Post by ivlianvs on Feb 5, 2016 12:33:20 GMT -8
Dredging up an old thread, here, maybe. However, I wanted to add a bit to it. Having gone through a transition between agencies, it really shed light on the difference between one that values proficiency and one that looks upon it as a burden.
I was hired under Dept. of Justice, in the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). After serving 8 years in the Army, almost half of which as Military Police, I thought I knew how to shoot. Man was I wrong. The DOJ-INS academy was awesome for handgun training (and interviewing techniques, but that's another subject), if you would open your mind and listen to what the instructors had to say. Once in service, we had quarterly qualifications. The course was 72 rounds with reloads and position changes included into various stages out to 25 yards. Each shot being worth a maximum of 5 points for a total possible score of 360. The course was rigorous enough that I never once saw anyone shoot a perfect score. I'm sure it happened on rare occasion, I got close enough to it, myself, to see that it was possible. I just never actually saw one. Each armed employee was allowed 1000 rounds per year (250/quarter) to practice on their own time.
Then along came DHS. Politics and mumbling aside, INS and Customs got blended together, and I happened to be in the part that was made up primarily of Customs and fell under the former U.S. Customs Service management. So, we switched to the Customs qualification course, nicknamed the Helen Keller course because a blind person can pass it. Less than half of the rounds at 30 per qualification, and trimester qualifications. Oh, and only out to 15 yards, during which you shoot so few rounds that you can miss all of them and still pass if you did well on the rest of the course. Coming from the DOJ standards to the Customs course, nearly every one of us received the marksmanship award in the first year. The criteria for that award: Shoot 3 perfect scores in a row. Yes, the course really is that easy. Why? Because Customs was always more concerned with the cost, than with proficiency. If someone failed qualification, that meant expending man hours and ammunition for additional training to get them to pass, or worse, the cost of training a whole new employee. We have since dropped down to semiannual qualifications. We have reduced the number of rounds issued per officer during each training, and can no longer get practice ammunition to train on our own time. When I became a firearms instructor, I had to shoot an NRA bulls-eye course with a minimum 270/300 score to be eligible as an instructor candidate. They don't even require instructor candidates to shoot the course, let alone pass it anymore, because it was costing the agency too much money to fail instructors. So, rather than putting the blame on the managers that were picking candidates that couldn't shoot well enough, they just dropped that requirement. Now, if a trainee complains that their sites are off, the instructors aren't even good enough to put 3 rounds in a bullseye with it and tell them how full of stuff they are.
Outside of qualifications and such, the bigger and harder pill to swallow, was the trust difference in regards to firearms. I went from a DOJ agency that basically encouraged you to carry off duty, almost to the point of saying that you are on duty 24/7 - to one that essentially said if you do anything off duty, you're on your own. When I graduated the INS academy, I was handed my pistol, a box of ammo, and told to go conquer the world. The Customs academy ships the firearm to the trainees office for them to be issued after the local management decides that they can trust them. For years, when the realignment first happened, we weren't even allowed to fly armed without getting a permission letter from the District Director's office. When I was still an instructor, the agency was actually entertaining the idea of requiring us to leave our firearms at work when we got off duty (it was their response to poorly trained people who would rather not carry one in the first place, that were losing them off-duty), but thank God places like LAX and JFK simply didn't have room to store them all. Since then, some of the off duty trust things have slightly improved, but what a culture shock that was.
The way things have swung for me, makes me feel bad about how we talked down about the BOPs at FLETC, because we're not too far from the same thing.
I was hired under Dept. of Justice, in the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). After serving 8 years in the Army, almost half of which as Military Police, I thought I knew how to shoot. Man was I wrong. The DOJ-INS academy was awesome for handgun training (and interviewing techniques, but that's another subject), if you would open your mind and listen to what the instructors had to say. Once in service, we had quarterly qualifications. The course was 72 rounds with reloads and position changes included into various stages out to 25 yards. Each shot being worth a maximum of 5 points for a total possible score of 360. The course was rigorous enough that I never once saw anyone shoot a perfect score. I'm sure it happened on rare occasion, I got close enough to it, myself, to see that it was possible. I just never actually saw one. Each armed employee was allowed 1000 rounds per year (250/quarter) to practice on their own time.
Then along came DHS. Politics and mumbling aside, INS and Customs got blended together, and I happened to be in the part that was made up primarily of Customs and fell under the former U.S. Customs Service management. So, we switched to the Customs qualification course, nicknamed the Helen Keller course because a blind person can pass it. Less than half of the rounds at 30 per qualification, and trimester qualifications. Oh, and only out to 15 yards, during which you shoot so few rounds that you can miss all of them and still pass if you did well on the rest of the course. Coming from the DOJ standards to the Customs course, nearly every one of us received the marksmanship award in the first year. The criteria for that award: Shoot 3 perfect scores in a row. Yes, the course really is that easy. Why? Because Customs was always more concerned with the cost, than with proficiency. If someone failed qualification, that meant expending man hours and ammunition for additional training to get them to pass, or worse, the cost of training a whole new employee. We have since dropped down to semiannual qualifications. We have reduced the number of rounds issued per officer during each training, and can no longer get practice ammunition to train on our own time. When I became a firearms instructor, I had to shoot an NRA bulls-eye course with a minimum 270/300 score to be eligible as an instructor candidate. They don't even require instructor candidates to shoot the course, let alone pass it anymore, because it was costing the agency too much money to fail instructors. So, rather than putting the blame on the managers that were picking candidates that couldn't shoot well enough, they just dropped that requirement. Now, if a trainee complains that their sites are off, the instructors aren't even good enough to put 3 rounds in a bullseye with it and tell them how full of stuff they are.
Outside of qualifications and such, the bigger and harder pill to swallow, was the trust difference in regards to firearms. I went from a DOJ agency that basically encouraged you to carry off duty, almost to the point of saying that you are on duty 24/7 - to one that essentially said if you do anything off duty, you're on your own. When I graduated the INS academy, I was handed my pistol, a box of ammo, and told to go conquer the world. The Customs academy ships the firearm to the trainees office for them to be issued after the local management decides that they can trust them. For years, when the realignment first happened, we weren't even allowed to fly armed without getting a permission letter from the District Director's office. When I was still an instructor, the agency was actually entertaining the idea of requiring us to leave our firearms at work when we got off duty (it was their response to poorly trained people who would rather not carry one in the first place, that were losing them off-duty), but thank God places like LAX and JFK simply didn't have room to store them all. Since then, some of the off duty trust things have slightly improved, but what a culture shock that was.
The way things have swung for me, makes me feel bad about how we talked down about the BOPs at FLETC, because we're not too far from the same thing.
