Tucson Harley Davidson is having their HOGTOBERFEST on October 10, 2010. There will be THREE yes three poker runs. Doors open at 8:00 a.m. because they couldn’t wait until 10:00 a.m. Proceeds benefit the American Diabetes Association. Battle of the Bands, bike show, and much much more.
Click to Enlarge
Tucson Harley Davidson is having a Motorcycle Ride on October 23rd honoring Kelli Ann (Bailey) Bonn and Helping Find a Cure for Juvenile Diabetes. Kelli was diagnosed with Type I Diabetes while in the military.
All Proceeds benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Starting location is @ THD and ends at the Tucson Conquistador Country Club. Many prizes will be raffled off. There will be a 50/50 raffle, a Custom built M4 Rifle, Spa Package, Dinner Certificates, and a GRAND prize of a 2009 Triumph America.
Registration is from 9:00 am – 10:30 am. First bike out @ 11:00 am. Pre-registration on-line $25, includes co-rider. Day of event $35. Includes a ride T-Shirt.
Click To Enlarge
Tucson Harley Davidson & Native New Yorker present BIKE NIGHT @ Native New Yorker the 1st Thursday of each month. 6:00 pm – 10 pm. Native New Yorker is south of I-10 on 8225 N Courtney Page Way, off Cortaro Farms Rd.
Click To Enlarge
P1 Special Report: Blood Lessons: Lessons learned from an off-duty officer involved in fatal shootout at a McDonald’s
by PoliceOne Contributor Scott Buhrmaster
Article submitted by PoliceOne member who would like to remain anonymous
In response to a recent Force Science News article ( Have Gun, Will Travel? ) discussing the issue of off-duty/concealed carry, a sergeant in California shared the following account of a horrific off-duty engagement he and his family unexpectedly fell into. The hard-earned lessons he shares may save your life in an off-duty encounter, so we hope you will take them to heart.
[Editor’s note: Because of the impact this incident has had on his family, this sergeant has asked for anonymity.]
He writes:
I had taken my family to a McDonald’s Restaurant on our way to a pool party. I was off-duty, in civilian clothes, and armed.
I was standing in line and oblivious (like all the other patrons) to the fact that an armed suspect had taken the manager hostage and was forcing her to open the safe in the restaurant’s office. One of the cashiers had seen this and I overheard her telling another employee that the business was being robbed.
At that time, I had approximately 15 years of experience and was a SWAT team member and use-of-force/firearms instructor. I had talked to my wife about such an occurrence and we had a preplanned response. When I told her to take the children and leave the building, she did not hesitate. I began quietly telling employees and patrons to leave. My thinking was to remove as many innocent bystanders as possible and then leave myself.
I thought that because I did not see the suspect enter he must have come in from a side door or employee entrance and I assumed (wrongly) that he would go out the same way. As I was standing near the front counter trying to get some of the kitchen help to get out, the suspect came from the office area and began running in my direction.
I immediately noted the large semi-automatic pistol in his hand. The distance was about 15 to 20 yards. I drew my weapon, announced myself and took a kneeling position behind the counter. Unfortunately, the suspect raised his weapon at me and the gunfight erupted. The suspect fired a total of 2 rounds in my direction. I fired 11, striking him 10 times.
My weapon was now empty and I ran from the line of fire to reload my spare magazine. I then approached the downed suspect and could tell that he was seriously wounded. It was right then that I considered that there might be more than one “bad guy” (the thought had not crossed my mind before this) and I began to scan the 360 to check.
I immediately noticed a small child lying behind me. I saw blood pooling under her head and knew at a glance she was dead. One of the bullets fired at me had struck this child. Unbeknownst to me, my family had tried to exit out the fire door, which was locked. My wife was still trying to get out when the shooting started and she pushed my kids under a table where they all witnessed the gunfight.
The end result was that the suspect died, I survived, but a 9-year-old girl did not.
I tell you this story because I think that this topic is of utmost importance. It is largely ignored in mainstream police training. I want to tell you some of the lessons I learned from this incident:
1. If you are going to carry a firearm off-duty, you should carry extra ammo. Security camera video of this incident revealed that I fired all 11 rounds from my Glock 26 in about 2 seconds. My extra mag held 17 rounds. Words cannot describe the emotion I felt when I slammed that mag into my weapon and was able to still be in the fight.
Mostly because of circumstances (distance) and my training, my rounds were on target. It could have happened differently and the reality is that most of us miss more than we hit when involved in a gun battle.
2. You cannot have the typical police mind-set in an off-duty situation. I ended up in this incident without a radio, without backup, without body armor, handcuffs, other force options and without taking the time to think it through. I was truly most frightened when the gunfight was over and I was standing there covering the suspect with my weapon in my T-shirt and shorts.
