Blue Sheepdog» Podcasts

BlueSheepdog Podcast #32

Richard — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:55:09 +0000

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Just a quick podcast today to let everyone know where I’ve been and where we are going. As they say “life happens!”

Getting Hired as a Cop: BlueSheepdog Podcast #31

Richard — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:23:33 +0000

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I’ve had a lot of requests lately for information on getting hired. So, today’s episode deals with the minimums you need to get hired as a police officer: minimum age, education, driving record, drug use, criminal history, etc.

A couple of notes:

This episode only covers the bare minimums – I will have other episodes and articles on some more in-depth aspects of getting hired. Actually, I may do a video series…

I will not be doing “getting hired” episodes every week. I will still be focusing on officer safety and training topics for most podcasts.

Officer Down – BlueSheepdog Podcast #30

Richard — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:00:01 +0000

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Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Deputy Lyonelle DeVeaux responded to a 9-1-1 hangup call in an apartment complex on a Friday evening. Shortly after arriving, she had been shot three times and was fighting for her life.

One of the scariest things any of us can respond to is an officer down call. In this podcast, I talk about one particular incident and what we can learn from it.

Resources

ITS ETA Kit: Perfect for the patrol officer’s bail out bag. The only thing I’d have to add is a SOF-T Tourniquet. For what it is worth, I own both the kit and the tourniquet.
68W Advanced Field Craft – Combat Medic Skills: Excellent book on “first aid” written for combat medics. The same skills apply for cops. This is another book that I own and highly recommend. It isn’t cheap, but worth every penny.
2010 Tactical Combat Casualty Care Guidelines – The folks at ITS Tactical highlight the 2010 TCCC update. Good information to know and use if you are in a jam.
Compact Tear Off Medical Pouch – Original S.O.E. gear makes some of the highest quality pouches, slings and vests you can find. The Compact Tear Off Medical Pouch is a great pouch that can attach to any of your gear or ride in the center compartment of a bailout bag. It is just large enough to hold what you really need in a tight situation. The gear is all made in the USA.

Attitude – BlueSheepdog Podcast #029

Richard — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:47:23 +0000

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We’re talking attitude today on the BlueSheepdog Podcast.

Police work is a corrosive environment. Constant exposure to hate, filth and violence eats away at our lives and soul. Maintaining a positive attitude is difficult to do. Yet, to achieve our goals and maintain personal relationships, we have to keep a positive attitude.

Today, I talk about what causes stress and negativity in our jobs, plus I take a look at what we can do about it. Don’t worry, I don’t go “Dr. Phil” on you.

Gen4 Glock Recall: Recoil Spring Assembly Problems

Richard — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 20:49:36 +0000

The Gen 4 Glock 22 is one of several pistols affected by the recall.

A voluntary recall on the recoil spring assembly of Gen 4 Glock pistols started on September 6 and affects all Gen 4 pistols except the G26 and G27.

Several department armorers forwarded me a copy of the notice sent out by Glock. The announcement states Glock has initiated a voluntary exchange program for the recoil spring assemblies of every Gen 4 Glock sold before July 22, 2011. While Glock does not cite any specific problems with the original recoil springs, the memo does indicate that the assemblies have been modified to “…ensure each pistol’s performance meets the company’s demanding standards.”

I’ve heard of various people having problems with the 9mm versions of the Gen 4 guns, and it was speculated that the new, stronger recoil spring assembly may not be reliable with standard pressure 9mm ammo. However, the problems did not seem to be universal.

Regardless of the reasons, you should contact your department armorer or contact Glock for all of the details on the exchange. The exchange is free and you do not need to ship anything back to Glock.

Body Armor – BlueSheepdog Podcast 027

Richard — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:02:58 +0000

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I talk about body armor in episode #027 of the BlueSheepdog Podcast. I discuss the differences between exposed and concealed body armor for patrol officers, trauma plates and mandatory wear policies.

It is my first day “back” as the past few weeks I have been sick and have had no voice. It is mighty hard to record a podcast with no voice…

Links:

Bullet Resistant Vest Test Video

Bulletproof Vest Grant

Cobra Strike Plate Video Testing

Ballistic Door Panels

Bullet Resistant Clothing

Transcript:

Today, I want to talk about body armor, specifically body armor for the uniformed patrol officer. We’re not going to talk a lot about plate carriers and things like that that your S.W.A.T. teams may wear. We’ll probably cover those on another topic one day. But today, we’re just talking about body armor that the average patrol cop would wear.
Generally, the patrol cops are wearing concealable body armor, although that is changing somewhat. And you do have officers now wearing external vests. We’ve seen a lot of the vests that are worn externally start outside the United States as far as popularity.

I know that some of the folks I have talked with in Canada, they’ve been wearing them for quite a while up there. I know over in England, I’ve had some of the officers over there tell me that they’ve worn vests over there. Although I think a lot of the vests they wear over there are the stab-resistant vests, although I could be wrong. Or they could be wearing the combination stab and ballistic vest.

But there are some pros and cons to the concealable versus the externally-worn. But we’ll cover that in just a minute. Basically, if you are in uniform, you should be wearing some type of ballistic vest, concealed or external.
If you are walking around where people recognize you as a police officer, you become a target for bad people. And you should absolutely always be wearing some type of ballistic protection. If you’re working inside a police station, inside a station house, it’s debatable on whether or not you should be wearing it.

I would certainly argue that if you’re in uniform, you should definitely be wearing it all the time, even if you are sitting at the station, because at any moment, you may be called to handle something, whether you’re working like the front desk in a lobby, or you’re handling citizen complaints coming in, or answering questions from citizens.
Or even if you are wearing a uniform and you’re behind some secure area, you may have to at some point go up to an unsecured area to assist citizens. And at that point, you’re an obvious target, but yet, you don’t have any type of ballistic protection. Never mind the fact that most of the folks that are stuck behind a desk at some point probably get out from behind the desk and go to lunch at some point during the day. And while you’re sitting in lunch at Applebee’s, or Chilli’s, or a local restaurant or something, again you’re that target.

You can’t hide while you’re in uniform. So, it’s just a — It’s my opinion that you should probably, any time you’re in uniform, have the vest on. Certainly, it is without a — without any doubt in my mind. If you are in a patrol capacity, you definitely need to be wearing a vest.

Vests generally, at many departments I guess, are provided by the agency, which is good and bad. It’s great for the officer from the standpoint of cost. Most vests — The least expensive vests, brand new, probably start around $350 to $400 US, and go up from there. Some of the nicer vests that are a little more flexible, a little more comfortable, a little thinner but still provide great protection, those usually start at around $600, $650, $700.

It just depends on what your department is willing to invest and what you get. And I guess, that’s kind of a draw back in that. You’re usually stuck with whatever the departments can provide, depending on your department that may be the look’s better.

At some departments, they look for something that’s a little more customizable. I know my agency actually has several different vests that are available. Generally speaking, there is one vest that is issued to male officers and a second vest that is assigned for women that’s available for the female officers, has probably better than a lot of agencies. But again, you are stuck with what they are providing. And I’ll tell you right now, the vest that the department is providing provide great protection but they’re also about as stiff as plywood and maybe it’s just part of the new NIJ Standards but we’re not very flexible and a lot of guys don’t like them nearly as much as some of the older vest.

So, what you have is you’ve got officers that probably are wearing vest that are about time to be retired just because they have been in service longer but quite frankly they are more comfortable. So, some officers are more willing to wear the older vest and run the risk of performance issues just because they are that much more comfortable.
Fortunately, vests don’t degrade nearly as quickly as most folks think and even though the recommendation is five years for most duty vest to be swapped out. Generally speaking, a vest that is not abused, that’s just worn normally a part of patrol, will probably do beyond five years time with no significant degradation of performance.

Something that you definitely need to consider whether you’re buying your own vest or your department looking to provide vest is — The vest should stop whatever round you carry in your pistol. For example, if your carrying .45 pistol, chances are any of the vest being made will stop the .45 round and .45 is a wide round at relatively low velocity and it’s not going to penetrate a vest very easily.

On the other hand, if your department is going to say a .357 SIG or your carrying a 9 mm with like the Winchester 127 gr +P+, those rounds will penetrate much farther into a vest so whereas a level 2A vest maybe appropriate or acceptable for stopping a .45 calibre round. They are not going to be appropriate for a .357 sig or a high velocity 9 mm or even necessarily some higher velocity .40 cals either.

So, make sure that you match up your vest to what you are carrying, your ammunition and your duty gun. And no matter what vest you get, if it’s concealable vest it is not going to stop rifle rounds, not going to do it. So, .223 you’re carrying as a rifle in your car is going to go right through the vest. Some of the different things that we’re seeing out here on the road, whether it’s .223 from an AR or .762 from an AK which are both — They’re not high powered rounds, they’re sill going to go through a vest, certainly if you’re getting your high power rounds like your 300 Win Mags, those types of things that people use for hunting. Those are going to get right through a vest.
So, have reasonable expectations of the performance of your vest. We’re talking about stopping hand gun rounds. Now, you can get different plates to go into your vest. Generally, for talking about a concealed body armor, you ‘re going to be able to put some type of plate, maybe a six inch by eight inch plate, or a seven inch by ten inch, just depends on your manufacturers – what size pouch they put in.

But going over this sternum area basically, on the front panel of the body armor, you can put in one of these plates. They’ve been alternately called “trauma plates” or “strike plates,” different things. And they can be soft plates which are really nothing more than additional ballistic materials, soft Kevlar or spectra that is going to help just with the blunt force impact.

And there are definitely good things being said for that. They are lighter weight, and they’re going to be less expensive, and in fact, most vests probably come with a soft pack like that. I definitely recommend taking a look at some of the hard plate options that are out there.

There are some from different manufacturers. They’re designed to handle special threats. And by special threats, we’re talking about handgun rounds that are generally lighter weight bullets that are at high velocity that maybe able to penetrate normal body armor.

Again, we’re talking about things such as the Winchester 127 gr. +P+. Most, if not all, I believe, 3A body armor, which is the thickest, heaviest body armor that can be concealed on duty. I think most of those vests are going to stop that round just like they’re going to stop most of the .357 SIG rounds.

But most of your special threat trauma plates are definitely going to stop those. They’re designed specifically to stop those. So, even if you’re not carrying one of those — if you’re carrying a .45, and you’re wearing maybe a 2A or a 2 vest, you may still want to get one of those plates in case you encounter somebody that is using one of those types of hand guns, you’ve got a little bit of extra protection on your most vital areas.

There are some trauma plates that are out there that actually start to kind of push the balance, if you will, between handgun and rifle. On the bluesheepdog.com website, I posted a video of the cobra strike plate. All companies in Kentucky are manufacturing vests and the strike plates. And they pump all sorts of nasty rounds into this Cobra Strike Plate, and it stops them. So, it’s definitely something to consider.

There’s also a plate out there called the “Impact ST” which I believe is made by BAE who owns Safariland, and a couple of other company — body armor companies, and it is also designed for some special threats. But there are definitely different things that are out there. Take a look. Most of your special threat plates are going to run you somewhere between $75 to a $150, and certainly, they’re worth it.

So, I mention for, about the external vest versus a concealable vest. And there are definitely advantages to both. If you think of the external vest, think of being almost like a raid jacket or a raid vest, only it’s going to be worn by uniformed patrol officers. And as I’ve mentioned earlier, they’ve been popular, and countries outside the United States for patrol officers. But, you’ve actually started seeing now inside the United States more agencies, if not issuing them, certainly authorizing them for wear on duty.

Now, they do have a few more benefits. I’ve not worn one, but I’ve had other officers tell me that they are more comfortable. And certainly, if you’re wearing body armor I can tell you right now from working in the South all of my life that body armor — it’s hot, it’s sticky, it isn’t fun.

You’re standing out at 5:30 in the afternoon on asphalt directing traffic around a wreck, it sucks. And there is no other way about it.

If you’re working in Maine for example, where the high may be 80 degrees and there’s low humidity it’s not going to be that big of a deal. Perhaps, if you’re working down where I do, in Florida, and it’s 96 degrees and it’s about 90% humidity, every little bit you can do to lighten your load or cool things off is needed.

So, in those cases, the external vest may be good. It may be more comfortable. Certainly, I would say that it would be easier to add higher protection level plates. You can probably put some rifle plates in to some of these external vests even if you don’t wear the rifle plate on a regular basis.

If you are responding to a call where you suspect there’s somebody there that is armed, on the way to the call or as soon as you get there, you can take a rifle plate out of your trunk or out of the bag on your seat or wherever you’re carrying it. Slide it into your vest. So, that would definitely be an advantage to the external vest.

Conversely, there are some advantages to the concealed vest which are going to be weaknesses for the external vest. First of all the, the external vests are obvious whereas he concealable vest are not as obvious.

Now, we know that there have been quite a few police officers killed by people that were intentionally aiming for the head — aiming for the officers head. And there’s not a lot we can do about that per se. I mean, we can’t force somebody not to shoot at our heads. But if we have an external vest on, it becomes a little more obvious to somebody that maybe they should be shooting for our head whereas if you’re not — if it’s concealed vest, they may not consciously be thinking about that.

