Last night was the final class of the Pierce County Sheriff's Dept. Community Academy, and it was super fun. The only blip in the evening was being late because I was giving Hugh a lift and we have different conceptions of Sixth Avenue (though his was more correct in the sense of it being a map, he didn't remember any of the landmarks I gave him to find my apt. building, the rendezvous spot). Hugh was concerned about driving in the dark and rain because he just can't see. This is a man who NEVER concedes primacy in ANYTHING, so his recognizing a failing borne of old age was a pretty big step for him.
Anyway, we had to drive out to Puyallup, which to my mind is a hellscape of five-lane-wide roads flanked by massive stripmall developmental mess that has bloomed out of control and unattractively — like a fungus — in the Puyallup River valley. That valley is one of the prime places that will be wiped out when (not if) Mt. Rainier blows and the river of melted glacier, chunks of ice, mud, ash and uprooted trees come crashing down to the sound, by the by.
So we get to "The Marksman," a gun shop and range, and there are classrooms in the back where the store has some kind of connection to the sheriff's department and teaches firearm stuff. More importantly, it teaches how police make the decision to use deadly force or not. So that's going to be our lesson for tonight.
The way the Marksman teaches is by using a computer-video system where there are a bunch of scenarios on a small movie screen about 12 feet in front of us. We, one by one, hold a fake gun attached to the computer with 13 "rounds" and go through some simulations. We are warned there is "rough language." But last week we saw photos of women who'd been killed by their partners — one particularly gruesome photo was of a hammer buried halfway in a woman's skull — so the swears don't carry much weight anymore, I would hope.
There were a lot of scenarios, and not all of them required us to come back with deadly force (I was SOOOO glad mine did, though. Can you imagine going all that way through the CA and not getting to haul off at the end?), and we all had to justify our actions in the end. The instructor was very negative about the media — later he told me he loved the media, which I also believe he does, people are complicated that way — so when it was my turn, he made sure to give me a hard scenario. Did I mention the class started heckling me?
So I got into character as Mike and Rusty, the instructors, and set off with a security guard who'd heard what he thought was a break in at an office building, gun out. Then we were attacked by two thugs above us on a stairwell. I basically missed one who was protected by the steel banisters of the stairs, but the other one I nailed three times. Once in the head, once in the arm/chest area and once, as the instructor put it, in the "Lorena Bobbit area." When that result popped up the class fell out laughing. Hecklers, I can deliver the goods.
The most interesting moment, though, in my mind was when a former L.A. County cop did not shoot a guy who was getting out his gun; this would be considered a justifiable use of deadly force moment, but he just didn't shoot. In every past scenario, the perp pulling out a gun did it to fire at the cops, this one put it down. The ex-cop said he was reading what basically amounted to the actor's body language, and the actors in this training tape were, as you can imagine, not the best in the world. It was uncanny how well he predicted what was going to happen.
Lessons for today's class: If a cop draws down on you, keep your hands up, up, up. Police have very tough decisions to make when confronting bad cases. If you heckle Callie, she will shoot someone in the gonads and show you what for.
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