TRAINING STATION
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Making entry: To unholster or not?
Throughout my years in law enforcement there
were very different schools of thought regarding
entering an unsecured structure. In the academy we
were trained to unholster our side arms before
entering any unsecured structure. When I returned
to my police agency for the “on the job” (Field Training Officer) training, I was led to believe that I was
RICH
only supposed to unholster my sidearm when there
NICOLETTI was a clear and present danger. I was led to believe
that simply finding an open door while on patrol or
responding to an alarm and finding an open door did not constitute
a “clear and present” danger. I am not knocking my training officers,
because they were some of the finest men with whom I had the
honor to work. However, the training had been passed down to
them from prior generations of police officers, who probably just
simply had a situation go bad.
It seemed to me, almost immediately, that these officers had
been taught to violate the second of the 10 deadly errors, which had
been drilled into our heads in the academy: “Tombstone Courage.”
Ironically, the officers who never had their weapons out during
these entries were also the guys who would yell at me if I wasn’t
wearing a ballistic vest.
Although I went along with this school of thought reluctantly for
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OCTOBER 2015
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