There are some people that we will encounter that will already have a game plan mapped out in their head and there’s nothing we can do to change that. And they already know, they’ve already trained that when they’re going to encounter a police officer they’re going to shoot the officer in the head, whereas there are other people that, maybe, have considered that but they’re not necessarily thinking about it when — when the moment comes — when combat arrives.

And if you’re wearing an external vest that’s very visible that may be enough of a visual cue for them to shift their point of aim, which obviously we don’t want them to do. So, that’s one potential problem.
The other potential problem, and I guess, this should have been obvious to me, but I actually had one of our friends in Canada talk about this recently. And that is, the external vest gives a bad guy something to hold on to and something to control you in a fight.

And if you think about it, that’s absolutely true. If you’re tied up with somebody or wrestling with somebody you’re trying to take somebody to the ground, and you’re wearing external vest. They can hook on to the vest around the neckline or an armpit. Or if you Catlike hoist strap or something on it or underneath it. And they can use that vest against you. They can use it for leverage. They can maybe pull it over you or they may even be abler, remove it from you.

And those are definitely huge disadvantages. The comfort aspect and the ability out of rifle plate maybe that for your environment, maybe that gives you some definite benefits over the concealable — I don’t know, it’s an individual decision.

Last but not the least, I want to touch the concept of mandatory wear policies. I talked about earlier when I think a — vest should be worn. But I didn’t talk about when the department should tell you “You absolutely have to wear a vest.” Well, a lot of people may disagree with me and that’s okay. But I think departments should absolutely have mandatory wear policies.

There are a lot of things that police officers do or don’t do because they figure they’re invincible. They may not consciously think that but in the back of their mind, they kind of do. But that didn’t happen to me. That happens to somebody else. They don’t wear their seat belt when they’re responding to calls. They don’t wear their vests because it’s hot out or whatever. And they’re the ones that get into a wreck in time because they weren’t wearing their seat belts. Or they’re the ones that get out to talk to the juvenile and get shot because they weren’t wearing their vest. They die.

Okay. And that’s the reason why I think that we have to have mandatory wear policies. We mandate that all officers wear uniform. We mandate that officers carry fire arms and other weapons for self-defense. We mandate that these officers have various levels of training. We mandate that these officers appear to a standard of conduct, okay? I think that we can also mandate that officers wear body armor. Body armor should be considered a part of the uniform. Just like the gun is, just like the rifle for shot gun are. You know what? You don’t like it, I understand. But you either have to accept it and deal with it or perhaps you need to really re-evaluate what your perception of law enforcement is. We go after the bad people in the society.

When the crap hits the fan, we’re the ones that go toward the gunshots, not away from the gunshots. Everyone else in society has the option of fighting or running. We don’t have that choice. When people’s lives are in danger, we go toward the threat. We get toward the violence. And frequently, we have to do that on our own. Frequently, we have to do that even though the bad guys maybe have better guns or better people. They’re in an entrenched position, whatever. Okay. We’ve got a lot of things tacked against us.

A body armor, a vest — It’s sort of like a seat belt, it’s sort of like a fire extinguisher. It gives us a second chance when things, bad things, have happened. And if you get shot, and you’re shot in the body armor, it’s going to hurt but you’re still on the fight. And you can still win that fight.

Right now we’ve got an incredible number of police officers that have been killed this year. We’re trending upwards from last year, especially on a number of officers killed by fire arms. But if we want to look at strictly just the straight numbers, we still have fewer officer deaths, a lot fewer officer deaths this year than we did ever to any point during the 1970s. It kind of interests me because in the 70s, we had a lot of the same civil strife in the financial and economic problems, and wars overseas, and all the things that we’ve got going on now. We had domestic terrorism, we had external terrorism. We had planes being hijacked and everything else.

Okay, there are a lot of parallels between now and the 1970s in the United States. But yet we have far fewer officers being killed on average than we did back then. Part of it is our training has changed. Part of it is also, police officers now are far more likely to be wearing a vest. And I think, that’s probably one of the key critical points is that if we’re saving a lot of officers’ lives because the officers are wearing vests. And doesn’t it make sense to make that, just standard operating procedure?

If you’re on duty, you’re wearing a vest. I think it does. We have unfortunately seen police officers this year that had been killed because they weren’t wearing a vest, but didn’t necessarily have to die because of that.

They’re, say, police officer in Saint Petersburg, Florida. And this one hits home a little bit because there are a lot of guys that I’ve worked with, a lot of guys that I know that knew this officer and they were friends with this officer. And this officer wasn’t wearing his vest and he’s responding to rather simple call. Suspicious person, supposed to be some kid looking in the windows of cars in the downtown area. We’ve all been to those and whether or not they’re actually — something they generally wind up being things that we can’t do much more than just do an FIR on.

If we see a kid, and they don’t take off running, and they will talk to us, you’d do an FIR and you go by your business, right? That or you get there and yes, there’s a car broken into. But, you know, have many friends, whatever, right? A relatively low risk call in the grand scheme of things.

So, officer rolls up down there, he sees a kid. He’s back up is not on scene yet. He sees a kid, he steps off the car to talk with a kid. The kid turns around and shoots him. The officer dies. The officer didn’t have to die. The officer wasn’t wearing his vest. If the officer had been wearing his vest, maybe he wouldn’t have died that day. But instead now, we got a juvenile in the court system who may or may not be kept in prison for all that long of a time. And we have a police officer that’s been murdered.

And I understand, it’s hot. I get it. Saint Petersburg, Florida. It’s hot during the summer time. I totally understand it. But you can’t take back that bullet. All right. My voice is starting to give out on me a little bit. So we go ahead and wrap up things. I want everyone to stay safe out there.

Watch yourselves. Back up your partners. Don’t take anything for granted. Don’t make any assumptions about any call. Things are dangerous out there and they’re not likely to get better in the near future. There are a lot of problems going on. If you have read the August newsletter, then you probably have a little bit an idea on kind of what I’m referring to. But it’s just my opinion, “Things aren’t going to be getting any better in the near future”.

So we’ve got to watch out for each other. Make sure we’re out there doing the right thing. And just make sure we practice all other officers’ safety techniques. Stay safe.

Police Response and Terrorism – BlueSheepdog Podcast #26

Richard — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:19:43 +0000

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Police response to terrorism in the wake of the Norway terrorist incident is the topic of today’s police training podcast.

Last week’s terrorist attacks in Norway should be a wake up call to every community that thinks “It can’t happen here.” I look at what we know so far from the incident, consider some of the ramifications of responding to bomb attacks and examine police response to active shooter scenarios.

The incident in Norway was beyond ugly, but it is not unprecedented. Nor will it be the last.

Law enforcement must prepare to respond to terrorism today.

Links:

Firearms Training: Mastering the Basics – BlueSheepdog Podcast 025

Richard — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 13:34:59 +0000

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Mastering the basics of survival shooting should be the largest piece of your department’s firearms training program. I identify six critical things that should form the foundation of your police department’s training (roughly 50-75%) – things that are most likely going to keep cops alive in a gun fight.

There are a lot of “high-speed, low-drag” classes being taught, and there is a tendency by many departments to try to emulate those courses. However, mastering the fundamentals of combat shooting is what will keep cops alive.

Consider leaving us a review at iTunes. Your reviews are always helpful.

Transcript:

All right. So, let’s start talking about firearms. And today, what I want to talk about is firearms training and where are placing the emphasis in our firearms training at our departments, and also, in our personal — personal practice.

Well, I think that it has become sexy for everyone wanting to learn the greatest and latest tactical shooting methods — to shoot like the S.W.A.T. guys, or shoot like the Navy Seals, or whatever the case may be. And so, you’ve got different schools that have popped up.

And unfortunately, some of these have bled over into just the normal firearms training community and police work. And that is the — kind of this desire to add all of this pseudo-tactical stuff to shooting. And I think that that does a disservice — a huge disservice — to police officers because you’re kind of getting away from the fundamentals. And you’re trying to do all these high-speed, low-drag stuff.

Some of the high-speed, low-drag stuff is good. But none of it is worth anything if you don’t have a mastery of the basics.

My thought process is that police departments and police training programs should emphasize the basics — mastery of the basics. And by emphasize, I mean, if you take your total training hours, I think 50% or better should be just on the basics; somewhere between 50% to 75% should be on the basics.

If you did 75% on the basics — and we’ll cover what I think those are in a minute. But if you did 50% to 75% on the basics, I think that we would improve officer survivability in shoot-outs significantly. Now, of course, that also assumes that we’re doing adequate amounts of training.

If you only train for 10 hours a year, seven and half hours on the basic for the entire year isn’t necessarily going to do you a whole lot of good. And I think it was Dave Spalding that I saw make this analogy. And that is if you were getting ready to lay money on a football team, and you’ve got your two teams going at it, and you’re trying to figure out who you’re going to bet on. And one of the quarterbacks has only practiced passing two, three times a year, are you going to put your money on that? Or are you going to put your money on the team where the quarterback has been practicing everyday for a few hours a day?

And I think that maybe looking at it in those ways that we start to realize that even though the skill sets are completely different, we have to emphasize all these skills related to firearms. We have to practice daily, at least much more regularly than a few times a year if we expect to have those skills available to us, and for those skills to be out at peak when we have to use them.

None of us would go in and place a bet on a football team where the guys only practice three or four times a year. But yet, that’s what we do in police work with our training. Some departments, they only go and qualify once a year; some, only a couple of times a year; some of the better ones, three, four, or five times a year. But at the end of the day, is that even enough? Probably, not.

And I’d certainly don’t think it’s enough if we’re going to try to incorporate all these high-speed, low-drag things in there because we’re barely getting enough as it is to get the basics down. And if we start taking away from the basics to do all these high-speed things, then suddenly, our guys are no longer proficient in the basics.

If firearms training is a pyramid, the basics is your base and all the high-speed stuff is toward the top. And if you don’t have a solid base, then everything that’s built on top of is — is ultimately going to fail.

Hope that makes sense. I hope I didn’t wander around too much on that. But I hope you understand what I’m saying. We have to emphasize the basics. And I think that we need to do the vast majority of our firearms training on the basics.

All right. So, what do I think are those basic, fundamental skills — those critical skills — that every officer has to practice, has to spend 50% to 75% of their time mastering? Well, I’ve actually got about six different things here. Real quick, they’re presentation, target acquisition, trigger control, movement off the line of attack, magazine changes, and malfunction drills.

Now, those are six things, and maybe, other people would lave less than six. Or maybe, other people would have different ones, and that’s fine. But I think those are the fundamental things that we have to drill in to police officers to win gun fights. And there are other things that we can add in there. But these are the fundamentals. These are the basics.

Things like grip — hopefully, that’s addressed as a function of how the hand fits the gun. And therefore, you’re finding guns that fit your officers, whether you’re going with a policy that allows officers to select from a variety of different guns, or if you are using like one of the new Gen4 Glocks, or Smith and Wesson M&P, or something that has interchangeable back straps, okay.

Grip is important, but it’s not necessarily a fundamental skill or — It’s more of a function of hand and gun fit. And there are other things that are typically classified as basics — proper sight alignment, proper breath control, and these things. And those things are important in precision shooting.

But what I’m talking about here is survival shooting, which, generally speaking — if we can average things, if we can take a generality — which I know is a bit dangerous when it comes to designing how we’re going to train. But most police shootings are things that are relatively close, and are relatively fast. And I think that these six things are the basics that officers must master if they’re going to win those confrontations.

Okay. So, let’s take the first one — presentation. Presentation is simply being able to draw your firearm; bring your firearm to barrel in a quick and safe method. So, for the average uniformed police officer, that’s going to be drawing that weapon from a retention holster and starting to point it off in the right direction on wherever the threat is.

Being able to do that, like in a safe manner — in other words, you’re able to disengage all the retention devices; you’re able to keep your finger off the trigger; you’re able to not muzzle yourself or other people as you’re drawing.

All right. Presentation is something that — It’s fundamental to everything else because part of presentation is going to be your grip. It’s going to be — It’s going to set you up for having the gun pointing in the right direction, not pointing at other people. And quite frankly, if you can’t get your gun out of the holster, nothing else really matters because you can’t get it out.

Retention holsters are phenomenal things. I’ve carried a firearm and a retention holster on duty for my entire police career. The vast majority of that time has been the Safariland 070. The SSIII, I think — who was it? The Rogers, I think, is the one that originally came up with the design for that. Safariland implemented it — phenomenal holster. And it is not a slow holster if you train with it.

I am as fast with that holster as most people are with non-retention holsters. And I don’t say that like I’m anybody special. I’m not. I’m just somebody that has practiced time, and time, and time, and time again with it. And I’ve carried revolvers, sigs, and glocks in that same holster. And it works every time with all those different weapons.

