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Get articles like these and more in every issue of American COP.
Dave Douglas
The bucolic little Central California town of Lake Shoals was, as usual, very quiet Sunday morning. That area of California is much like what’s referred to as fly-over country by the pseudo-intellectual and quasi-erudite creatures infesting the highly urbanized areas of the East and West Coasts. The “Urbanites,” especially those from inside the beltway of DC, rejoice in looking down their noses at the “little people” of what you and I both know is real America.
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Bob Pilgrim
Outgunned And Outperformed. The FBI released its most recent and edifying study entitled, Violent Encounters: A Study of Felonious Assaults Against our Nation’s Law Enforcement Officers. The researchers selected 40 incidents from over 800 encounters, interviewed 50 police officer victims and almost 50 felons who committed felonious assaults against cops. Among many interesting revelations almost half the felons carried some kind of backup weapon, practiced with their firearms more often and enjoyed higher hit ratios than the cops they assaulted. This very sobering study hopefully will motivate police officers to train more with their duty weapon and carry backups.
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Steve Albrecht
Lt. Col. David Kilcullen is a man who knows battle. He served 21 years in the Australian Army and fought in hot spots around our globe. He served his country and then began a tour of duty with our State Department. In response to what he saw as the growing sophistication of Iraqi and Afghani fighters, he wrote a manifesto of sorts and titled it, “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals for Company-level Counterinsurgency.” Where you work may not look like Iraq or Afghanistan; it’s sad to say if we don’t do our jobs one day it might.
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Sammy Reese
Photos by: Ichiro Nagata
One is none, two is one and when you are talking Kimber Covert IIs, three is fun. Editor Dave dropped the plain brown box on my desk. I knew from the shape it most likely held guns. In this case it had three, all three sizes of the new Kimber Covert II series — full-size Custom Covert II, Pro Covert II and the Ultra Covert II were unwrapped checked for clear and fondled. When I asked Dave who was going to review them, he didn’t respond. When I looked up he had the cat-that-ate the-canary grin on his face. “You dude,” was his reply as he walked away.
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Learning to shoot with iron sights was the only option I had while shooting Campbell’s soup cans with my Red Ryder. The older guys had the really cool scopes on their deer rifles. Wanting to look cool, I made my first scope out of a paper towel roll, some string and a whole bunch of scotch tape. It looked cool to my buddies, but as far as durability and usefulness, well let’s just say when the Red Ryder fell over the scope was all but out of commission. I didn’t know it, but my home made scope was the beginning of what I know would call a full on addiction to scopes and 1X optics.
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Paul Johnston
Photos by: Ichiro Nagata
”The pistol that will never die” continues to live a life of its own, as it keeps ahead of the rest of the pack while approaching a century of service. With more companies than you might care to count making Model of 1911-style pistols, even more variations and improvements have been made to the gun — many more.
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Yeah, we know … Last New Year’s Day you wrote “Shop For Christmas!” in your monthly Day-Timer, and you were determined not to repeat last year’s 2300 hours-on-December 24th Christmas “shopping” debacle. Remember? Your partner got a handcuff key and a dusty box of Federal HydraShoks right off the shelf in your closet. You hoped he wouldn’t notice there were eight rounds missing. He did. The guy who patiently nursed you through the academy got a six-pack of Bud Lite with a bow made outta yellow Crime Scene tape on it — and the list goes on. You were determined never to let that happen again, so you carefully penciled in that reminder, and then repeated it every month — for a while.
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Mark Hanten
SIG's P250 is a new type of pistol and one that’s certain to change the way many view handgun ownership. It brings modular firearm design to a whole new level thus making it the most versatile handgun available.
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One thing that’s nice about being an editor is you get to write about stuff and put things in the magazine that always pushed your buttons; that’s a nice way of saying, “pissed you off.” One of my “buttons” is unrealistic training, better known as just training to most agencies. Some places do it right but most don’t and it’s a real disservice to cops. What should we do about it?
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Rob Garrett
Some 20-plus years ago, I wrote my first article entitled, Showdown With The Good Guys. The article covered guidelines for off-duty cops involved in an armed confrontation. The first consideration I listed was the decision to become involved or be a good witness. The second was the ability to be clearly identified as “good guy” when the troops showed up. Very little had been written about off-duty encounters and nothing was being taught in most of the academies. The thought of our families becoming targets because of our career was far from our minds unless you worked gangs in LA or Miami.
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At 2300 he leisurely crossed 100 yards of open field separating his village from my neighborhood. He lingered, as if waiting for the bus, by our bus stop. After a half-dozen of my neighbors gathered waiting for that bus, he produced an M16 from under his coat and shot them all in a single burst of full-auto fire. Changing an empty 30-round magazine for a full one, he started walking down the street shooting folks sitting on benches and looking out their apartment windows.
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Mark Hanten
Generally speaking I’m not a 1911 guy. This may be blasphemous to some, but there’re a few things in a defensive handgun I just don’t feel I get out of most 1911s. At the top of the list is reliability. Color me picky, but I want the damn thing to go off every time I pull the trigger. And I mean every time. I’m pretty good at the tap-rack-assess-bang thing when I have to be, but I’d rather just plan on a loud bang each time I squeeze the trigger.
