Editor’s Note: In PoliceOne “First Person” essays, our Members and Columnists candidly share their own unique view of the world. This is a platform from which individual officers can share their own personal insights on issues confronting cops today, as well as opinions, observations, and advice on living life behind the thin blue line. This week’s essay comes from PoliceOne Member Mark Schraer. Do you want to share your own perspective with other P1 Members? Send us an e-mail with your story.
By Sgt. Mark Schraer (ret.)
Fairfield (Calif.) Police Department
On April 5, 1970, four California Highway Patrol Officers were murdered in the City of Newhall, just North of Los Angeles. These murders, which became known as the “Newhall Incident,” presented a watershed moment for police training and police tactics nationwide.
For those unfamiliar with this tragedy, these murders occurred after Troopers Walter Frago and Roger Gore made a traffic stop on a vehicle in which at least one subject was known to have just brandished a pistol at a motorist. Lacking the benefit of the tactics that we use today as a result of their murders, most notably the high risk traffic stop, Frago and Gore approached the car, guns drawn. As Gore removed the driver and began a “wall search” against the driver’s door of the suspect’s vehicle. As Gore was performing the wall search, the passenger suddenly opened his door and began shooting Trooper Frago, who was standing just behind the passenger door; his shotgun in a port arms position. As Trooper Gores attention was diverted by the gunshots, the driver removed a pistol from his waistband and shot Gore several times.
Within seconds of these murders, a two-officer cover unit arrived. Troopers George Alleyn and James Pence engaged in a gun battle with the two suspects, expending rounds from their pistols and the police shotgun. Tragically however, as the officers were reloading, both were murdered. In less than two minutes, four young officers lay dead or dying at the hands of two suspects who were never hit and who possessed no significant firearms training.
Most will correctly tell you that these murders created a watershed moment in regard to the attention given to effective officer safety techniques. Significant advancements in police tactics were made as a result of these murders, most notably the high-risk traffic stop. Many tactics used throughout the nation today are as a direct result of the lessons learned from this tragedy, most notably proper searching techniques and the high-risk traffic stop.
It needs to be stressed however that this incident was in fact two separate events that provided two distinctly different sets of lessons. While tactics have greatly improved from the lessons learned from the murders of the officers who initiated the traffic stop, I strongly believe that we have still failed to fully learn the lessons provided by the subsequent lost gunfight that took the lives of Troppers Alley and Pence.
The Newhall incident became famous for the officer who pocketed spent casings into his jacket during this gunfight, an officer who grew up and is now buried in my community. However, the more sobering fact is that neither of the officers who engaged in the gunfight struck the two assailants. The failure to hit these suspects allowed the suspects to stay in the fight and eventually murder two more officers.
I am in no way faulting any of these officers. They fought as they were trained to fight, or at least as it was accepted in law enforcement at the time. We should only honor these officers for their bravery but also learn all we can from their deaths and the deaths of so many other officers since. But as we should honor their sacrifice and the lessons learned from their murders, we should also have long ago grown fed up with the fact that forty years after their murders, police officers continue to die in gunfights that they were never adequately trained to win. We have had enough of these watershed moments in law enforcement to recognize that this issue should once and for all be addressed so that effective standards can be developed and taught nationwide.
Many law enforcement agencies have excellent programs and committed firearms instructors. However, the methods, terminology and training priorities in too many agencies do little to address the most serious threat to police officers — the close quarter gun battle.
My general assessment of law enforcement firearms training is the result of 15 years as a firearms instructor. In this time I have had the opportunity to train officers from several other agencies through in-service and instructor level classes, and have provided the in house training to the almost one-hundred officers hired by my former agency over the past decade. Almost all of these officers have been extremely complimentary of the training program and priorities created within my agency, with many telling me that this was the most effective firearms training of their careers. I appreciate a compliment as much as anyone but these compliments frustrated and concerned me as to the effectiveness of the firearms training that many officers are still receiving.
I would often wonder how is was possible that one day of training at my agency could be the most effective training for police officers who were years, even decades into their careers?
Most firearms instructors have the best of intentions and they teach because they want to help officers. However, I think that we can become so absorbed in the process of training that we don’t take the appropriate time to challenge conventional training methods and ask if our priorities are in the right place. The following points are stated in the hope that they will promote greater discussion amongst instructors and the officers that we train.
Training for the Gunfight
The term “gunfight” best describes most armed encounters in law enforcement. The distance and duration of an armed police encounter is very similar to the gunfights in the Westerns that many of us watched as children. It is close up, violent, and over within seconds. Too many instructors apparently overlook these obvious similarities when deciding what to teach their officers. While “run and gun” and high stress courses have their place in firearms training, police officers should first develop, and then master, the superior shooting skills and mental preparation to overcome the disadvantage that they will face in a close quarter gunfight — the fights within two or five yards from the suspect. What else could be more important than first teaching the skills that officers will need to win the close quarter fights.
These are the fights with the greatest challenges and the fights that officers most frequently lose. Officers should master the techniques of how to quickly and effectively get into the fight before they are exposed to high stress courses. Without mastering the core skills, these “Run and Gun” courses will only reinforce poor shooting skills and gun handling habits.
