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By Jeremy Kohler, Terry Hillig
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS — Federal law lets police officers bring firearms almost wherever they please, but common sense dictates whether they should carry them while drinking, policing experts said Tuesday in the wake of Sunday’s shootings involving two St. Louis officers.
No one has said the officers involved were drunk or even drinking. But the setting - 1 a.m. at a sports bar in Pontoon Beach - suggests that alcohol might have played a role.
During a struggle in the parking lot of Mac N. Mick’s Sports Bar & Grill, off-duty St. Louis officer Bryan Pour fired his department-issued 9mm handgun, striking a 25-year-old man in the chest.
A Pontoon Beach police officer responded and shot and wounded a second St. Louis officer, identified by Pour’s lawyer as Christopher Hantak. Both victims were in critical condition.
Pour and Hantak and at least three other city officers were at the bar celebrating a birthday and wedding engagement, said Pour’s lawyer, Albert S. Watkins.
While authorities have not released details of what led up to the trouble, all signals point to a classic bar fight that exploded because of a noxious mix - alcohol and guns.
“That should be discouraged,” said David Klinger, a former Los Angeles police officer and an associate criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
He said most departments allow or even require officers to carry firearms while off duty - and few prohibit it. But officers who carry should be able to demonstrate good judgment, he said.
The St. Louis Police Department lets off-duty officers decide whether to carry their weapons. But their trainers preach that “combining weapons and intoxication is a potentially deadly and potentially career-ending mix,” said police spokeswoman Erica Van Ross.
Pour graduated at the top of his Police Academy class in July and started on patrol in the city’s 4th District, which includes downtown.
Said Watkins: “You’ve got a young man who graduated magna cum laude in aeronautical engineering from St. Louis University. He has no prior anythings - nothing but a stellar reputation.”
Now Pour is waiting for prosecutors to present facts from the incident to a Madison County grand jury. He was released from jail without bail Monday while investigators with the Illinois State Police sort out what happened. His employer immediately ended his short career.
As a probationary officer, Watkins lamented, Pour has no recourse to get it back.
Bob Douglas, a retired Baltimore police officer who speaks at training seminars about the relationship between drinking and police, said what happened in Pontoon Beach appeared to be another chapter in tragic police history. Drinking is ingrained in the culture, he said.
Douglas, executive director of the National Police Suicide Foundation in Pasadena, Md., has simple advice for officers: “Stay out of the stinking bar.”
Officers may not like his message, he said, but “don’t put yourself in a compromising position.”
Klinger says he advocates that officers who are planning to drink hand their weapons to a nondrinking cop buddy for safekeeping.
Darren Carlton was a police officer and the police chief of East Alton, before he became coordinator of the criminal justice program at Lewis and Clark Community College in Godfrey.
Carlton believes officers should be prudent about their behavior even when off duty.
“I consider myself from the old school,” he said. “I believe that what I did (off duty) reflected on my profession, my department.”
Copyright 2008 St. Louis Post-Dispatch