Arming the Police!

Kia Ora,

Here we go again the great 'To arm the Police or not' debate.

That might seem a strange thing to be talking about in this day & age, but the New Zealand police force are really an unarmed force with access to firearms.

Everytime there is a major incident or a police officer is the victim, as at the weekend, of a cowardly attack the great debate surfaces.

It comes down to a couple of things.

First is it bad enough out there to warrant the police to be wearing firearms all the time?

You bet it is. It is a war out there & there is no other way to look at it.

The Security Industry also needs arming but as I say I would not arm 99% of those currently in the industry with a ball point pen let alone a firearm to which experienced police officers have replied along the lines that the same applied to 75% of the police force.

Then there is the issue of training required for the force to be up to the standard to carry fire arms.

Current training levels are way below even a minimum standard. Which is why currently 75% of the force should not be armed.
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You need to be able to confidently use the weapon you are issued with. Some of the stories of weapon handling skills or lack of them are horrifying.

Big difference when you come from a military background especially say Infantry you end up with the weapon as part of you.

Since the police have so little training most of the issues come when they have to handle weapons again.
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Many of us who worked in Iraq had not handled weapons for years after leaving the military. Two hours good training had us up to speed on four weapons as it was ingrained, although after the initial induction there was an issue when group some of us were sent to be part of could not strip & assemble one of the weapons systems for two months after.

Why? We were given brand new weapons still in grease. Despite degreasing them it was still a struggle to use & the armourer advised us to stop until we had fired some rounds through them. Unfortunately like the NZ police cost came into it & it took over 3 months before anyone got to fire those weapons.

By that time I had moved on & we were using our weapons often in training at the range which again is very different than dry training.
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To give the Police officers the confidence & experience there needs to be a large increase in training in the use of firearms. That means an increase in budget to cover that training.

Because it is certainly dangerous enough out there for every officer to be armed.

Then there is the other issue that the Minister of Police has raised. When making the comment "we will have to do a risk assessment.." on how firearms are deployed shows me we are on the wrong track. The only people who should be making a risk assessment are those on the front line.

Is it that bad out there right now that I need a weapon?

How close is my back up?
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Then it again comes back to training & having the budget for it.

As I said in a previous post when attacked I was in the hospital when a detective came in with a pistol on. They were also wearing body armour so from where the pistol was there was no way they could of drawn that weapon fast if needed. So they had obviously not trained with their gear on.

As was forever quoted at us from Genghis Khan "As you train so shall you fight!"

So by all means the police & security need to be armed but there needs to be a huge increase in training.

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