And whatever your retention holster is, whether you’ve got maybe one of the SERPA on-duty holsters — Safariland has some new retention holsters. I say new; they’ve been out for a while now. But like, with the rotating hoods and different things — The concept, part of presentation, is you have to be able to acquire a grip on that firearm, disengage those retention devices, draw, and point that firearm in the right direction. And you have to be able to do it very, very quickly.

If you combine shooting with the retention — or with the drawing and presentation, you should be able to put rounds on target in less than two seconds. And if you’re carrying a retention holster, that means you got to practice with it to be good at it. Okay, first shot on target should be just around a second, maybe a little more at relatively close ranges. That’s presentation.

Look around the officers in your department now. Watch them when you’re on a relatively low-stress call. For example, you go to a burglary alarm and you get to the business. And it’s supposed to be closed, but there’s a door open in the back. And now, you’re going to have to clear that building, all right. So, what do you do?

Well, you probably already got your flashlight out. So, you draw your firearm and you’re getting ready to clear that building. Watch the officers around you and see how did they draw their weapon. Are they presenting it in a very clean motion? Or are they somebody that’s kind of struggling with it a little bit?

If you look around your department and started looking at — at all the officers and how they draw their weapons, you’ll be able to get a good idea on whether or not you’re department is spending enough time on presentation skills in their firearms program. And the unfortunate thing is a lot of departments do not.

The good thing is presentation skills are very easy to start drilling in to people. And you can do it every at read-off — presentation drills for five minutes, right? You show up for roll call and read-off and you go over whatever’s in the agenda for the day.

And everybody clears their weapons. Everybody checks each other’s weapons. You make sure everything is safe. You point off in the safe direction. And the seargent runs everybody through presentation drills for five minutes. And if you did that, everyday at read-off for about six months, in about six months you’re going to have people that have mastered that skill. I don’t know, just seeing something that’s relatively simple and under stress if you haven’t mastered the skill it’s going to fail you.

All right, next thing is rapid target acquisition. Now, this could be easier said than done, right? And I’m not going to get to a big debate about point shooting versus front sight focus or anything else. If you remember, I think it was Episode 7 of the podcast.

We have Rob Pincus on, and one of the things that we’re talking about is he teach a front sight focus, does he teach point shooting? Does he teach some other alternate sighting method and they kind of laugh about it a little bit. But if I understand him correctly, what he teaches and what makes a lot of sense is you fire as quickly as you can accurately fire, and if that means you’re very close and you’re not even getting a full sight picture.

You don’t see that nice hard sharp front sight because the distance is one yard and you’re pushing that, you’re pushing that gun, that pistol out towards the person’s chest. You can’t see it but you can clearly tell you’re on target. You’re able to put rounds accurately on target, or you’re at seven, 15, 25 yards and you have to find that sight, you got to get a good sight picture. How rapidly can you do that?

And through, all the different things that you train with, you should be training to rapidly come up either from a low ready or preferably from presentation, from drawing, and be able to quickly acquire your target and put rounds on that target.

Now, I come from the school that believes that under the vast majority of circumstances you should try to find your front sight and I stick by that. But regardless on what school or philosophy you come from on using sights, you have to be able to rapidly put rounds on target. So, you have to be able to get that rapid target acquisition, okay? So, from presentation, you’re coming up, and you’re able to index your weapon and boom, boom, rounds on target.

So, I think those are your first few things, presentation, target acquisition. Third thing, trigger control, I don’t care how fast you go. If you go, if you’re just slapping the trigger you are not going to put rounds on target, you’re going to keep missing, okay? And I don’t care how slow you go, if you don’t have proper trigger control, you’re going to be throwing rounds all over the place.

Trigger control at distant ranges will say for pistol 25 to 50 yards, okay? — is a huge deal. Trigger control like close ranges you know what? — is still a big deal because even at close ranges, if you don’t have proper trigger control, you can start pulling your shots off and a shot that’s supposed to go a center mass has now gone into the gut or it has missed completely and you’re not stopping the threat and that’s the whole point.

We want to stop somebody from killing us, right? Trigger control, how do you improve trigger control? Easy, dry firing, I’ve talked about dry firing before. I’ve talked about it on the website. I’ve talked about it in the Podcast, dry firing. If you’re worried about damaging your weapon go and buy some snap caps. I don’t think you’ll ever damage your weapon but can’t guarantee it. So, if you’re worried, go buy snap caps, and work on dry firing five minutes a day, everyday, before you get ready to go to work.

And for your weapon, make sure it’s clean. Make sure it’s a safe gun, point on a safe direction, dry fire for five minutes. Pretty soon, you will be able to, nice and smooth, roll that trigger straight back. And if you keep working on that, you keep working on that five minutes a day, every day, pretty soon, that is going to be a skill that you master.

So, whether you’re shooting for qualification on the range, or that you’re shooting on the street, that will be just the way your finger and your hand naturally operate is a proper trigger press. Okay, just roll that trigger straight back, nice one smooth continuous motion. It may be a heck of a lot faster, I understand that, but you’re not going to be jerking and not to be slapping it and all those other things that throw bullets all over the place.

Trigger control. Now, if you haven’t noticed, everything I am talking about so far, you can do at home. Dry firing, you don’t have to spend any time on the range, right? Presentation, target acquisition, trigger control, you can do all that stuff in your house. Practice drying, practice getting your sights on target. Practice rolling your trigger. All dry firing stuff don’t cost you a dime, five minutes, and each one of these things and you’re going to be a much better officer, much better shooter, I should say.

All right, number 4, talking about movement off the line of attack. This is important. I don’t care if you’re defending against knife attack, if you’re defending against the guy pulling a gun, or anything else. Whatever the line of attack is, you need to move laterally.

Backwards doesn’t get it, okay? Try to run backwards, try to backup that type of thing. It’s a losing proposition. If you’re trying to walk backwards, chances are, you’re going to fall down and hurt yourself . And then, while you fall down, you’re going to wind up getting shot. There are lots, and lots, and lots of video of this taking place all around the country. Go watch some dash cam videos. It happens.

Moving laterally, however, what you do is you get yourself off the line of attack if the person is running straight at you and you start moving laterally, then they have to change their direction of travel. That slows them down. That gives you opportunity to present, acquire target, and start rolling that trigger backwards to put rounds on target, okay?

Move laterally, left, right, don’t matter. Okay, just get off the line of attack. By moving, not only do you now force them to react to you but it’s buying you time. Its making them slow down physically. Its making them slow down mentally. It’s creating an advantage for you, okay?

If the person has drawn a gun and they’re pointing at you and you are moving laterally, now they have to try to track you, I think everyone of us would agree that shooting on moving target is much harder than shooting a target that is stationary.

So, if they are trying to shoot at you, make you a hard target to hit. Move left, right, don’t matter, one step, two steps, a thousand steps, move. Get off the line of attack. Now there are two different theories about this and I’ll let you make up your own mind. Theory number 1, move all shooting as you’re moving left to right, you draw your weapon, you continue moving, and you start putting rounds on target as you move. That is theory number 1.

Theory number 2 is you move and you set. That is you move left to right, one or two big steps. You move left to right. And while you’re moving, you’re drawing. And as soon as you are done drawing and you’re bringing your weapon, abear on own target, you stop and you press the trigger.

Now, which one is better? Which one is more accurate? Hey, it’s up to you. It’s for you to decide. Okay, I’m not here to advocate either one of those. Me, personally, I’m a little bit more of a believer of the step to decide, step out of the way, move laterally, stop and shoot.

I am a much more accurate shooter when I am stopped than if I am trying to move. If I move laterally, my thinking is that if I move laterally, now I’m forcing them to react to me as I’m moving I’m drawing my weapon. I am bringing it to bear. They are trying to figure out where I’m going or trying to acquire me as a target or trying to readjust physically and mentally to where I am.

I stop when I’m ready and when I stop, now, they are still trying to catch up to me and I have now stopped. I have formed a good stable platform from which to shoot and I put rounds on target. That’s my theory. That’s what I practice. It doesn’t work. Sure. Does the other method where you’re shooting, where you’re moving work? Sure.

What do you practice? What do you train with? Okay. Personally, I don’t care either way, whichever one you want to do, just get off the line of attack because as soon as you start moving laterally, you start taking control of the situation. Now, you’re buying yourself time, now they reacting to you. I think I’ve said that a few times “now they’re reacting to you”, right?

I hope all of us understand that action beats reaction every time. And when we’re out on the street, we are reacting most of the time to what the other guy is doing. Well, as soon as we start moving laterally, they have to react to us and that’s exactly where we want to be. We want to be in control of the situation. And when they start reacting to us, we start taking control. And we assert control, finally and dominantly, by putting rounds on target. So, lateral movement. And you know what? Hey, you can practice that. Head on dry firing, right? Again, you only have to spend a moment on the range.

Okay, next two items are going to be things that kind of — I can sort of a fundamental, but they are a step away from winning the immediate gun fight, if that makes sense.

First one is magazine changes. Magazine changes are very important because sometimes, our first magazine doesn’t do the job. Sometimes, we engage multiple people, sometimes were having to engage someone from behind cover. Sometimes, they’re behind cover and at extreme distances and so, the shots become much harder, so we wind up going through more ammunition and get the job done.

Magazine changes are very, very important. You have to be able to quickly and smoothly change magazines, because an empty gun is useless. It is merely a poorly shaped club at that point. Let me reemphasize that.

Magazine changes are very important. If you run out of ammunition, it’s very difficult for you to defend yourself against an armed adversary. So, I don’t care if you’re carrying a Glock 17 with 17 plus rounds in there, or you’re carrying a six-shot revolver. You have to be able to get more ammunition into the firearm for it to continue to be useful to you. So, fast magazine changes are very, very important. And again, that is something that you can do right at home, right? Part of your dry firing practice, practice them. If you can learn that skill, then it makes magazine changes very easy under very difficult circumstances. It’s a basic skill. You should know this. You should learn this. You should master this.

I have seen, fortunately on the range, I have seen people go to make a magazine change, and they’re on a hurry, and they don’t practice that much, and they go to gym, the magazine, into the body of the gun, only the problem is they miss completely. And they wind up throwing the magazine halfway down the range because they are going to shove it up in there, they miss the gun completely, and the magazine goes sailing down the range, 30 feet down the range. Okay, whoops.

Now, that happens in the relatively low-stressed environment on the shooting range. How well do you think that person’s skills are going to play out on the street in a shooting situation? — Probably, not going to go very well for that person, so practice magazine changes. Practice drawing the magazine from however you carry them on your duty belt, practice dropping the other magazine, jamming the magazine up into the magazine well, and then, dropping the slide — a couple of different things about that.

One, first theory is for the quickest reloads, which you want the quickest reloads. For the quickest reloads, you drop the slide stop lever, you push it down, the magazine, or the slide; shoots forward chambering around from the magazine. Yup, that’s one way of doing it. And it’s a good way of doing it very quickly, and that’s a way if you’re shooting competition always, suggests that’s a way you do it.

The second way, and this is the way that I practice, and not all firearms instructors agree with me, that’s okay. But the second way and this is the way I believe that you should do it is after you slammed the magazine home, you reach up with your off hand that is now free, and you grab the top of the slide, and you yank it back. That will pull a slide off the magazine stop, and the maga –, and the slide will shoot forward stripping around off the top of the magazine, and loading it into the chamber, all right?

Slightly slower than the other method, why do I suggest that way? Well, I believe in simplicity of training, and the next item that we’re going to talk about is malfunction drills. And in a malfunction drill, what do you do? You tap the bottom of the magazine, and then, you rack the slide, right? — which is the same exact motions that you’re doing for inserting a fresh magazine into a gun that’s run dry.

So, if we, instead of trying to learn two different ways of doing essentially the same thing, we learn just the single way, then we don’t have to learn as much. And it becomes twice as quick, or it’s twice as quick for you to master that one skill, then it is for you to try to master two different skills.

Just the way I look at it, you may disagree, and do what works for you, okay? If you’ve been doing one thing for 20 years, then, stick with it, okay? Obviously, it works for you, okay? Just make sure you’re the best as possible in however you do it.

And as I was just talking about, the last thing that which I think is an absolute basic that must be mastered, and that is the malfunction drill. And there are always different types, and classes, and numbers, and all these other things people try to use to describe malfunctions. Quite frankly, I don’t care, all right?

There are two ways I’m going to deal with the malfunction on a firearm, and perhaps three. On a pistol, I don’t care what has caused a malfunction. If my gun has malfunctioned, I am doing the tap rack bang drill, or tap rack assessor, tap rack, whatever PC thing they want to use today.

And that means that I will pull the pistol back towards the center of my body where I have the greatest strength and control. I will slam the – my off hand into the bottom of the magazine, making sure the magazine is properly seated into the magazine well.

I will reach over, and then I will yank back on the slightest hard as possible while pushing forward with the hand that’s holding on to the firearm, and then, I’m back on target. The idea is this that probably, cures; I don’t know, 90% to 95% of all malfunctions associated with the semi-auto pistol, all right? Making sure the magazine is seated; making sure that a round has been stripped and chambered.