I was really worried that one of my own guys might not recognize me. I was worried too that there might be some other off-duty copper around who would think I was the bad guy.
The smartest, most responsible thing I could have done would have been to take care of my family first. I should have seen personally to their safety. If I had grabbed them and gone outside, I would have spared them this entire experience and that little girl would probably still be alive today.
Again, words cannot describe the emotions that we all went through after this incident. I recognized afterward that it could have been one of my children lying dead because of my actions. When you are off-duty your first responsibility is to your family. You should never forget this.
3. I survived this incident. Partly due to my training and tactics. Partly due to God’s grace and blind luck. But the other side of the coin is that I got into this incident because of my training. I switched immediately into “cop” mode without stopping to consider that I was at a great tactical disadvantage. Most of us are driven and dedicated to the point of self destruction and I think good cops die because we are taught to place our personal safety second when others are in danger.
Because I had never trained realistically for a situation like this, I was unprepared. Most of the guys I worked with then and now carry off-duty weapons. But few of them, if any, have really taken the time to engage in realistic training and preparation for how to handle an off-duty incident.
Training can be as simple as discussing these types of situations with your coworkers. Since this shooting, I have devoted at least one quarterly range session with my students to off-duty encounters and the associated considerations.
4. The responsibility of carrying a firearm is huge. I had devoted countless hours to training for the fight, but was not fully prepared for the aftermath. None of the training scenarios, books, films, etc. that I learned from touched upon the fact that when you take that gun out and decide to take action, 9-year-old kids can get killed. Even if you do everything by the book, use good tactics, and are within policy and the law, the outcome can still be negative.
You have to remember that the suspect does not go to the range and he does not practice rules of weapons safety. He does not care about what’s in his line of fire. If it’s you or him, you gotta do what you gotta do, but whether you’re on-duty or off-duty we need to train to look at the totality of the incident.
Letting the bad guy go because doing otherwise would place innocent people in grave danger needs to be more “socially acceptable” amongst our ranks. I think we’re starting to see more of this in the pursuit policies of most agencies and I have tried to carry this message over into my training and teaching.
I guess the bottom line here is that it’s good to be on “auto pilot” when it comes to tactics in these situations, but we can’t go on auto pilot in our assessment and examination of the environment and circumstances leading up to and during the event. On-duty mind-set and off-duty mind-set need to be strongly separated and the boundaries clear.
– A California Sergeant
By Sgt. Steve “Pappy” Papenfuhs, PoliceOne Contributor
A county deputy was shot in the face and killed by an auto theft suspect. A city police officer was shot in the face and killed by a subject trying to cash bad checks. A state trooper was shot in the upper body during a car stop. The trooper survived despite numerous bullet wounds. In all three events the officers were standing behind the suspects attempting to handcuff them when the offender pulled a hidden weapon and shot over their shoulders striking the officers.
Let’s list the “mistakes” some say these officers made. First, the officers did not correctly apply a control-hold while performing the handcuffing. Next, the officers did not put the suspect in a position of disadvantage. Third, the officers should have waited for a backup officer before attempting the arrest, and operating alone was the ultimate error. Fourth, the officers were all attempting to place the handcuff on the controlled wrist when they should have cuffed the uncontrolled hand first. Finally, the officers were shot because they were handcuffing before searching; and, had they searched first they would have discovered the weapon before the subject had an opportunity to access it.
To all these arguments I respond, “Maybe…maybe not.”
It’s human nature to go into denial when hearing of these tragedies. Cops are very susceptible to this trait due to our drive and controlling nature. When an officer is killed in the line of duty, we have an inherent emotional need to explain it by delineating the mistakes made, confident that we would not have made those errors. But, if we are intellectually honest, we will acknowledge that we all make errors every day; and we would admit that we have often operated in a similar fashion. There but for the grace of God go anyone of us.
How can we improve our odds in similar circumstances? First, after acknowledging that we are only human, prone to errors, and not invincible, we admit that:
Once we recognize the disadvantages we face, we can then begin to formulate survival strategies. But, first we need to recognize one last idiosyncrasy shared by the three described events. In each case the officers had contact with only one of the subject’s hands during the cuffing process. All subjects had one hand free, and in each case it was the right hand. The vast majority of the population is right handed. Should we cuff that hand or control that hand? If you’re following the human factors under discussion, you know there is no good answer to this question.
Most officers when conducting a pat-frisk have the subject’s hands interlaced either behind his head or at the small of his back. Where you frisk will depend upon where you reasonably believe a weapon might be secreted. The law allows you to search the outer clothing from head to toe, including reaching under shirts and jackets when reasonably necessary.
