First I should begin by saying I have not seen the orginal SOP9 document (if anyone has a link to it I would like to get a hold of it.) So my comments are based on the analysis done here NYPD SOP 9 - Analysis of Police Combat

The bulk of this article is an endorsement of point shooting. Much of the SOP9 material here is used as a justification of point shooting. I am not a point shooting advocate, and I don't see any evidence here to change my mind.

We would like to see granular data that gives a picture of the hit rate for officers using a crouch in low light conditions at some particular distance. What we have instead is a mixture of point shooting and aimed fire under a range of different conditions.

The internet is full of "common sense" tips, regurgitating the same old information with out any real analysis or insight. I suspect that many of these tips originated from police departments who didn't want to go on record as endorsing active resistance or private citizens being armed. As these tips continue to make the rounds they become more like dogma, and less like doctrine.

People have a number of tricks for hanging on to their cash, ranging from the conventional wisdom of carrying only small amounts, hiding it on your person, and carrying false wallets. It is worth analyzing all of these gimmicks and looking at what makes sense and what doesn't.

Any cash hiding strategy will simply limit the amount of loss in the best case scenario. If the armed mugger demands your wallet and you keep all of your large bills in your sock then hopefully the mugger is satisfied with the contents of the wallet and goes away. If the mugger is frustrated at the amount in the wallet or isn't convinced that you don't have any more money you are still in the middle of an armed robbery.

From Hell In A Handbasket: Reaching Out

The maximum engagement distance for a handgun is the greatest distance at which you can still get good hits reliably. It might be that a self-defense encounter beyond 50 feet is pretty rare, but I would argue that if you are getting shot at from 60 feet you still have a problem. Rare doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and statistics don't apply to the individual. For many of the victims of Charles Whitman, 100% of their lethal force self-defense situations occurred (and ended) at distances greater than 50 feet.

75% of police officers killed with firearms are killed at a distance of ten feet or less.

Police Officers have to close to contact distance in order to effect arrests, and they need to be at conversational distances to interview subjects. A lot of police work happens within this distance, so it is not too surprising that high number of losing gunfights also occur at this distance.

For many people home defense begins and ends with passive security measures. Passive deterrents certainly serve a function, but it should not be your entire defensive plan.

I have observed a lot of discussions about statistics for the average gunfight. While these discussions might prove interesting, when they start to drive training without some proper analysis we run into some problems. It is important to remember that all of the statistics come from law enforcement encounters.

There is a lot of confusion about the Tueller drill and what we can learn from it. Over the years the drill has turned into the '21 foot rule' and some police policy has been driven by incorrect interpretations of it.

Simply put, most people can cover about 14 feet of distance per second. A police officer can typically draw and fire one shot in 1.5 seconds. This means that a threat with contact distance weapon 21 feet away can close the distance, and strike the officer at the same time as the shot breaks assuming that the attacker and the police officer (the defender) are reacting to the same stimulus (usually a buzzer or a whistle.)

There are a lot of flaws with what is modeled by this simple example. The error is that the attacker and the defender do not react to the same stimulus. The attacker initiates whenever he feels like it, and the defender has to recognize the hostile action and react.