Now, there is another kind of malfunction which that, may or may not work, that’s going to be like your double-feed situation. And that is now, you’ve got multiple rounds trying to jam their way, and at the same time, into your chamber. In those types of situations, you’re going to have to strip the magazine out, rack the slide multiple times, and then, insert a fresh magazine in there. That takes a little more time, okay?

So, the reason why I say that I have basically, two methods of handling it, I go tap rack. It’s usually pretty obvious and double-feed when I go tap, and I’m trying to rack it, and the slide is all jammed up. Okay, the double-feed is usually pretty obvious at that point.

So, I may easily go into my second method of taking care of the malfunction, and that is, I draw my backup gun. Now, the double feed can be cleared at a relatively quick amount of time. I can draw my backup gun quicker than I can clear a malfunction, a double feed malfunction, okay?

Generally, I can do a tap rack, and be back on target much quicker than I can draw a backup gun. So, I definitely recommend learning the tap rack drill, okay, clear that malfunction. Then, the double feed drill, you need to know how to clear that. If you do not carry a backup gun, or your department does not allow you to carry a backup gun, then you have to be very proficient with that, okay?

Learn that, use dummy rounds, and practice at, figure out how to make that work for you, okay? Generally, what you’re going to do is you’re going to strip the magazine out which probably, is going to require some force. So, you want to snatch that thing out of there, rack the slide multiple times to make sure that you clear out any additional ammunition that may be jammed up in the area, slam home new magazine, and back into business.

Now, if you carry a backup gun, then it’s up to you how do you want to practice. But you figure that out yourself. And if you notice, all of the stuff, you can train at home. Just a few minutes everyday before you go to shift, or on your off days, or whatever. All of these stuffs can be accomplished with an empty weapon, a safe weapon, dummy rounds, and a little bit of time. I hope that makes sense to everybody.

My thought is, like I said, if we master the fundamentals, and that’s going to get us through the vast majority of problems that we’re going to encounter. And I firmly believe that we need to train for what we are most likely to encounter, and then, build on that. Once we’ve mastered those skills, then, build on that to start dealing with the other issues.

Some secondary skills, once you’ve mastered the basics, some secondary skills like shooting in one hand, or shooting with your weak hand, or your reactionary hand. Transitioning between your long gun, and your pistol, or from your pistol to your backup, or whatever — working with flashlights, all those things are important skills to learn. But I don’t think that they are the fundamental basic skills that have to be mastered from the outside.

Again, those fundamental master skills – your presentation, your target acquisition, your trigger control, movement off the line of attack, magazine changes, and malfunction drills. Those are your basics which everything else is built on. Because if you don’t know how to change magazines, you don’t know how to clear a malfunction, or you don’t know how to acquire a target, then what’s the point learning all these high-speed low-drag stuff when you can’t do the basics.

I don’t know. What do you, guys think? That’s a – that’s the way I train, that’s the way I work with others, and trying to help people out. That’s the way I present it to my department, and previous departments, and depending on who you talk to, you get varying degrees of success with implementing these different things.

But at the end of the day, we’re all each responsible for our own safety, our own survival. And even if I can’t go to my chief, and convince my chief that we’re going to do training in this particular way, I can still do that for myself. And I can still work with the guys on my shift. I can still work with my partners, my buddies, my squad mates, or whatever, okay? We can work together, and we can be safer even if the department is not providing it to us.

So, well, with that, I’ll go ahead and wrap up. If you got any questions, comments, concerns, feel free to leave a comment on the website under today’s episode. Or feel free to shoot me an email, again, Richard@bluesheepdog.com. Yes, that’s my real email address, you shoot me an email. I’d get back to you as soon as I can. Generally, it’s pretty quick, but I will get back to you no matter how long.

As always, stay safe.

Charter Arms Revolver Review – BlueSheepdog Podcast 024

Richard — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 23:40:48 +0000

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A review of the Charter Arms Off Duty revolver is the main topic of today’s podcast. I take a close look at the Charter Arms gun for use as a backup gun and off duty cary. To summarize, I was pleasantly surprised by the gun. The Off Duty was reliable, easy shooting and offers some real advantages over the Smith & Wesson 642.

I’m not sure I am ready to trade in my Smith, but if I was buying new, the Charter Arms revolver might get the nod.

Also from today’s police podcast:

Please visit Safety Solutions Academy and take a listen to Paul’s podcast.
If you don’t already, you should give ITS Tactical a visit. In addition to being a superb resource for law enforcement and military tactics and gear, they published one of my articles on Threat Identification in Low Light Conditions.
Consider leaving us a review at iTunes. Your reviews are always helpful.
Join us on Twitterhttp://www.bluesheepdog.com/uploads/podcasts/BlueSheepdog_Podcast_023.m4a.
Consider sharing the site and podcast with your friends and coworkers.

Stay safe!

Off Duty Survival – BlueSheepdog Podcast 023

Richard — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 11:59:41 +0000

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Off duty survival is an often neglected subject when it comes to police training. In this podcast, I talk about some of the things you need to consider when you are off duty.

Among other aspects of off duty survival, I talk about:

options for intervening
firearms
training your family
what a family member should tell 911
revenge attacks on officers

You experiences and ideas are welcome. Please post your off duty tips in the comments section below.

Security and Police: BlueSheepdog Podcast #22

Richard — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:44:27 +0000

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Security and police is what I am talking about in today’s podcast. Private security and public law enforcement officers sometimes clash, and we really should be working together. The job of the security officer is different, yet similar, to that of a police officer. Learning what those differences are can help cops better understand and work with security guards.

Working together sure beats fighting each other over stupid perceptions, doesn’t it?

I’m going to offer a few suggestions to police officers on enhancing cooperation between security and cops. Some of them may seem a little odd. Try them out, though. You might be surprised on how many more cases you can make by closely working with private officers.

CCW and Police – BlueSheepdog Podcast 021

Richard — Thu, 19 May 2011 21:29:12 +0000

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Police encounters with legally armed citizens and an interview with Emily Sweet are the topics of today’s podcast.

A friend of the show wrote in with some questions about police encounters with legally armed citizens. I attempt to address those in today’s show. I can only speak to the laws and attitudes of officers in my region of the country, so your views and opinions on the subject are welcome. Feel free to add them in the comments section.

Also, I speak with Emily Sweet of Relatively Real who is looking for police families to feature in an upcoming television series. The series seeks to portray officers in a positive, upbeat way.

Relativey Real is a media production company with a hand in major motion pictures (300, Battle: Los Angeles, The Pursuit of Happyness, Zombieland and about 200 more) and in television (such as Police Women). The company CEO is Tom Forman, creator of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

If you are interested in participating in the show, get the details in the podcast and then contact Emily at policefamily@rrstaff.com.

CCW information:

Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter (upper left corner). No spam guaranteed!

Transcript:

BlueSheepdogPodcast021

Welcome to episode number 21 of the Blue Sheepdog Podcast.

As always, my name is Richard. And today, I’ve got kind of a variety of topics we’re going to cover. First up today, we’ve got Emily Sweet.

Emily is a casting producer for “Relativity Real”, which is a production company involved in a great number of different projects including some big movies you may be familiar with, such as, “300”, “3:10 to Yuma”. And they also are involved on a number of TV projects such as, “Police Women”, which is on the TLC channel, and also “Extreme Make-over Home Edition”, and quite a bit of different projects are involved in.

But Emily is going to be on today to talk to us about a new project involved in “Police Families”, and it sounds like a really good upbeat reality show. I hate that term reality show but, it does sound like a pretty good, pretty upbeat casting us in more of a human or a positive light. So, were going to talk with her a little bit.

Also I’m going to talk today a little bit about, what do we do when we encounter a legally armed citizen on traffic stop? One of our listeners who I’ve had a kind of a pleasant conversation with an email, post a few questions, and ask that — We address those here today.

So, we’re going to talk about that a little bit both for our friends that are not in law enforcement but do carry a firearm for self-defense. And then, also from the perspective of police officers; how do we address those situations when we encounter them?

But first, let me take care of a few of our housekeeping issues. If you are a podcast listener, but you’ve never been to our website, I encourage you highly to check out our website. Podcast is only part of what we do, and it’s an important part but it is just a part.

The website, we’ve got all sorts of different training articles on there, legal updates and things. Just in the past week and a half or so, we’ve had a multi-part series running on “Police Knives”, not just the different types of knives hurled there or out there, but also, how do you carry them? Are there some methods of carry that are safe than others? Are you carrying them for self-defense? Or you’re just carrying them as a tool?

Randell [ph], one of our regular writers, has been doing a really good series on that. Also, one of our other writers, Aaron has been doing a number of articles on “Traffic Stop Safety”, and also on DUI training.

And Aaron is absolutely one of the best when it comes to investigating drug and drunk driving. Aaron is a certified DRE instructor, certified SFST instructor. He spent a lot of time as a full time DUI officer with his department. He’s also spent time, part of a Federal Drug Task Force working under cover.

So, if it comes to some types of impairment, Aaron is actually an expert in those areas, and he’s giving us a very, very good in depth, step-by-step instructional series on investigating DUI cases, or DWI depending on your state in what you call it but an absolutely excellent series.

Of course, I also threw in a variety of things. We’ve got gear reviews, and legal updates, some of the Springport decisions and things, we talk about those.

So, if you’re not going to the website already, please check that out. Also, you can connect with this on Facebook and Twitter. And our Twitter account is twitter/bluesheepdog; and then Facebook is facebook/sheepdogmedia. Somebody else, I guess, had already grabbed blue sheep dog, but we’re at facebook/sheepdogmedia, so you can connect with us there.

Obviously, you can always send me an email richard@bluesheepdog.com. Shoot me an email. Let me know what’s on your mind. If there’s something we can cover, or you think we got it wrong on something, hey, shoot me an email. Let me know about it.

The commenting section on all the post online is also open. So, if you want to take issue with something, or relay your experiences, or offer other points of view, please do. Absolutely jump in there.

Also, one of the other components to the entire Blue Sheepdog experience is you can sign up for our newsletter. Our newsletter is absolutely free. We’re not selling your email addresses to any third party. You don’t have to give me your name or anything. Just give me your email address, so I know where to send the newsletters, too.

We sent out our first newsletter this month, a couple of weeks ago now, I guess. And the first newsletter, I’m not going to lie, there were some technical issues on my end. And I’m just trying to get it configured right, and get it out.

But I got it out there. It had a gear review on a flashlight, new tactical flashlight. We had a training article in there from Aaron on “Surviving the Street.” And then, I also had a review of an officer involved in shooting. And unfortunately, it was a shooting which an officer was in fact killed.

And with any of the times where we have to critique other officers, especially if another officer has been injured or killed. It is done so in a matter not to point out their errors, but it’s done in a way that we’re trying to prevent whatever errors may have occurred from happening again. Because, there’s absolutely nothing worse in my mind than losing an officer to some mistake that we could’ve prevented, if we’ve just been open and talked about mistakes that have been made previously.

I’ve said it many times and I’ll continue saying it. We continue losing police officers, having them killed for making the same mistakes that we’ve been making for decades. Whether it’s not properly retaining [??] your weapon in your holster, whether it’s not wearing a vest, whether it’s not wearing your seatbelt, we continue to lose officers to the same old things.

And, that’s not necessarily the case in this particular review, but we don’t want to make those same mistakes that were made that day. We lost one officer. We don’t want to lose anymore. And I hope everyone can approach it from that view point.

So first up, let’s go ahead and talk to Emily about their new TV program.

[Segue to music]

Richard: Alright, we’ve got today with us Emily Sweet. Emily is a casting producer for a company called “Relativity Real”. Welcome to the show Emily.

Emily: Hi! Thanks for having me.

Richard: Absolutely. Okay, tell us a little about who you are and what exactly you do for your company.

Emily: Well, I work for “Relativity Real” which is the television division of “Relativity Media”, which is the company that has — they produce big feature films including “The Fighter”, “The Social Network”, and stuff like that. So we are their television division and our company is headed out by Tom Forman. So, you might be familiar with — he is the creator of “Extreme Make-over Home Edition”.

Richard: Absolutely.

Emily: So, yes, we are a — we’re a new company but we’re really committed to making inspirational programming, and I am here as a casting producer. So, I’m one of the people that reaches out to anyone that we need to get on the new show that we’re working on.

Richard: And that’s why we’ve got you on today. You’re working on a new program that is going to probably interest law enforcement officers, both to watch and then also perhaps to participate in. Can you tell us a little bit about your new project?

Emily: Yes, so we are working on a brand new show. My company is — the company that has produced six successful seasons of “The Police Women” series on TLC.

Richard: Okay.

Emily: So, we are working on developing a new show that will be similar to that show, sort of informant [??] a documentary style show, but we are looking for families with multiple members working in law enforcement. They could be in one department or perhaps in two neighboring departments but we are looking to do a positive portrayal of some really great, deserving law enforcement families.