Offenders generally carry their firearms in the waistband and pockets. They do so for ease of access. Therefore, most defense-tactics search patterns start with these areas before moving to less probable and less accessible areas. If you really believe that a subject is armed wouldn’t you be safer if he was handcuffed before you frisked him? Of course you would. But, in the process of handcuffing him you have the divided-attention issue discussed earlier. You are trying to control his hands while you are accessing your handcuffs, getting the proper grip on the cuffs, and then applying them to the subject’s wrists. Meanwhile, the subject might have a weapon of which you are unaware but is immediately accessible to him.
Tactics are a tradeoff — a balancing act. Every time you create a tactic to solve a problem, you create a new problem. Both the “search first” and the “handcuff first” theories have inherent dangers. I submit that we must find the reasonable “somewhere in between” strategy. That strategy is the Grip-Protective Sweep (GPS). Simply put, grip the subject’s hands either behind his head or behind his back. Know that there are pros and cons to each of these positions (in fact, that is a topic of discussion we will have at another time in the future).
Conduct a limited frisk of the areas that subjects are known to carry weapons and that are easily accessible to them. We call this a “protective sweep” to discriminate between this action and a full search. Once you have determined to the best of your ability that the subject is not armed with an immediately accessible weapon (and if he does have one, use your trained tactics to deal with that) handcuff him. After he is handcuffed, conduct your Terry frisk or your search incident to arrest.
We have used this strategy at the San Jose Police academy with good success. Is this the silver bullet? Probably not. After 29 years of law enforcement experience, the only thing I know is that the more I know, the more I know I don’t know. But, at this point the strategy seems to fulfill the needs of the “balancing act” between the search first / handcuff first extremes. You satisfy the “search first” proponents by establishing whether or not there is a weapon present in the “high-risk” areas before handcuffing. You satisfy the “handcuff first” proponents by handcuffing a subject prior to conducting a full-body search. You limit your “time in the hole” (that area in close proximity to a subject) with an unsecured suspect. And, you satisfy the human factors experts who correctly insist that it is extremely difficult to pay attention to more than one thing at a time.
I am open to suggestions from others, and always willing to learn something new. If you have a tactic that works for you I certainly would like to know about it. Please contact me and tell me about your experiences. Like most trainers, I steal from others without remorse.
Come join Ca. X for their Annual Poker run in El Centro Ca. This would be a great getaway weekend for our members. The Poker Run is on Saturday, October 30th. Take a nice ride over on Friday, enjoy the Poker Run on Saturday, and return to Tucson on Sunday. Nice three day weekend and a good time to meet new Blue Knights. Let’s make this a group ride.
WHO WANTS TO BE THE POC FOR THIS RIDE????
Registration fee is $25 for single $ 35 for two up. Registration is @: Imperial Cycle Center
Registration fee includes Tri Tip lunch, ride pin, nice scenic ride, and good friendly company.
Click To Enlarge
This month’s breakfast ride will be back at the Vail Steakhouse, on Saturday, Oct. 9th, at 08:00 hours.
For those long term planners among us, we now have dates and locations for the 2011 and 2012 conventions here in the West.
2011 SWC will meet in Prescott, AZ with arrival on June 15th and departure on June 19th.
2011 WCC will meet in Boise, ID with arrival on Aug 21st and departure on August 25th.
2012 WCC/SWC 2nd Combined convention will meet in Provo, UT with arrival on June 16th and departure on June 21st.
All dates and times are subject to change, please consult our respective Conference Web pages.
Are you BAD enough to STOP diabetes? Join us for a fun filled day of riding, great food, live entertainment, bike show, bike games and more… Rip’s B.A.D. Ride Arizona
Date: October 24, 2010
Festival Site: Pinal County Fairgrounds
Event Manager Name: Heidi Goldsmith
Email: hgoldsmith@diabetes.org
For more information call: 1-888-342-2383
Event:
Click on link below to go to Web Site
Click To Enlarge
Click To Enlarge
Driving to work in the morning can be a tedious and annoying affair. At least, we imagine it is, since we are chained to the wall of a basement staring at a computer screen for 23.5 hours per day. One vehicle that can make any commute quicker is a motorcycle… perhaps even a stupid-fast literbike like the Yamaha R1.
Combine a rider with a need for death speed, a 25-mile commute through Russian traffic and a powerful two-wheeled samurai sword, and you get a video showing the “quick” way to work. Sometimes this two-wheeler even becomes a one-wheeler as rare empty stretches of road disappear when the nose goes skyward.
According to our tipster Andy (Thanks!), the title translates to “A couple minutes of my life could be more interesting than the whole life of the other people.” It’s certainly interesting, but we prefer pushing vehicles to our limit on a track. Regardless, the music choice is excellent and the riding would make Trinity jealous. We don’t condone this type of action, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all check out the video, which you can watch after the jump.
I could name a few people who could do some of the same stuff. However, maybe not in this kind of traffic.
YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.