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Small high-intensity handheld lights haven’t only spawned a whole new industry, but have given us cops relief from carrying those heavy, large, anemic-output “police” flashlights, a much longer range of dark space that we can now reach into and a whole new subject control tool. Almost any small high-intensity light you buy today will work reasonably well and will certainly do so if your comparison point is the Kel-Lights of yore. But there are real differences in today’s products — some matter while some don’t.
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Robbis Barrkman
There was a time when the citizenry actually respected the law, and for cops, verbal compliance was pretty much the order of the day. Sadly, society and attitudes have changed — some for the better but many, especially for law enforcement, for the worse. When I grew up in South Africa, formerly a colony of the British Empire, police weren’t even armed with handguns. The common weapon was a long wooden baton, a pair of handcuffs coupled with a really sour disposition (PC for shitty attitude) and a propensity to wield the baton at the least sign of “lip” or resistance. It was no wonder they consistently received compliance from the locals by using verbal commands.
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Snap out of it fellas. You’ve got to work past your feelings of imminent danger when it comes to conducting a frisk of someone of the opposite sex. I can’t single out the men though, since lady cops are violators too. To help things along, I’m going to tell you about a couple of incidents I was involved in. Since I work in the deep South, the names and situations might be colorful, but change those names and the places and I’m sure you could tell the same stories.
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Brian Dawe
Photos: Dave Douglas
Like most kids growing up, I often spent days with my
friends playing cowboys and Indians, soldier, fireman, and cops and robbers. Never once can I recall locking my friends in the basement and playing Correctional Officer. In fact, after 23 years in corrections I can honestly say I’ve never met anyone who planned to become a Correctional Officer. I believe it’s one of the reasons my profession is one of the most misunderstood and under appreciated in the nation. We often come to it by way of economic necessity, after a military career, or as a stepping-stone to other more “respected” careers in law enforcement.
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Some cases have tough facts, and some have complex legal issues; these cases are hard by their very nature. But then there are the ones where the arresting officer has already killed the case before the bad guy even gets booked in. Don’t get me wrong, we DAs make plenty of dumb mistakes that lose cases. But even so, we can only try as good a case as we get. So we’re gonna look at three things that can kill your case: first, Miranda, then evidence and witnesses, and we’ll wrap it up with general stupidity.
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Dave Spaulding
Since the early 1980s, the words “survive” and “survival” have been as much a part of cop lingo as handcuff, citation and emergency lights. We’ve been bombarded with the phrases Street Survival, Officer Survival, the Will to Survive, Survival Mindset and Ultimate Survivors. The message Chuck Remsberg and Dennis Anderson, founders of Calibre Press, sent law enforcement was loud and clear. Due to their efforts, many cops who probably would not have lived to see their retirement did. They’re probably responsible for saving more law enforcement and military lives than any two men in history — and neither ever wore a police uniform. I’m truly proud to call them my friends.
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John Connor
It's a very rare, way cool thing when the first time you use a new weapon system operationally, it's fun and funny. Even better when none of your troops get hurt. That's the way it was for me and laser sights.
Lasers were spanky-new then, and I had just spun-up a metro SWAT unit on `em. That's when we got the call on a bungled-robbery hostage-taking incident, and we rolled with a bag-full of berry-blasters. On arrival, we learned this was a combination SWAT mission, training session and situation comedy.
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Tiger McKee
Violent encounters typically take place within arms reach, happen in the blink of an eye, and the vast majority of these confrontations - more than 70 percent - occur in low light environments. Even Joe Average, who always sticks to the "nice" parts of town must occasionally make that late night run to the quick-stop, and dark parking lots are a favored hangout for nocturnal trouble makers.
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J.I. Galan
One of the newest of the so-called "non-lethal" or "less lethal" options available to law enforcement and security is actually not new at all. Dubbed the "Negotiator" by its current manufacturer, Westun LLC, this device dates back to the '60s, when it was marketed as the "Stun-Gun" by MBA Associates of San Ramon, Calif. However, the original concept of the Negotiator was patented way back in 1929, according to the big honchos at Westun.
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Les Baer's Premier II Super-Tac 1911
- .45 ACP Finesse -
Roy Huntington
In the beginning, John Browning created the 1911 and he looked at it and said, "It is good." And he was right. Of course, since then, tens of thousands of pistolsmiths have disagreed with John, some with much waving of arms and pointing of fingers. But nonetheless, when old man Browning finished his last file stroke on the design, I wonder if he smiled slyly, perhaps knowing the controversies he would cause over the next century? I like to think so.
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Dave Anderson
Photos by: Ichiro Nagata
SureFire is best known for its high quality flashlights, with models for every purpose you can imagine and a few you probably never imagined. SureFire recently began offering a new product - a lightweight, compact, durable and highly efficient suppressor for the M4 and M16 rifles.
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Charles E. Petty
Photos by: Ichiro Nagata
A couple of years ago, a polymer-framed, 9mm pistol appeared from Croatia. It was sold here as the HS-2000. More than a few folks thought it was an improvement over the Glock. That was not a popular sentiment amongst "tupperware" devotees.
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