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Learning to Walk and Shoot Guns at the Same Time
Posted 11 Feb 10
Good policing relies on training, which depends in turn on institutional experience and wisdom – just like good lawbreaking.
I’ve been reading Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies, a thoroughly researched account of the great gangsters of the 30′s: Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, etc. (It was the basis for last year’s movie of the same name.) What’s most striking is just how incompetent everyone was: cops, the FBI, the criminals themselves.
Bank robberies go awry because no one bothered to case the bank beforehand. Getaways nearly fail when cars run out of gas, or get stuck in the mud. Innocents are gunned down by panicky, tommy-gun wielding amateurs.
But law enforcement comes off even worse. Obvious leads — fingerprints, phone records, eyewitness accounts — are ignored, while enormous effort is expended on worthless rabbit trails (finding the house were kidnapping victim Bremer was kept, for example). Over and over gangsters are caught, only to shoot their way free because the G-men left their cars a mile away, or failed to cover the back door, or simply failed to recognize who they had cornered. Dillinger’s escape from jail, using nothing but hutzpah and a carved wooden gun, is classic.
This isn’t to poke fun at Hoover’s incompetent agents, however (even if Melvin Purvis was truly and remarkably unfit for the task given him). The problem was that no one had any experience conducting complicated, wide-scale, geographically broad investigations. Even something simple, like firearms training, was ad hoc and uncertain — an agent might be taken out to plink at cans in an empty field for an hour, then sent into action.
Good guys, bad guys: they were all just making it up as they went along.
Police culture is certainly open to criticism (DWB, the blue wall, defiance of rules, and so on). But sometimes it’s easy to forget that over the decades law enforcement has gotten better at its job — and just like any process, much of that is learning from past mistakes, then institutionalizing the lessons.
Whatever happened to tommy guns, anyway?
This post indexed as: Crime, Reading