The annual FBI LEOKA — Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted — report chronicles how officers have been murdered. Year after year, the report clearly states the following:
1.) Most fights in which officers are murdered last less than ten seconds
2.) The officers are murdered by handguns at close range — usually within three yards of their killers
3.) Less than half a magazine is expended from either the officer or the assailant
With these points in mind, why do so many instructors and officers still fail to train in courses and shooting standards that help officers to win these specific fights? Simply put, if an officer loses the initial close quarter gunfight there will be no time and little use in the movement from one cover position to another, as so many “tactical” courses prescribe. I believe that officers should first master, and I stress master, the skills necessary to win the three to five yard, three to five second gunfight. Only after developing a lighting quick and formidable reaction to this threat should officers train for fights in which they are afforded the luxury of time, distance, and the ability to move to cover.
Terminology — How Instructors Can Kill the Fighter Mindset
I challenge anyone to find a professional fighter who trains with the mindset to “qualify” or “meet the minimum requirements” in their fighting disciplines. I also challenge anyone to find a trainer who would use such terminology, or who would even speak of “surviving” rather than “winning” the fight. Why is it then, with the stakes significantly greater than a win/loss record or being knocked unconscious, that law enforcement firearms instructors traditionally use these exact terms while training officers for gunfights? These sterile terms and the courses in which they are used often have little if anything to do with the actual fights that officers are murdered in. They are passed down from one generation of instructors to the next with little thought as to how counterintuitive they are to what we should be attempting to teach. We should eliminate or drastically reduce the use of such innocuous terminology and replace these terms with ones used in other fighting disciplines. We need to constantly instill the mindset that this is firearms training not “range qualification.” We should avoid terms that confuse this point.
Great fighters train with a desire to win but also train out of fear at the thought of losing. Sterile terminology such as “qualifying” and “meeting minimum requirements” also remove the healthy fear that officers should have at the thought of losing a gunfight. Officers should not fear the fight, but instead, fear the thought of being unprepared for one. A good instructor should do everything possible to remind officers, even scare them if necessary, about the costs of a lost gunfight.
Have a Training Program
Just as the fourth year athlete is more capable than the freshman, firearms programs should be challenging and should require increased abilities over time. How is it possible and permissible for recent academy graduates to be better shooters and more mentally prepared fighters than officers with years and even decades of experience?
This is possible and common because too few agencies have actual training programs, programs that build on the basics rather than just retraining the same shooting courses over and over again. An effective program created around the development of core gun-fighting skills is the most important factor for a successful program. A measure of a successful program is one in which a ten year veteran would be able to walk off the street and teach a new officer the skills they need to know, as well as back up this instruction with demonstrated ability.
Instructors should create a program that has Pistol Standards, Standards that are challenging and require some training to achieve. These standards should primarily focus on the close quarter gunfight, but should also include distance shooting and gun-handling drills.
Every agency should have a training program that provides officers with the most bang for their buck — pun intended. Simply put, after we train officers to safely carry their pistols, we should be committed to making them as dangerous as possible at fighting with them.
Teach Officers About the Weakness of the Pistol
There is a good reason why members of the US military are not searching for Al Qaida with pistols. In the military, the pistol is at best a back-up weapon. I don’t imagine that the people who are sent out to find and kill terrorists spend a lot of time discussing the most effective pistol caliber; and neither should you. What we should be doing is reminding police officers that their pistol will likely be the only weapon that they will have access to for most close quarter gunfights; so they need to make sure that they are as formidable as possible with that weapon.
The weakness and limitation of this weapon must be stressed to police officers and is the reason why we should require strict shot placement to vital areas (heart, lung and brain only). Too many officers have injured their killers with ineffective “center mass” hits from pistols. Non-vital, center mass hits should be scored as a miss and should require additional training. To some this may sound harsh however we are talking about winning a fight with a weapon that is likely no more powerful than the one the suspect is trying to kill you with! We have to demand more of our officers and their ability to fight. The suspect gets to decide the when and the where to fight; we should make sure our officers have every other advantage.
Instill the Urgency to Train
Finally, while I am concerned with our efforts to prepare officers for gunfights, I am equally concerned about the apathy that many police officers display toward their own ability to win a gunfight; this despite all of the evidence on how officers are murdered.
Rather than seeing firearms training as a requirement to carry their pistol, or as a skill reserved for the gun enthusiast, every officer should see this training as what may one day determine whether or not they carry on in their roles as husbands, wives, mothers and daughters. The stakes are both that simple and that significant. It is ultimately the officer’s responsibility to prepare for his/her gunfight however, it is the responsibility of the firearms instructor to remind officers of the real purpose for training.
We need to once and for all raise training standards for all officers and challenge them to both develop and then maintain these abilities throughout their careers. In some of the instructor level courses that I have helped teach, I have encouraged instructors to tell students to bring in a photo of their family to the class as a reminder of who they are really training for. This may sound dramatic to some, and perhaps it is. However, it is an honest reminder of why we teach and why they need to train.
Whatever the method you use to motivate officers, always remind them of the ultimate purpose of law enforcement firearms training; effectively training officers so that they can win their own “Newhall.”
About the Author
Mark Schraer served with the Fairfield Police Department for 24 years. He was a defensive tactics instructor for twelve years and as a firearms instructor and rangemaster for the past fifteen years. Mark was also a member of the department’s SWAT Team for thirteen years, serving as both a firearms instructor and team leader