Richard: Okay great. I know law enforcement a lot of time gets kind of a bad rep from folks that don’t understand us just because unfortunately, law enforcement, we kind of get into the position where we wind up not trusting a lot of people, which is unfortunate; but cops are really just like anybody else from the community. And it sounds like you’re trying to, maybe, present that side of them.

Emily: Exactly. We are very interested and really portraying police officers as everyday people. Just putting a human face on the job and making it really relatable for people so that they understand that law enforcement officers are out there. They’re protecting us. They’re doing great things for our communities; and then they are coming home to their families; and they’re having barbecues on the weekends; and going to movies. They’re just like anybody else but they have a really demanding, important role in all of our cities.

Richard: Absolutely. How did you come upon this project? Is this an idea you’ve come up with or was this something that was suggested to you or I guess kind of where the origins of the project?

Emily: Well, you know, through our many seasons of working on “Police Women”. We’ve been in touched with lots of officers from all across the country, all different departments and we started to notice that it seems like it’s the kind of career that really gets into people’s blood. And that people tend to pass down to the generations. And we came across a lot of families where the dad had been in law enforcement, and then his son, and then the son met his wife through the department and stuff like that.

So, we are just really interested in what it’s like to be really, to have the career be such a big part of your life and such a big part of your family’s life. So, we realized there are a lot of families out there like that and we kind of just wanted to show our viewership what that’s like.

Richard: Sounds great. Do you have any kind of timeline on when the series might start?

Emily: We don’t have any official taping dates or anything yet but at this point; we are still in the developmental stage where we’re really just reaching out to families and departments and organizations. Kind of just trying to spread the word but we would love to get in touch with interested families as soon as possible in the next couple of weeks; and hopefully, we could film something in the next few months.

Richard: Okay, and what would be the easiest way for people to get in contact with you?

Emily: Well, the best way to get in touch with us would be to email us. Our email address is policefamily@rrstaff.com. So, you could shoot us an email with a brief description of your family, the department you’re from, and maybe a photo or two if you have one; or if you have any other question; or you don’t want to email, people are welcome to just give me a call. And my number is 323-860-8623. And they can just call me up and we will discuss.

Richard: Alright, sounds great. Is there anything else anyone needs to know?

Emily: I think that we’ve basically covered it. I mean, just that, we are really devoted to uplifting family-friendly programming. Some of the other shows that our company does are in addition to “Police Women” as we’ve also – We produced the new series “Coming Home for Lifetime” which helps police men and women reunite with their families after their tours overseas. So, we are really just interested in the kind of shows that just make you watch. I mean, they make you feel good and you see the people that are really doing great things for our country.

Richard: That’s fantastic. There definitely, in my humble opinion, has been a lack of that kind of programming so, –

Emily: I agree.

Richard: Certainly, if there’s anything I can do to help you out, hopefully, you’ll let us know.

Emily: Well, I appreciate it.

Richard: Absolutely.

Emily: We’re really excited about this.

Richard: Absolutely. Thank you very much for coming on the show today.

Emily: Thanks so much for having me.

[Segue to music]

Richard: Okay, so, now we’re going to talk a little bit about the armed citizen and the police officer. When I talk about the armed citizen, I am talking about the legally armed citizen. We’re not talking about a criminal with a gun. Completely different story and we address those in completely different ways. But, sometimes, we don’t know if the legally-armed citizen is in fact legally-armed or if they are in fact the criminals. So, that creates a problem for us in law enforcement because obviously we want to do our job safely.

We have our families that we want to go home to every night and sometimes, let’s face it, the wolves dress up a sheep or Sheepdogs. So, one of the listeners and readers on the website, Jon, he sent me an e-mail and we’ve swapped a few emails back and forth. But he sent me one email with some questions.

And we’ll just kind of go through the questions here and I’ll try to answer his questions, but also try to, in the same way, offer some ideas to law enforcement on how to address some of these questions and some of these issues when we encounter them.

But the first thing Jon asked was; what is the collective opinion among law enforcement officers I work with regarding the legal carrying of a firearm? Is it positive or negative?

Well generally, positive. Or at least with all the agencies I’ve worked with. I started law enforcement up in Georgia. Worked there for a number of years, and now work down here in Florida and both my agency in Georgia and my agency here in Florida.

The general, if not overwhelming opinion of law enforcement is very positive toward the legal lawful carrying of a firearm. And probably, the biggest reason why that is; is law enforcement officers see what happens when victims encounter the criminal element. They don’t have a way to defend themselves.

At the end of the day, this maybe kind of a crude way of explaining it, but law enforcement is nothing more than a report writer. And I know our job is a lot more than that. Our job really should be a lot more than that. But, unfortunately, we generally get there after the crime has already occurred.

We get there after the robbery’s taken place. We get there after the rape has taken place; or we get there to a murder scene. And a lot of times, we wind up merely detecting that crime has occurred and then investigating what happened; and then seeking out who did the evil act, right? And there’s nothing in there about preventing the act from starting.

And I understand it says serve and protect on the side of a lot of our police cars, but at the end of the day protecting isn’t something that we’re legally required to do and the Supreme Court said that time and time again, that law enforcement officers and law enforcement agencies have absolutely no duty to protect those people in their community. We have merely a legal obligation to provide for the general welfare of the public. Not to prevent anyone from being victimized.

So law enforcement officers generally have an opinion that citizens need to be able to defend themselves. And of course, there is a broad range of opinions that we have in law enforcement officers, just like we do in the general public. Some may be for or against open carry just like there’s many people and the second amendment community that are pro or against open carry, right?

Law enforcement officers ultimately are citizens just from your community, and they are a reflection of that community. So, if you have a community that is very negative towards firearms, then, chances are you’re going to have a lot of law enforcement officers that are negative towards firearms. Being that I worked in Georgia and Florida, both of these states, generally speaking, are fairly pro-second amendment; so, most of the officers I worked with are pretty pro-second amendment.

Now, let’s see, Jon asked,

“Do you want individuals being stopped to voluntarily tell you they are carrying a firearm?” And we are talking about traffic stops here. We’re talking about just the routine. If you allow me to use that word, the routine traffic stop, just the traffic enforcement type stop.

Generally speaking, I prefer to know; it just prevents a possible misunderstanding later. If I stop someone and they go ahead and tell me about it; okay, we can address that issue and I know they’re being upfront with me and everything else. As opposed to, they’ve got a gun in their pocket, they’ve got a gun on their waistband or in the glove box or whatever, and they start reaching into that area.

And now, the gun is exposed and our hand is moving towards that area. That creates a completely different situation. It’s a situation where that misunderstanding could get somebody hurt or killed.

If the guy doesn’t want to tell me, he has no legal obligation to do so. In the state of Florida, you don’t have that legal obligation telling the officer. In other states, you do. But, if you don’t have the legal obligation, I can understand you don’t want to tell me, fine. But, it does help create an environment in which, a misunderstanding could result in harm or injury to someone.

Just like I said, if I ask a guy, “Okay, sir, may I ask for your driver’s license?” and he reaches back to grab his wallet, but as he’s reaching back, he exposes a firearm and his hand is going down toward that firearm, because he’s reaching for his wallet. He hasn’t told me he is armed. All I know now is that he’s reaching toward an area where there is a firearm. I’m going to handle that a lot differently than if he had said initially, “Sir, I’ve got a gun with me. What would you like me to do?” Because we can address that and I think most police officers would agree with me there.

Jon, then asked, “When you approach a vehicle, how do I want someone to convey the information to me that they, in fact are legally armed?” Generally speaking, I prefer something along the lines of, “Good evening officer! Hi”, whatever. I’ve got a concealed weapons permit and I do have that firearm with me. What would you like me to do?”

Kind of by leading off with, “I have concealed weapons permit.” That’s kind of mental shorthand for “Hey I’m a good guy and I don’t pose a threat.”

I’ve seen circumstances where someone just announces I have a gun and that’s kind of get a little bit of a different reaction. If I’m in some type of enforcement capacity, I’m investigating a crime or I’m investigating some type of traffic infraction or whatever, and someone just announces “I have a gun.” You may be thinking “Hey, I’m trying to do a right thing here.”

But that really, especially if we’ve not already established some rapport or something, it’s not going to — it’s not going to enhance our relationship in a positive way. Whereas if you lead off with “I have a concealed weapon’s permit and I happen to have that firearm with me”, you’re saying the same thing but it’s in how you say it.

We communicate not just with our words but also with how we say things and our body language and everything else. And that’s sort of what you’re doing here also. So, I recommend and I don’t know, maybe somebody will disagree with me but I would recommend just saying, “I got a permit. I have that weapon with me. What would you like me to do?” And it’s kind of you’re saying the same thing but it’s in a lower key sort of way. You’re less likely to get a negative reaction from that officer.

Jon then goes on to ask, “If you approach a car from the passenger side –“, which hopefully, everyone realizes I’m a huge advocate of and hopefully, you’re at least trying that out for yourself, but he says, “If you approach the car from the passenger side and see a firearm before the individual has had an opportunity to present his credentials, how do you respond?”

Well, that’s going to depend on the circumstances and what is the driver doing, that sort of thing. Obviously, if I’m responding to some allegation of criminal activity, we’re going to handle that in a much higher level than if I’m just stopping somebody for an expired tag or something. Now, I realized any traffic stop can go bad very quickly, and we unfortunately have seen that many times.

But, if I already know there has been a crime or there has been an allegation of a crime, then I may even one step higher on my alertness level and now that I have stopped this guy in relation to some crime, I see that the he is armed, chances are you’re going to be pulled at a gun point at that point depending on what the allegations of the crime are.

On the other hand, if this is just a straight routine stop, I walk up there and say “The firearm is in a holster on your belt and you’ve got your hands on the steering wheel” and there’s no other indication of anything criminal. Then chances are, what I’m going to do is I’m just going to get on the radio, a buzz pause radio, “I’ve got a subject here that may be legally armed just go ahead and start me other unit” And then I’m going to try and make contact with, with the driver. Knock on the window or whatever the case may be and try to address the situation that way.

Assuming the driver doesn’t do anything silly; we’re probably going to be fine. We’re going to have a nice conversation. I’m going to handle the enforcement action. He’s going to be put on his way. If on the other hand, I knocked on the window and he makes a reach for his gun, then that’s obviously a situation in which he’s probably going to get shot. It’s just — it’s kind of hard to say what my reaction is going to be in every circumstance because it’s going to just depend on the situation and what is the driver doing and everything else.

If you’re sitting there, your hands are on the steering wheel and you have a firearm, maybe open carry is legal or it just happens to be exposed because of the way you’re sitting in the car or something like that. I’m going to knock on your window and we’re going to have a pleasant conversation.

On the other hand, if I walk up there and you’ve got a gun that’s tucked under your leg, that’s going to be a little bit of a different situation because most people don’t ride around with a gun tucked under their leg ready for immediate action when the police pull them over. So that’s going to create a much higher level of concern for me and we’re going to address in that issue. And then, we’re going to address that issue.

Jon goes on to ask, “When the individual hands you his or her driver’s license along with their concealed weapons permit, do you automatically recognize they’re a good guy, or do you become more apprehensive knowing that they may possess a firearm?”

Well for me, I generally won’t recognize them as a good guy. But that doesn’t mean that I become lackadaisical. That means you still get run through NCIC, FCIC to make sure you’re not wanted.

You also, I’m going to check to make sure that you got a good driver’s license, you’re not suspended or anything else. I recognize a thing. CCW permit does mean that you’ve have a background check but that doesn’t mean since that time you haven’t maybe have it revoked or you haven’t taken on a drug habit, or whatever the case may be. Or maybe you just, or issued the permit incorrectly.

There are a lot of states that don’t even have a photo ID or a photo on the permit or anything else. So, if you are not driving, or maybe you tell me, “Sir, I don’t have my license with me. It is my car”, or whatever, I may not be able to immediately confirm that. So even you on the permit [??]. But generally, I’m going to recognize you as a good guy and I think most police officers lead the same way but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get better treatment or worst treatment because we’re not going to be lackadaisical.

And certainly, I would encourage any police officer out there that encounters someone with the CCW permit to recognize that this person has in fact been through a background check. They have in fact had finger prints taken and everything else. Most states require them to have some type of training before they are issued the permit.

So, generally speaking, you come across somebody with a concealed weapons permit. Generally speaking they are in fact a good guy and I’ve seen a variety of statistics that are out there that show that of all the subpopulations out there in the United States, the folks that have a CCW permit are folks that are less likely to commit crimes.

They’ve just a fraction of them will ever have their permit revoked and of those that have their permit revoked, for if you have them or actually of their crimes [??], sometimes it’s for non-payment of traffic fines or parking tickets or something like that. Sometimes, its clerical errors or they didn’t submit the right paper work for their reapplication. There’s a lot of stuff that’s out there. Yes, concealed weapons permit holders commit crimes but generally had a much more infrequent number than any other segment of population.

Jon asked, “If the individual is legally carrying, do you disarm them during the traffic stop?”

