Yeah, I agree with you totally about the lack of training available to most officers. Though, you would think that LV Metro would have a better training budget than most.
I thought the same, but in my interactions I've found that just isn't the case. A good friend and old Marine buddy of mine is on Long Beach PD in Cali, as was his now ex wife. Big department, tons of money for training, but the typical officer like his wife never used it and only did the minimum annual qual, whereas my buddy who was also SWAT spent 25% of his paid time on training and took many off time courses on his own. Long story short, shots fired and officer down call came across, he heard his wife call over she was responding. He immediately called her and told her to stay the fuck away, that if she wants to respond to those calls then she needs to do what he told her and go to the range more than once a year, otherwise she was going to get killed.
We would always hear the joke "If the minimum isn't enough, then why is it the minimum?" In government work, shit doesn't happen unless it's mandatory and that's why I say the additional training needs to be mandatory. Dozens upon dozens of man hours and thousands of tax dollars are spent on training, yet most departments have a firearms training requirement of at best semi-annual qualification with no situational shooting that they're not well adapted to because of standardized training.
When I contracted in Afghanistan, we had hundreds of US police from across the country working on our program as mentors, and I ran the training section there for two years so I would see them all fresh off the plane from a three week workup for their quals and again every six months for requalification. While they were certainly decent with a pistol on a static line, they knew they were not well prepared for a dynamic situation including their carbines because they lacked exposure to it. We put together a one week shooting and driving course and by the end of it, they had shot as many rounds in that week as many had shot in their career, instilling foundations that more than a few came back after being in a contact situation and thanked us for training them to survive and win the fight.
It's a failure on both the department/government heads and the citizenry that our officers are not getting the skills they need. As much as people want to fault officers when a shoot goes wrong, the question also needs to be asked what part of their training was lacking that may have led to it.
Perhaps I'm drawing too many conclusions from this one incident, I'll definitely say again that the officer did a great job and even a sloppy win is still a win, but damn did it skyline a shortcoming in training.
