. Following the Miami Shootout the FBI changed calibers, following North Hollywood LAPD adopted patrol rifles.

The changes in capacity and caliber of police weapons have not drastically improved the very low police hit rates. This begins to look like a technical solution to a training problem. You can't buy enough gun to correct poor marksmanship. The only way to improve the hit rate is provide officers more training of better quality.

Crime fighting is not a function of firepower. If it was the police would be shooting more criminals than they were arresting. The high profile incidents that seem to drive all of the changes are knee-jerk reactions to situations that the police weren't prepared for. Columbine was an example of confusing a 'hostage rescue' with the previously unknown 'active shooter.' I personally believe that we will begin seeing hostage situations be treated as active shooters in the future.

Because of the internal politics of police departments (or any institutions) new training is a tough sell. Anything that challenges the orthodoxy or the authority of the head firearms instructor is probably not going to be adopted. Simply being a good shooter is not enough to implement a training, sustainment, and improvement program. Bill Jordan and Jelly Bryce were phenomenal shooters but they didn't train anyone to duplicate their abilities.

In the military small arms doctrine is driven by the tier one units. As that knowledge trickles down it gets diluted at each passing step until it arrives at basic training and becomes dogma. That is not to say that the level of training isn't progressing, it is just progressing more slowly at the bottom than it is at the top. Where do the tier one guys learn from? Competition shooters and private schools. Unlike police departments they have people that were trained in implementing training, development, and sustainment programs who are also subject matter experts in their field and understand the context that the skills are to be used in.

Interestingly all of the tier one guys that I have ever worked with seem to favor safety and simplicity more than anything else. They do the basics, and they do them really fast with a lot of precision. They don't have some secret way of running their guns.