Again, that’s going to depend on the circumstances. Generally speaking I will not. But if there is a criminal allegation, then yes. Absolutely, I will. If someone has accused you of shoplifting and gave me your tag number and I spotted your car and I pull you over on traffic stop, then yes absolutely I’m going to disarm you because I’m there investigating a criminal allegation. And it would just be absolutely silly or stupid of me to allow someone I am investigating for a crime to stand there with a firearm.

On the other hand, if we’re talking about just the traffic stop; then generally, I’m probably not going to. But again, it depends on the circumstances. What is your demeanour? What is –? Are you acting in a way to cause me to fear that you may try to do something stupid? Or are you just — average guy maybe a little nervous because you’ve being stopped by the cops, that’s fine.

Where is the weapon in relation to the documents that I may need from you. For example you say, “Sir, I’ve got a firearm in my glove box and that’s where I’ve got my insurance, my registration, and my driver’s license.” You know what, I’m not going to let you just reach in there and grab that stuff out. Okay, I’m going to need that information. We’re going to have to work out something to where I can come over there and maybe remove the firearm from the glove box.

You can find the documents or if you don’t want me rifling through there, that’s fine but I’m not just going to let you do something that would be dangerous, not just to me; but then also something that will create danger for yourself because you’re reaching for a gun and, men, obviously that’s not going to have a good outcome for you either. So, that just gets back to — It depends on the circumstances.

Yes, if I choose to disarm them, do you believe that further manipulation of firearms such as loading or unloading it is a greater danger than just leaving the firearm in the holster room [ph]? I’ve seen this talked about a little bit in a lot of the forums and Tom Gresham on his radio program.

He talks about these types of things. At the end of the day, the safe manipulation of a firearm is in fact, safe. Right? But the problem is as anytime you introduce additional manipulation of a firearm, you create a possibility of unsafe manipulation. And it maybe a situation or a police officer that’s unfamiliar with that type of gun, he’s not doing stupid with it.

For example, you’re a police officer and you carry a SIG Sauer P226. That is a double-action, single-action gun. There’s no safety on or anything and you now have in your hand, say, a 1911 cocked and locked. And you freaked out because a hammer’s back and you can’t figure out how to take the safety off or rack the slide etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Okay. And I get that. But that goes back to, as police officers, we need to know what our limitations are.

If we have a firearm that’s in our possession that we have to secure or we have to clear it, place in an evidence, whatever we’re doing with but we have to unload it; and we don’t know how to manipulate that firearm, you need to just take that firearm and maybe stick it in your trunk or something until another officer can get there, whether it’s a sergeant or a firearms instructor or just somebody on your shift that knows a little bit about that gun can get there and handle it.

Okay, at some point, I responded with another officer to a shooting and we got there and wound up being a guy who had try to commit suicide and he actually had an older break top. I think it was a 32 revolver. Maybe it was a 38. I don’t think it was a 38, I think it was a 32. Anyway, it was an old break top revolver. And for those of you that aren’t familiar with it; instead of the cylinders swinging out to the side; the top or the gun, actually, kind of folds in half and it’s called a break top because the top of the revolver where the back strap is, actually is not one solid piece. When you manipulate it, it actually opens up, exposing the cylinder of the revolver, kind of upward at an angle and you can load them and unload the firearm from that way.

When myself and another officer got there, and right behind us was our sergeant. Our sergeant actually — we had to move the firearms, so we could safely, render aid to the person that has been shot. So, the sergeant actually removed the firearm and he took it over to his car. And for whatever reason, he needed to unload it, whatever the case may be. He didn’t know how to do that. Knowing that I am a complete geek when it comes to firearms, he called me over, and I was able to show him how to do it; rather than him trying to do something that would have caused it to discharge or hurt somebody or anything else.

And I think we have to; as police officers have to recognize what our limits are. If you don’t know a gun, that’s fine, right? We can’t know everything. But if you don’t know how to operate a particular firearm and you find that firearm in your possession, you need to call over somebody to help you that does know that firearm.

I don’t know every firearm in the world. I mean if you handed me like a crew-operated weapon, whether it’s a 249, or a Modus [ph] or something like that, you know what? I’m not going to be able to help you with that. I know which way the pointy end goes, but other than that, I’m not going to be able to help you with that. But on the other hand, if you bring me a Glock or a Revolver, or a Cig or a Smith, or pretty much any handgun, most rifles and shot guns, I’ll be able to help you out.

So, just get to know the folks on your shift; know that you can rely on in that. If you don’t have somebody that knows what they’re doing, and you have to handle or you have unload a firearm, you with the sergeant, do that.

Back to Jon’s, I guess, main question here is, “Is it safer, even if you know what you’re doing, is it safer to manipulate that firearm further?”

Yes and no. Again, it depends on the situation. If it’s a circumstance in which I have to disarm someone, because they are — I’m investigating them for a crime or they’re acting in such a manner to place me in reasonable fear for my safety, I’m not going to leave them in possession of a firearm. So, I’m going to have to secure that firearm.

And most holsters are not something that are easy to take on and off. You got a lot of belts slide holsters that you would have to take their belt off. You’ve got some inside the waistband, which again you’re going to have to sit there and kind of fool around and manipulate everything. A lot of times it may be easiest just to take the firearm out of the holster.

What do you do with it at that point? The very least, I’d just take it and lay it in my trunk somewhere, out of the way; and let me conduct my investigation. And when the investigation is over, then return the firearm or if it’s going an evidence or whatever the case might be.

If it’s, if I’ve stopped somebody and I’ve had to take their firearm for some reason; and they’re now leaving, chances are I’m still not going to feel real good about them having a loaded firearm. And if I’ve just had to take some type of criminal enforcement with this guy and maybe I’m not arresting him, maybe I’m just giving him a notice to appear or a summons to appear in court on a criminal charge, you know what? I don’t feel we’re comfortable with giving that guy a loaded gun back because he’s pissed off at me.

And me handing him a loaded firearm is not necessarily in my best interest as a survival instinct situation, okay? So, you know what? I may unload that firearm and stick it in his trunk or something else and then he can leave, I can leave and he can load back up and do whatever. BBB

On the other hand, if it’s just a regular routine stop, I may — If I do have to take a firearm from him for some reason, I may just put it in his glove box for him not even unload or anything just put it in his glove box for him. Tell him, “Look as soon as you get down the road, go ahead and holster back up. But, don’t manipulate the gun in front of me, we don’t want any misunderstandings.”

But most of the time on just a routine stop, they guy’s not suspected of any criminal activity. He’s not giving me any reason to fear for my safety because of his behavior or what he’s doing or anything. Chances are, “Partner just leave it in your holster.” You and I are going to stand here and have a conversation. You don’t do anything stupid, don’t cause me any reasons to get concerned and we’re going to have a nice time. And he’ll just hold on to it.

Let’s see, Jon asked, “Is it standard practice to run the serial number of a firearm even though the individual is licensed to handle or permitted?”

That really depends on department policy and state law. For example, gun registrations are illegal in most states; but some states actually have some type of firearm registration. So in the states with those registration laws, it may be standard procedure to do this. I maybe — a law that they have to do it. I just don’t know if there’s somebody from like Maryland or Massachusetts or New York that have these types of crazy registration laws. Maybe you can let me know if it’s a policy or a law, or anything like that.

Most states don’t have registrations. Most states, it’s actually illegal to have any kind of firearms registration. So generally speaking, it’s not going to be a standard procedure.

Except, if there’s some type of criminal activity suspected, if there is criminal activity suspected, then yes, as a matter of course, I’m going to check any property that they might have associated with that crime. I’m going to check the serial numbers and NCIC to make sure that they are not stolen.

For example, if I would just stop somebody and they were suspected of some type of theft and in the backseat they’ve got a stereo system, I’m going to run the serial numbers on the stereo system also. They’re suspected of being a thief and stereo system on the backseat is something that’s a little abnormal; so, of course I’m going to check it. Same thing with the firearm; if you’ve been accused of some type of crime, chances are I’m going to.

And from the other hand, it’s just a traffic stop and you’ve told me that you’ve got a gun and I’m leaving. I’m letting you leaving on a glove box and your holster or whatever else, and no, I’m not going to check it. But that’s going to depend on the state; the department policy and everything else.

And last but not the least, Jon asked, “How do you handle the stop that the individual has no criminal history. He has a loaded firearm in the glove box for personal protection. Is it an automatic arrest? Is that individual charged with a felony? If there are additional occupants in the vehicle, are all occupants arrested?” And this goes back to state law.

In the state of Florida, It is perfectly legal for an individual to have a loaded firearm in their glove box. And the glove box does not have to be locked. So, in this state, what you’re doing is perfectly legal.

If you go to another state, and I don’t know what all the states are, But I suspect, some of the same ones I just mentioned, Illinois, Maryland, and New York. In these states, it may be illegal, it may be a misdemeanour, and it may be a felony, who knows?

Okay, if in — if you’re a law enforcement officer in one of the states, feel free to go to the comment section of today’s show and list what’s going on in your state. But in a lot of states, it’s not illegal to have a firearm, a loaded firearm in your glove box or in your vehicle. But, in the caveat is, as I’m not an attorney and I don’t necessarily live where you live, so I’m not giving legal advice on what to do or what to carry or how to carry it or anything. But it’s going to depend on the state. It’s going to depend on your jurisdiction.

And I guess, kind of the underlying question maybe with that is if you have somebody who has no criminal history, but they have some type of firearms offense now that you’ve countered them. Do you automatically arrest them? Do you automatically load them up with a felony if that’s a charge or for whatever they’ve done that type of thing?

And it’s just like anything else. It’s going to depend on the circumstances. Officers always have discretion. And if it is a case where somebody genuinely has made a mistake, and they have no prior convictions; a lot of times officers are going to go out of their way to help that person out. Because for the most part, we have a pretty good idea of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

And if it really seems like you’ve made a mistake and you don’t have any criminal record, there’s a lot of cops that are going to bend over backwards to help you out. I mean, there really are. On the other hand, you know, some places, it’s a major felony.

So, it’s a matter of know your laws, comply with the laws as best as you can and you know, politeness goes along the way also. So, being friendly toward the officer will not guarantee that you won’t be charged with a crime, if in fact you violate a law, but being rude definitely aint going to help you any.

Alright so, I hope, Jon, that helps you a little bit. Maybe it answers a few of those questions for you. For some of my other listeners out there that are armed citizens, if you’ve got any more questions, I’ll be more than happy to try to address those and answer those for you as best I can.

A lot of states have some pretty good references for different firearms laws and you may want to check online for some of those. I’ll actually post up a couple of links to some different sites. I know they’re here in the state of Florida there’s an attorney over in Orlando that puts out a very good book on Florida firearms laws. I’ll put a link up to his and definitely you want to know what the law is. That way, you don’t create yourself any problems unintentionally.

To all of my law enforcement listeners out there, I strongly encourage you to also read up on the laws because there are a lot of things that you are not taught in the Police Academy and there are a lot of misconceptions and wrong beliefs that you may have.

Not through any a will on your own but just because your sergeant didn’t know and he told you something that he had always heard or the instructor of the academy told you something wrong.

Definitely, before you take some type of action on somebody, make sure you know what are the actual legal requirements in the laws are. I’ve seen, even in my own department, I’ve seen officers say something that they thought was right, which just plain isn’t. You got to pull out the code book and look at it and actually understand what you’re looking at.

Also, to all my brothers and sisters that are in police work, keep in mind that armed citizens really are good guys. And well, maybe no one deserves any special treatment, certainly, they deserve fair treatment.

So, these were pretty much wrapped up episode 21 of the Blue Sheepdog Podcast. Again, if you’ve got any question, comments or concern, shoot me an e-mail, richard@bluesheepdog.com. Make sure you hit our website, bluesheepdog.com and if you have a chance, how about leaving me a review over on iTunes. Thanks and stay safe.

[Extro music]

—End of transcript—

Disaster Response Kits for Police Officers – BlueSheepdog Podcast 020

Richard — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:06:39 +0000

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Disaster response kits for patrol officers is the topic of the day. As a police officer, you need to have a disaster response kit for your patrol car. What is it and what do you put in it are part of today’s podcast.

Although this podcast was inspired by the horrific tornadoes that swept through the southern United States, the disaster response kit is something every police officer should have. From California mud slides to midwest flooding, and hurricanes in Florida to earthquakes in Japan, all of us may have to respond to large disasters. Having a kit with some sustainment items will make sure we can do our job and stay safe while doing it.

Resources:

DeWalt 3D LED Flashlight – In the podcast I think I said I had published a review on this light here at BlueSheepdog. Actually, I published the review at my GunsHolstersAndGear blog. Sorry for the confusion. It is a great light that I still have and use. It is one of the best inexpensive lights I own.

Transcript:

Blue Sheepdog Podcast 20

Richard: Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Blue Sheepdog Podcast. My name is Richard. We’re at Episode number 20 today, and we’re going to talk a little bit about disaster kits. What you need to put together for you to go on patrol in the middle of some type of disaster.

Before we get to all that though, I do want to make sure that I mentioned that anybody that’s just listening to podcast, and maybe found us through iTunes, definitely check out our website, bluesheepdog.com.

