Arathain Kelvar wrote:
Diamondeye wrote:
I did this once with swinging targets in the dark; there was one of a masked guy pointing a telephone at you just like a gun. The range was dark except for some strobe lighting and lights back by the booth which didn't illuminate the targets beyond being able to see the shape. I shot that picture, and I think almost everyone else in the class did too.
That really seems like more of a lesson to ski-mask-wearing individuals confronted by the police while on the phone than anything else.
The lesson there was after the shooting. That would have been a completely justified shooting, but you would have to articulate
why it was justified. They critiqued you on the accuracy of your decription of what you saw (they knew, because they set it up and looked at it first) and your articulation of what caused you to believe it was a gun. You were supposed to treat the entire thing as a real scenario, and if the target "flipped" (turned back so its narrow edge was towards you, essentially making it invisible) that meant they had surrendered or something and not to fire.
So, everyone was yelling at this target to drop the gun, and they didn't flip it back, so it got blasted.
There was a gotcha in there, in that the original scenario was that the reason you were there was a distress call from 2 undercover officers. Of course, this guy turned out to be one of the undercover officers, and the instructors wanted to know why no one asked what they were dressed like. The lesson being make sure you have all the information. Of course, it wasn't as effective as the lesson about articulation because in reality, the dispatcher should just give you any and all information she has, and an undercover cop should know damn well not to point his phone at a uniformed officer as if it were a gun, especially in the dark when that guy is here expecting to confront armed people.
Some training scenarios are better than others.