Newhall Shooting - A Tactical Analysis by Michael E. Wood

Author:Michael E. Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781440235917
Publisher: F+W Media

CHAPTER 15

Skill with the Safety Equipment

“You are no more armed because you are wearing a pistol than you are a musician because you own a guitar.”

—Colonel Jeff Cooper, Principles of Personal Defense

Continuing with Ayoob’s model, we reach the third survival priority of “Skill with the Safety Equipment,” which encompasses a wide range of individual skills with vehicles, weapons, medical equipment, and other items. However, for the purposes of this analysis, the focus will remain on the officer’s skill at arms.

Interestingly, much of the legend and lore that surrounds the Newhall incident inordinately focuses on this issue. For many law enforcement officers and members of the armed civilian community, their knowledge of Newhall is limited to a few quips or sound bites about the officers’ inability to handle powerful .357 Magnum ammunition they did not train with and the errors made during weapons reloading. These factors are certainly significant and bear further discussion, but they must not be allowed to dominate the conversation about Newhall, lest they drown out the more significant lessons about mindset and tactics. Furthermore, they must be reckoned with the growing body of knowledge about the involuntary physiological changes associated with sympathetic nervous system activation and how these changes negatively affect performance.

It’s worthwhile to remind the reader that this priority is relatively far down Ayoob’s list. Mental awareness and preparedness and proper use of tactics play a more important role in the survival equation than an officer’s ability to shoot, because they make it less likely that the officer will actually need to shoot to solve the problem. Most law enforcement scenarios are resolved without the need for weapons employment, but none of them are exempt from the requirements of mental preparation and the sound execution of good tactics. And when tactics fail, or when the criminal is determined to resist regardless of the superiority of the officer’s tactical advantage, an officer’s skill at arms is the only thing standing between him and certain injury or death.

Training

The state of CHP training at the time of Newhall has been discussed in greater detail previously, but no discussion of individual skills would be complete without recognizing the criticality of proper training to develop these skills.

At the time Officers Gore, Frago, Pence, and Alleyn were cadets, the quality of instruction at the CHP Academy was equal to or better than that provided by most other law enforcement agencies, but the program still had weaknesses and deficiencies. The cadets were unable to fully integrate some of the lessons from their academy training into their skill set, because they did not get to spend enough time learning and ingraining the skills prior to graduation. Also, after graduation, the officers were deprived of a robust probationary “break-in” period that would have allowed them to fill in the blanks and establish a solid foundation for skill development.

While the CHP Academy’s training compared favorably to others, the state of the art of law enforcement training at this time was still immature and inadequate across the profession.

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