Well, this is an interesting turn of events. APD has a range and cannot get their officers qualified? I hate to be blunt, but this is purely a management problem. Officers WILL obey orders or be punished/suspended. How does an officer not find the time to go to the range when his supervisor says be there at 9:00 a.m. Monday? And why worry about things like vacations or weather. We do our shooting no matter what the weather because that is how it will be on the street, and we tell the officers to arrange to qualify when they are in town if they have a vacation coming up near the scheduled time.
Ok, now that I am done laughing and pointing out the real problem, I have to address some of the things posted. First, you cannot set aside one lane of a range for the requals while other things are going on for safety reasons. On a range, everyone has to be working on pretty much the same thing or someone will cross in front of another person's firing line.
Second, you could not give the officers the targets and ammo and expect to get them back because too many officers have .40 caliber pens. You need to know who punched the holes in the target and from what range. No, I am not saying ALL of the cops would cheat, but some of them certainly would.
Having a mobile range certainly would reduce the excuses. If it spent one day each week at each substation, changing the days of the week, it would be hard for the officers to completely miss it. They are commercially available built into a standard 57 foot tractor trailer. That gives them three firing lanes. This one even comes with a fats type of simulator built in to:
http://www.range-systems.com/outpost/
The auxiliary systems is what makes it so expensive, including the bullet proofing and ventilation and such.
I would love to have two of them to go around the state to small departments that need better training, but I really think APD could spend the money better on fixed facilities and fix the management problem of getting the officers to the range on time.
As a side note, if an officer qualifies on Jan 1 2007, he can next qualify on Dec. 31, 2008 and still meet the state requirements. That is shoot for two adjacent days in each two year period. Most departments don't allow it this way. We make our guys all qualify in March and October of each year.