There are a lot of additional information on the website. There are a lot of things that we post about training articles and news articles, different things that are going on that never make into podcast, but there are a lot of great information there. So check that out.

Also in the website, you can sign up for our newsletter. The newsletter is going to have a lot of information, some training articles, different things that aren’t necessarily going to be on the regular website. It’s going to be like an addition or a bonus that we’re going to try out, put together in a newsletter form. The first newsletter goes out next week, so make sure you go ahead and sign up for that.

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All right, so today I want to talk a little bit about a disaster kit, something that you have, available to you for doing your job, police work, patrol work in a disaster. Disasters really can happen at anytime without any kind of warning.

The perfect example is the earthquake and following tsunami in Japan recently. You live in an earthquake prone area, you don’t know when the next one is coming, and you certainly don’t know that there’s going to be this monstrous tsunami that follows afterwards. So, that’s pretty much without warning.

Here in the state of Florida, we have hurricanes, of course. And usually with hurricanes, we got some sort of warning and preparation, but then there are other disasters that can happen that we have no warning for, whether it’s a tornado, or maybe there’s some type of train disaster — a train overturns, and now, you’ve got chlorine gas that’s leaking into an area. We’ve got nuclear plants here. What happens if one of those was to have a radiation leak, or we have a meltdown or something like that? So these are all types of disaster that can come up.

As I am recording this, there has been an outbreak of tornados across the southern United States. Right now, looking at, it looks like there’s at least 200 confirmed dead across multiple states. Tornados that started and continued throughout the day and into the evening just absolutely devastating; and if you’re in Georgia, and you saw the tornados hitting in Alabama, okay, you’ve got a little bit of preparation.

There’s a possibility of a tornado coming, but tornados are very unpredictable things. They can show up anywhere, and do a lot of damage, a little damage. They can be big, they can be small. You don’t know where they’re going to go. So, again, the disaster is going to be somewhat unpredictable. Even if you know the storm front is heading toward you area, you don’t know if you’re going to get damage. If you do get damage, how much, how wide spread is it? You know, it’s very unpredictable.

Things like mutual aide are really helpful in a disaster. They are what help, keep us available to respond to all sorts of life threatening emergencies. But the problem is it’s what happens when your disaster covers multiple jurisdictions.

Again, talking about the tornados that started yesterday, you’ve got tornados are ripping through multiple counties and multiple cities. How beneficial is mutual aid when you’ve got a tornado that comes for your town, but so does your neighboring town?

Suddenly, mutual aid is, is not as, it’s, it’s not the instinct here that perhaps we’ve planned for sometimes when dealing with disasters. Yeah, help is coming, but it maybe coming from multiple counties away.

Or maybe coming from the next state depending on how widespread the disaster is. Or your mutual aid, maybe National Guard’s been called up, and God bless the National Guard does wonderful things, but they’re not an instant response force because those are folks from your community, they are dealing with the disaster on a personal level that are now being called up, so they have to make their way to whatever they’re going to muster; and then, head out to provide assistance. So that’s, that’s going to be something that may take some time.

Well, what I’m going to talk about a little bit is having a disaster kit for work. And a disaster kit, in my mind, is not going to be what we sometimes think of as a bug-out bag or a get home bag.

A bug-out bag, a get home bag, or just as bare essentials that you need to get immediately out of a very bad situation; something that maybe just the basic sustainment items for, maybe 24 hours for you and your family to kind of bug-out of the situation, or if you get stuck somewhere to get home.

The disaster kit for work, though in my mind is something that’s going to be a little more inclusive; something that can sustain you for several days as you work out of your patrol car. I know that all of our departments may have plans for a disaster, where they’re going to be able to feed you, and get you water, and offer you some shelter, and all these things. And that’s great, it really is, and sometimes that works out. But a lot of times, it doesn’t.

What happens if one of those tornados comes through and it wipes out your shelter? And there goes all the department’s food, water and staging area. What are you going to do, then?

Or what happens if that’s not the case, but you’re one into the county. The shelters at the other end of the county and the roads are blocked with down trees and everything else. You’re not going to be able to get over there, and you’re going to have to rely on yourself, and on what surrounds you in the community. But if your community is suffering from a disaster, they’re not necessarily going to be able to help you. You’re going to be there to help them.

So again, the disaster kit, in my mind, is something that is going to be able to sustain you for several days on end.

Now most of you know, I do work here in the state of Florida. And here in the Florida, we got these hurricanes and we, at our department, I imagine most departments have a policy regarding officers having kind of a hurricane preparedness kit. Because whenever a hurricane is coming to the area, you know you’re going to have to be called in to duty, even if it’s vacation time, or whatever else for you. All that gets cancelled and you’re coming in to work.

So you got to shelter your families, send them off, or shelter them in place and then off to work you go. And you’ve got to bring with you certain equipment — extra uniforms, and everything that you’re going to need for three to five days of work. And the plan is, is you’re going to be at work for that period of time.

Chances are you may be there a lot longer depending on where the hurricane comes in and how bad the damage is. But for any kind of disaster, I think that having one of these bags put together ahead of time is, is a good idea.

Now as far as the bag, generally speaking, I’m thinking a bigger bag for these types of things is better than a smaller bag. Again, we’re not talking about a bug-out bag. We’re talking about something that’s going to sustain you for a period of days.

And for this, I prefer a big backpack, something like a military surplus backpack that you can pick up. They’re not cheap, but if you can get a surplus backpack for about $50, that’s actually going to be a really well-designed and pretty sturdy bag, certainly going to be cheaper than if you go out, and try to find yourself a really big nice Maxpedtion or a 511 bag or something.

And again, we’re not trying to blend into the environment or anything else. I mean, it’s obvious, we’re in a disaster. We’re the police, so something that looks all tactical is perfectly acceptable; and that can be towed in the thing around anyway. You’re going to carry it basically, from your house to your trunk. Keep it in your trunk. You may carry that inside a shelter.

But again, it’s not something you’re going to be wearing for any extended period of time, or at least I would hope not. So something big, they can hold a lot of stuff. They can organize a lot of things, and in my mind it’s the best way to go for something like this.

So, what do you carry in it? Well, you can carry a lot of different things in it, and depending on where you are, and depending on your season, and depending on what kind of disaster as you can reasonably expect. You may want to carry some different things. So I cover some things that I have in my bag that I think are kind of applicable across the board.

First thing is water. You cannot survive without water. That’s just the basic fundamental fact, and you cannot, in a disaster situation, anticipate that there will be water available to you. Water in your area maybe contaminated due to waterline that’s been broken or flooding or any other number of things.

And you also can’t expect that you will be able to walk into a convenient store, and buy some water. And, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, you may be in a remote area, and you’re just not able to get back to a command post or to your department or your staging area to get water for yourself.

So, first thing is you have to have water. And you may want to carry a little bit more water than you think you would normally need. Because if you’re out and you’re doing hard work and you’re trying to rescue people from a collapsed building, or your trying to assist fire fighters, or whatever the case maybe, you’re going to dehydrate a lot quicker due to hard work or heat or whatever you’re doing.

The more work you’re doing, the more water you need. Something to keep in mind is Gatorade or Powerade or some of these different sports drinks. Those are good, but they should not be a replacement for water. If you’ve ever done some pretty hard intensive work, whether it’s a military exercises or a SWAT training or something like that, you’ve got a bunch of gear on and everything else.

If you listened to the folks that have been through it before, if you listened to your instructors, you’ll hear them talk about you’re not supposed to drink just straight Gatorade. You mix it half and half of water, you want a very thin mixture of that Gatorade.

So a 50% Gatorade solution, if you will, is likely the best thing if you want to drink some sports drinks. Because they really do, they do provide some electrolytes and other things you need. But if you just do those, you’re actually going to do your body a little bit of harm because you’re dumping too much electrolytes into your system and not enough water. And it’s going to throw your body chemistry off.

And the last thing you want in a disaster is for you to become a victim because you’re out drinking the wrong thing. Close with water, of course, is going to be food. I recommend for a disaster, nothing fancy, keep some MREs in your bag.

Yeah, MRE is not the best food in the world to eat, but they are food and they are pretty good for calorie content. So they can keep you alive in a disaster. If you’re out on your own or pretty much on your own, for a day or two, the MREs are going to keep you alive.

If it’s much more than a day or two, and you probably are going to get a little tired of the MREs, but hopefully by, then some of your department resources are coming in to play, and maybe they can get to you a cold sandwich or something by then.

But, also in addition to the MREs, I recommend that you keep some non-perishable snack items in there, things like, granola bars, maybe some hard candy. Avoid anything that’s going to melt. I know that there are a lot of granola bars out there that have chocolate syrup on them, or these other things. I would stay completely away from those.

When I say granola bars, I mean, like the hard, crunchy ones. Because those things you can pretty much keep in your trunk all the time. They’re not going to melt on you. They’re going to be reasonably tasty when you need it. And if you’ve got a bottle of water, and one of those – that’s easy if you wolf [??] down pretty quick, give you a little bit of energy, and keep you in the efforts.

Hard candy is also good. Again, we’re trying to melt something like a — peppermints, or like, I don’t know, something like, maybe a Jolly Rancher kind of thing, something you can throw in your mouth. Yeah, it may help you with little fresh breath because after a couple of days out, you probably haven’t brushed your teeth a whole lot. Just simple things like that, kind of, it’s a creature comfort, but it can really make a big difference to you.

The next thing that I keep in my bag, I strongly suggest you keep in your bag, is heavy work gloves. We’re talking about disaster, I don’t know what kind – it maybe a tornado, it maybe a flood, or tsunami, or whatever, but, and a lot of disasters you wind up with debris, and structure damage, a broken glass, charge of metal. You want some heavy work gloves.

Getting out there, and getting cut with a piece of glass, or a piece of metal, or something like that, is never fun. It hurts. It sucks. And a lot of times, it also requires stitches, or tetanus shot, or other things.

Well, if you can avoid that, obviously, you’re going to be more effective in doing your job. Plus, if you go and get yourself cut, and you’re not able to get to some place they can soothe through you. How long are you going to walk around with that, that open wound in your hand.

Yeah, you can bind it up a little bit using some of your first aid gear. And you can pour some rubbing alcohol in it to try to keep it sanitized. And I’m sure that rubbing alcohol, in an open wound, probably will feel really good.

But it’s a lot easier to avoid that, if you can. So I recommend having at least two pair of heavy work gloves in there. Let’s face it. You want a back up for everything – you carry a back up pistol, you want to pack a pair of gloves. You never know if you, maybe somewhere, and someone comes to help you out, whether it’s another officer, a citizen, whatever.

And you may want to hand them a second pair of gloves, so they can help you more effectively. Or your first pair of gloves, maybe gets soaked in oil, or soaked in water, or whatever. And now, you don’t want to use them. They need to dry out, or they’ve been contaminated with blood, or who knows what? Having a second pair allows you to continue using gloves even if the first pair become unusable.

Kind of along those lines, you want to bring extra socks, extra underwear — if lot of disasters, unfortunately, involve water, whether it’s flooding or rain, or whatever the case maybe, tsunamis –

And you may be different; but for me, out working, I hate walking around in wet socks. And if you’re out there for 24 hours, 48 hours, and you walk around in wet socks, it sucks to life sucks. I mean, your feet get ousterabled [ph] up, and everything. It is, [expletive], it’s not fun. So I highly recommend having not just one, not just two, but – bring yourself a few extra pairs of socks.

Then what I’ve done is, is you can go get those space bags, or you can get like a vacuum sealer, or even, it’s kind of the cheap way of doing it, get yourself like a zip locked bag. And you stuff your socks in there. You roll it up tight, squeeze all the air out, and if you can, and it helps kind of keep the socks compacted.

Yeah, one of those vacuum sealers, that’s where to go. Throw yourself a couple of pair of socks – and vacuum seal that thing, and it shrinks it right down. Kind of along in the same line, toilet paper — Yeah, it’s another creature comfort, but if you’re head on your own for a while, you may not have access to toilet paper.

And contrary to what some of the big time hunters in green berets may tell you, leaves in the woods is not fun. So again, and the reason why I bring it up now is because what I’ve done with toilet paper. I’ve taken a roll of toilet paper. I’ve taken the center cardboard too bad of it, vacuum sealed it, and now it’s in a nice small tight package. It’s waterproof should I get rained on. And it’s also very compact. When I need it, just cut it open with a knife and we’re good to go.

Kind of a long on the lines at the socks, you may want to bring extra pairs of underwear. One of the things that I definitely recommend is an extra pair of boots. Now, I wear a waterproof boots on duty. A lot of guys don’t, whatever. That’s your choice, what are you feel comfortable with.

But even waterproof boots are going to get wet if you walked through on anything that is flooded out. You step into a flooded ditch. Those waterproof boots are not doing any good because all that water’s going in right over the top.

