NCJ Number
174509
Journal
Policing Volume: 21 Issue: 3 Dated: 1998 Pages: 510-533
Date Published
1998
Length
24 pages
Annotation
This article evaluates the usefulness of police handgun training and evaluation.
Abstract
The article considers officer safety over the past quarter century, and examines police handgun training and qualification as well as the evidence which indicates no clear predictive link between training and gunfighting performance. There are serious reasons to question the validity of police recruit and in-service handgun training activities which supposedly enable the police to fire accurately during armed confrontations and thereby incapacitate their opponents - though not necessarily kill them - or at least to cause sufficient physiologic disruption to degrade their opponentsþ abilities to carry out harmful actions. To be valid, police handgun qualification must reflect the realities of armed confrontations, requiring research into such things as the nature and characteristics of field shootings, physiological limitations which cannot be mitigated by training, as well as the doctrine and specific techniques taught to police officers for defeating lethal assaults and seizing dangerous fleeing felons. Figures, table, note, references, appendix