By Michael R. McFall
Deseret News
Bob Idle pointed his gun at the assailant and demanded he put the knife down.
“You’re going to have to kill me first,” the knife-wielding assailant shouted through a black face mask. Give the man a cape, and the full-body-armored assailant would have looked like a comic-book super villain.
Idle, a West Valley police officer, ordered the assailant to drop his weapon one more time. Three shots rang out. The knife and the assailant’s body hit the floor.
“That was quite realistic. I was nervous,” Idle said.
The assailant, Todd Mitchell, picked himself off the ground and pulled off his mask. One of the most useful training exercises Idle’s ever had was over.
He and about 70 other officers from five states had gathered in the Salt Lake County sheriff’s shooting range Wednesday in Parley’s Canyon to test out new training exercises, hosted by aeronautics-company ATK’s Clearfield-based ammunitions branch, at no cost to the agencies. The exercises included two shooting ranges — one for pistols, one for rifles — with gel that mimicked human flesh and a realistic combat exercise between an officer and an armed assailant.
The exercises were meant to simulate dangerous situations as realistically as possible, because situation training using paintball guns with no recoil against paper cut-outs doesn’t get the job done right, said ATK manager Randy Clifton. Clifton said he’s seen officers trained to drop to a knee and raise their hand when they’ve been shot in training — and then do the same thing in an actual shootout.
“You do as you train,” said Salt Lake County Sheriff Jim Winder. “When you’re put in a stressful situation, you mimic what you’ve been trained to think is the appropriate response.”
Winder also said it’s invaluable for an officer to know exactly what his or her bullet will do when it leaves the chamber. So for the exercises Wednesday, two shooting ranges were set up where officers were able to fire at the ballistic gel mimicking, as close as possible, human flesh. The officers watched as the rounds blew cavities into the yellow gel, and even more valuable, how deep they went after going through real car windows.
Idle knows a thing or two about a bullet’s effect on the human body. He was shot seven times 12 years ago when a traffic stop turned sour; the man inside the stopped car had a rifle. Idle said using a paintball gun that feels and recoils like his service weapon against Mitchell in an armored suit, put him right back in the same stressful mindset as that day in 1997.
“You learn to make a decision — the fast and right decision,” he said.
Idle and the other officers said they will take what they learned Wednesday back to their agencies — almost 60 in all — and tell their fellow men and women in blue these realistic simulations are an invaluable education.
Copyright 2009 Deseret News