So having a second pair of boots is a good idea. And if nothing else, you can keep the first pair, try to get those dried out while you’re wearing the second pair. And if you’ve been out somewhere, you’ve gotten wet, you’re muddy, you’re nasty — putting on a fresh pair of socks and a dry pair of boots can make a big difference to your morale, to your mindset.

Now, depending on your agency, you may have alternative uniforms for inclement weather or disaster situations. For example, my department authorizes in hurricanes and certain other disasters that we can wear BDUs.

And what we have is we have BDU pants and very obnoxious t-shirts that identify us as police officers. And they are much more comfortable, and some might even agree much more practical than the standard uniforms that we wear.

If you have such a policy with your department, and if you’re allowed to do those, then you may want to go and pack those into your disaster kit. I actually don’t have those in my disaster kit. I’ve got in my locker at work, I’ve got a couple of pairs and then at the house, I’ve got a couple of pairs.

So if I know there’s a problem, I can grab the stuff from the house, take it with me. If I’m at work when a disaster happens, hopefully at some point, I can get back to the station. But at the end of the day, if I can just put on a clean pair of socks and boots, I’ll deal with the rest of the uniform, let it get a little torn up or a little wet or whatever, hell, it’s — I’ll deal with that.

But, if you have those options available to you, maybe something you want to consider, something else, though is a dust mask, kind of goes with the work gloves, if you are trying to pull people out of debris.

You don’t know what maybe in that debris, whether it’s just fibreglass insulation. It could be an older home with some asbestos. Maybe you’re working in an industrial area and quite frankly, you don’t know what you’re dealing with in those areas.

Having a dust mask does, if nothing else, it keeps the large particles from getting into your system. You look at our brothers and sisters that, or at the 911 disaster up in New York. Say disaster, I mean terrorist attack, but they’re up there dealing with the collapse of those buildings.

And a lot of them wound up, inhaling a lot of particle debris. Now, we can talk about some of these stuff maybe was or was not hazardous, or whatever. But the fact to the matter is this, inhaling the stuff, even if it’s just dirt, is detrimental to your system.

So having the particle mask or the dust mask coming in, you can get those at a Home Depot. You can get them at Walgreens or wherever. Having some of those — and they’re cheap. Having some of those in your bag that you can use, you can hand off to your partner to use, or some citizens that are helping you or whatever. They’re cheap, and they are effective with most of the stuff that will wind up dealing with.

Kind of following the same train of thought, you need to have some goggles or some type of safety glasses, some type of eye protection. A lot of those I know wear some sunglasses that are balistically rated. They’re designed to stop fragments, and everything, and that’s great. But what happens if you’re — you’ve got your sunglasses, and it’s dusk. Well, the sunglasses are probably reducing your ability to see, and, yet you’re trying to rescue somebody, you’re dealing with some different debris that you don’t want getting into your eyes.

So having some plain, just clear safety glasses, or some goggles, or something, is definitely a good investment. Again, it’s cheap. Your department may issue you such things for shooting off on the range, so you may already have some. Or swinging into a Lowe’s, or a Home Depot, or something will definitely get those for you also. You don’t have to get all the kind of fancy and everything with these, just something to protect your eyes.

Something else that you want to have, if you don’t have already are maps of the surrounding jurisdictions. In the event of a disaster, you may have to go in to surrounding jurisdictions to assist them.

So if you don’t know that area, which, chances are you’re not going to know it as well, as if you worked the area. You’re going to need some type of map or maps for those surrounding cities or counties.

Because when you hopped on their frequency, and they tell you that – you need to go to a particular location, and you’ll be able to figure out how to get there. So having those maps ahead of time is a definitely a good idea.

Also, you want to have a small amount of cash on hand, and in small bills, having a couple of $50 bills is not going to help you very much. Whereas if you had just $50, and $1 and $5, maybe because you don’t know, again, how long are you going to be on your own, about getting any assistance from the department.

So if you have to pull in somewhere, you find a gas station that’s open, you may have to pay them to pump some gas, and they may have a manual pump, but the electricity is also, they can’t run a credit card.

Or the lines may be down, so they can’t run a credit card. But if you have some cash, maybe you can get yourself $10 or $15 worth of gas, and keep your patrol car going. Or again, the place is open, and you can go in there, and get your – restock yourself on some water and some snacks.

So again, having the cash, cash talks, whereas if you got a credit card, and they have no way of running that credit card, that’s not going to do you any good. Few other things to think about, batteries, if you’re like me, you’ve got a couple of rechargeable flashlights on your duty belt. And those are great, but when the charger, or when the battery runs dead on you, unless you happen to have a charger with you, you’re not going to be able to charge that battery, or charge those batteries back up. So there are flashlights now are basically clubs of varying sizes.

If on the other hand, you keep some type of like a diesel, or a c-cell flashlight in your bag, and keep some extra batteries for it, you can kind of stay in the game a little bit. I actually have a relatively inexpensive flashlight made by the Wall.

And it’s nothing fancy, ‘doesn’t look like anything fancy, but it’s a sturdy flashlight. It’s got some motorings in it, so — and a light rain, or something like that, you’re not going to get a bunch of water in it. And I think it holds three d-cell batteries. And it’s really like some of the old bag lights we’re used to carry.

But I’m telling you right now, the LED light on it is super bright. And for a relatively inexpensive flashlight, that thing would really throw us out a lot of light. I actually did a review for that flashlight some time ago. And things still are running great. I’ll link to the previous review on the web page.

Something like that is going to do you a lot of good because it’s going to be as bright, or close to as bright as maybe your regular duty lights, but it’s something you can run off D batteries. So if you’re first set goes dead, I mean, you got a little bit of that extra cash, maybe you can buy some batteries at a store that may be open. Or you can bump some from a citizen that maybe has some extra, or whatever the case maybe. But at least you still have light.

And speaking of batteries, if you don’t already have one, I recommend you get one. But having a cell phone charger for your patrol car is a good idea. I think that most guys have one but if you don’t have one, get one.

You don’t know what communications may be affected in a disaster. You may or may not have radio contact, and you may or may not have cell phone contact. But if you’ve got a cell phone and a radio, that gives you twice the chance of being able to contact other people if you need too. Also, a cell phone that you’ve got some power too even if the cell tower is down, you still are going to have all your contact information in there.

So if you can get to a landline somewhere, you can still call your relatives, or call friends, or whoever you may have in your contact, your address book. You also — What I would recommend is having a small cleaning kit, so you can keep your gun and other equipment maintained.

You again, you don’t know, but a lot of times in a disaster, you may wind up getting wet, or you may wind up going into a dusty dirty area. And your gun, your handcuffs, your taser, your backup — all these things are going to wind up getting wet or getting grime, or getting mud, and you’re going to have to keep those things clean.

In a disaster, we’re thinking about rescuing people and assisting people, but you also have to stay aware that there are bad people abound [??]. And just because you’re there trying to help somebody in disaster situation doesn’t mean there’s not still going to be, you know, a robbery or somebody that’s going to nod up, and try to shoot you, whatever else. And having a muddy gun is not a good thing.

So you got to be able to take care of your equipment, keep that clean. And thinking along those same lines, having an extra box of ammo for all your different firearms is a good idea also. Chances are, that if you’re like me, you probably already have extra ammo in the car.

But if you don’t go ahead and get some, it’s not so much for this case that you’re thinking of being in a barricaded situation where you’re having a fight off to somebody hordes [??]. It’s more like what happens if you are working a flood and you stepped into a ditch and all of a sudden you’re up to your neck and water, and you crawl out of there. Well, all your firearms, all your ammunition, everything has been immersed. Will they fire still?

Well, maybe. But I’d rather get some dry ammo out that I know it’s going to fire rather than ammo that I’ve just dunked that may fire. So having the extra ammo there is a good idea. Last, but certainly not least to the things that I’ve mentioned today, is having some additional Advil, Tylenol, bandages, antiseptic, all the simple stuff that we frequently used in first aid.

Yes, you should have a first aid kit in your car. And yes, a first aid kit should include maybe some more advances things like some quick cloth or some tourniquets or whatever. But in a disaster situation, you are likely going to use up whatever is in that first aid kit very quickly.

And a lot of the things that you may use out of that kit are going to be some of the simple things like your bandages and antiseptics, Band Aids, your gauze 4 buys [ph], those types of things.

So a lot of that stuff is pretty cheap, especially if you can get it, either like a generic store brand or catch some of the stuff on sale. So if you can grab some extra of that stuff, it’s not unreasonable to go to some type of disaster, and deal with a mass casualty situation, and a lot of the people are not in need of advanced life support.

They may – The vast majority of people may only have some pretty significant cuts or whatever, and by having bandages and antiseptic and gauze, and what not on hand, you can actually wind up bringing a lot of help, a lot of comfort to people.

Something to consider, and this isn’t something you necessarily carry in your bag. It’s something you carry, kind of with you all the time, is to plan ahead, think about these things in advance, how are you going to deal with things, try to calm mentally, prepare yourself. Chances are, you’re not going to have to deal with a “mass cows” of a major disaster during your career. Okay, that’s — Those are the odds. But just because that maybe the odds doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be prepared for it.

We do a lot of training for firearms, and then surviving a shooting, yet most of us don’t actually get into shootings right. But the consequences of not training are pretty high. It’s the same thing with dealing with disasters and mass casualty incidents. Need to go ahead, and start thinking about those things now.

Because when they happened, if you’re, then just starting to think about it, you’re going to be much more likely to inappropriately respond, to fail to respond, or overreacting to the situations. And inappropriate response is not a luxury you have.

You maybe on your own, or you maybe working with other people, but you have to respond appropriately. There are lives literally that hang in the balance, and it’s going to be up to you to do what you can to save as many of them as you can.

I took some time last night, and was listening online to one of the sheriff’s departments that was affected by the tornados that came through the South. And I gave the dispatchers and all the emergency personnel on the radio a lot of credit. They sounded like real professionals. They were handling their jobs. They were doing what they are supposed to do.

And the radio traffic was clear, it was understandable. And that was clear, they were also overworked. They had some pretty bad scenes that they were trying to respond to. One particular scene, and I mean, these calls are just coming back to back to back. And they are trying to do their best to get them out, and find emergency responders to get to them.

And even with these awful things are dispatching, they still had an excess of a 100 other priority calls holding, people in need of real emergency assistance. But they dispatch, they had, I believed it was four or five ambulance cruise coming from a neighbouring county – they came up on the air, buys that they are in service.

They are at the EMS staging area, a particular part of the county, and they are available for calls. And then, immediately sent to the EMS units, to an apartment complex where they had several buildings that had collapsed, multiple traumas, and multiple entrapments. And the only thing the dispatch could do is dispatch to the EMS cruise there, and tell them that as soon as they had a fire crew available to assist with the entrapments, they’d be in round.

So how are you as –? When this case — There was a couple of paramedics, but if you are the deputy, or you are the police officer responding to that, have you prepared yourself mentally to go into that scene where you’ve got many victims, and help maybe coming, but it’s going to be a long ways off, and when it gets there, it’s not going to be in we’re near enough.

How are you going to respond to that when you get there? Are you going to be able to kind of take the walking wounded, and put them to work helping you? Are you going to completely freeze up? Are you going to overreact?

You got to think about these things ahead of time. And you’re going to wind up dealing with a lot of injured people, a lot of people that are scared, that are frightened, that are looking to you for everything.

One of the sadder calls was they sent an EMS crew to, I don’t remember if it was a house, or what it was now, but the injuries they had, two small children with multiple broken bones, external bleeding, and a father who is dead. How are you responding to that?

– Because you’ve got so many different things, so many different dynamics going on there; and you don’t have anyone else coming to help you. If you’re that cop or you’re that deputy that’s responding there because there’s not an EMS crew, and you’re going there, how are you going to respond to that?

Just some things you kind of keep in mind; but as always, if you’ve got any questions, comments, concerns, feedback make sure you do — make sure you shoot me an e-mail. Also, whatever you’ve got in you disaster planning kits, I hit just some of the basics. There are lots of other things that I keep in my bag and spare of batteries for my radio and other things that are specific to me; but whatever other ideas that you have, things that you keep in your bag, you can go to the website, leave a comment on the post for the Episode number 20: The Podcast.

But other folks know what you’re carrying in your bag; and in that way, we can all learn from each other. If you’re one of the citizens or officers that are in the affected areas from these tornadoes and everything, you’re in my prayers and my thoughts and hang in there, okay? For you and for everybody else, stay safe.

[Music Extro]

BlueSheepdog Podcast 019 – Old Guys Know Stuff

Richard — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:47:41 +0000

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Old guys know stuff. I think I saw that on a t-shirt somewhere, but it is absolutely true. Seek out and talk to the veteran officers around your department, and look for training, books and interviews with others who have really been there and done that.

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BlueSheepdog Podcast 018 – Combat Casualty Care, ILEETA

Richard — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:10:22 +0000

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Steve Rabinovich joins us for a second discussion on combat casualty care. Rabinovich attended the 2011 ILEETA conference and participated in several discussions on the topics of self-care and buddy care for law enforcement. We talked about what is going on in the field of self-care in law enforcement, training and liability.

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