The City of Miami is giving Miami police patrol officers the option of carrying assault rifles:

Patrol officers will have the option of carrying assault rifles as police try to combat the rise in the use of similar weapons by criminals, Miami's police chief said Sunday.

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Officers interested in the guns will have to undergo two days of training and be certified to use the weapons. The police department doesn't yet have money to purchase the guns, and if officers want to use them now, they will have to pay for them, Timoney said.

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The Miami Police Department said 15 of its 79 homicides last year involved assault weapons. This year, 12 of the 60 homicides have involved the high-power guns.

On Thursday, a gunman opened fire on four Miami-Dade County police officers with an assault rifle during a traffic stop, killing one and injuring the other three. Police killed the suspect hours later.

Officers using the weapons in Miami will shoot "frangible" bullets, which shatter after they've hit something to avoid striking bystanders or other unintended targets.

Not all officers may choose to carry the new weapon. But, said Timoney: "If I was a police officer out there in a tough neighborhood, I would want to have that in the car."

Video game makers should be thrilled now that the stage has been set for Medal of Honor: South Beach, but if I was a resident of Miami, I'd be far less than thrilled with the continuing arms race between the police and criminal elements in their city.

I sympathize entirely with the police officers that sometimes feel outgunned by criminals, but feel compelled to state that by escalating to intermediate caliber weapons, and without adequate training, the Miami Police Department is setting the stage for a much greater risk of collateral damage and potential civilian casualties, and that the casualties that are sustained have the potential of being far more lethal becuase of the ammunition being used.

Two days of training to carry an assault rifle in an urban environment is, in my opinion, unforgivably short.

By way of comparison, Gunsite offers a five-day course for urban rifle training. Frontsight offers a four-day advanced course the focuses on the urban environment, and it requires either a 2-day or 4-day prerequisite skill-builder course focusing on marksmanship. Other dedicated professional shooting schools offer similar courses of similar length. What makes the Miami PD think that two days training is adequate for their officers to carry carbines in a crowded urban environment, when courses designed for already more-qualified special operations soldiers and SWAT teams takes more than twice as long?

The fact that the Miami Police are not (apparently) receiving adequate training will only compound another problem, that of collateral damage to property and civilians when shootouts occur. Despite what Cheif Timoney says, the laws of physics dictate that bullets will go precisely where they are fired; the have no ability to "avoid" striking anyone, and the weapons he has authorized both extend the range at which innocent bystanders can be hit, and potentially increase the severity of the wounds.

It is a well-documented fact that in the overwhelming majority of officer-involved shootouts, the police miss most of the time, even at near-contact ranges. Amadou Diallo was hit 19 times from 41 shots at close range by NYPD officers armed with Glock pistols firing from just yards away. Simple math tells us that 22 shots completely missed Diallo, and of the 19 shots that hit and killed the unfortunate young man, many of those passed through his body completely and kept going before being stopped by the buildings behind him.

Now keep in mind that the pistols used in the Diallo shooting used relatively short range (typically fired at just 7 yards or less) 9mm pistol ammunition. Miami is going to allow their police officers to carry weapons shooting much longer-ranged (300+ meters) 5.56x45 NATO-caliber weapons with a far greater ability to penetrate the body of the suspect and materials. They hope to mitigate the inherent over-penetration risk by requiring officers to fire frangible ammunition.

Frangible ammunition is great in theory: if it hits the suspect or a hard surface, the bullet is designed to fragment into small pieces. But the theory can become something else in practice, when under-trained officers may empty firearms with magazines containing roughly twice the amount of ammunition they typically carry in their handguns, with more than triple the practical range. It is a proven fact that officers miss more than they hit at short range; is there any reason to suspect that this tendency will decrease even as the potential range increases?

And what of those innocents hit with frangible ammunition? There is another aspect of frangibles that the Miami Police will not likely mention in press releases: frangible bullets are by far the most deadly kind of bullet to those struck by them directly.

Purposefully constructed with thin or weakened brass jackets, frangibles blow apart into many small fragments once they hit a target. In a human being, the effect is to make many small wound channels that shred muscle, bone and organs, similar to a contact-range shotgun blast instead of the larger single hole created by typical bullets.

This is great news if the cop firing the weapon hits the armed suspect, as it will almost guarantee the immediate end of the gunfight if he hits the suspect in the head, torso, or the major part of an extremity, such as the upper arm or thigh. The downside of this is that if the officer misses the target and hits a civilian hundreds of yards away, the odds of the civilian surviving the wound are much less.

So is a change in ammunition enough to rectify this potential problem? By no means. Frangible assault rifle ammunition, for all its lethality on soft targets, is still far safer to shoot in an urban environment than hollowpoint or FMJ rounds with will more readily penetrate structures and vehicles. Frangibles will blow apart; FMJ and even hollowpoint loadings can and will blow through multiple buildings, depending on their construction.

So what is the solution?

The "simple" solution is to recognize that American police forces, no matter how bad the neighborhood, are not soldiers engaged in urban combat. Assault rifles chambered for 5.56 and 7.62 rifles are a horrible choice of weapons from the perspective of the great majority of law-abiding civilians that are not engaged in shootouts with police.

If Miami and other police forces would like to provide their patrol officers with a longer-range firearm than their duty pistols, the community at large would be far safer if these officers were armed with patrol carbines, small rifles that greatly extend the officers effective range while still using the exact same ammunition and typically the same magazines as their service pistols. Major manufacturers of police-issue sidearms such as Beretta and Ruger already offer such carbines, which provide police officers more range and potential accuracy than they have with their pistols, but with a significant reduction in the risks associated with firing much more powerful rifle rounds in an urban environment.

The City of Miami fails to mention how the militarization of the Miami police is going to make their officers and citizens safer, and does not seem to address the problems that are inherent to their stated plan of giving their officers higher-velocity, longer-ranged weapons with minimal training.

The police are contributing to the prospect of turning Miami into an urban battlefield, which I somehow suspect was not their original intent.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:21 AM | Comments (31) | Add Comment
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