If The Zombies Attack Me, Will The Police Shoot Into The Crowd?
BY Herschel Smith
12 years, 7 months ago
Gilbert, Arizona Police Sergeant Bill Campbell advocates an interesting way to train police.
OK, my fellow Firearms Instructor… You’ve been tasked with creating a short block of in-service training for the department, but budget and time constraints have dictated that each officer will only get to shoot 50 rounds of handgun ammo and you have only one hour of training time. Your goal for this training session is to work some shooting drills from the patrol car doors in a dimly-light environment, maybe even incorporating some cover. You want to make the training as fun and interesting as possible so the officers will enjoy it, and of course, you’d like to make it memorable so they will look forward to returning to training at their next available opportunity. What should you do?
Okay, but who doesn’t like putting 230 grain slugs down range at any time and under any circumstances? It’s fun and interesting and memorable any time. Why does he have to make it fun? It’s already fun. But continuing with his recommendation, he gives us the situation he’s set up for his trainees.
The drill briefing itself is rather simple, and our instructions went like this:
When the lights go out, you will be attacked by a group of four Zombies. Using the car doors for cover, draw and engage the Zombies with a couple of rounds as they show themselves. Whenever a light is shining on the Zombie, he is considered a threat to you and will remain so until the light shining on the Zombie goes out. Occasionally, you will see a Zombie attacking an innocent person. In this case you must hit the Zombie but avoid hitting the innocent person. Reload when you can or must — using teamwork to avoid reloading at the same time. At some point, the Zombies will retreat. That is your cue to move tactically to the ground cover and be prepared to use a kneeling position to continue the drill from behind the ground cover. When the Zombies reappear, continue to fight them from behind the ground cover as you had from behind the car doors, fighting until there are no further Zombie threats.
You can read the entire article, including the use of Zombie targets. I’m okay with Zombie targets. In fact, I’m good to go with the great Zombie apocalypse. Bring it.
But here is the problem. During engagements, a very low percentage of shots fired from police hand guns actually hits their intended target. It might be as high as 25%-30%. But it’s probably no higher than 20%. In one recent engagement, the New York City Police discharged 71 stray bullets, one of which killed a bystander.
Does Sergeant Bill Campbell really want his officers to learn the behavior to shoot at assailants and victims entangled together in an attempt to hit the assailant? Really? Is this good training?
Let me go on record right now with the following. If I am ever attacked by Zombies, I’ll be armed. Let me do the fighting. I don’t want anyone shooting into the crowd.
On September 16, 2011 at 7:26 am, Warbucks said:
I would start by splitting the training, there is situational awareness learning that occurs in computer simulation now so heavily relied on by the military but it has to be blended with live fire for obvious reasons on testing control.
Even cheap computer simulation is of great training value when the weapons and targets respond to within say a 1% of reality and provide sufficient variation.
The weaknesses of cheap computer simulation are many. There are no team members to coordinate. A simulation that also allowed tactical coordination with members would be a useful tool.
The system has to be cheap, like mass produced and worked with simulated weapons. The trainee at some point in such exposure begins to demonstrate learning from their mistakes. The system needs to be cheap enough to be useable often to be of lasting value.
Teaching is focused on these areas:
Assessing the battle environment
Assessing realistically the need for back up
Adapting and deploying the best probable solution
Adapting to changing conditions
Developing inner confidence quickly that you are not in over your head and will probably prevail.
Using your actual weapon array has to be live training to wrap around the computer simulation. But the cost can be reduced through simulation for some types of training.
On September 16, 2011 at 7:38 am, Warbucks said:
Interesting footnote: the subconscious brain takes a long time to learn that a simulation is not real. Eventually it will figure out the threat are not real. But the is in the interim the real possibility of mild combat fatigue, interim depression if one is inclined to that, crankiness and short temper. It takes sometimes 100 to 200 hours of complex simulations to have these reactions first emerge then dissipate through self healing as the subconscious brian eventually also leans it’s not under threat. Weird, huh?