Do you believe off-duty officers should carry a firearm when off-duty

[Johninaustin]

My wife drives me crazy by being on the flip side. I bought her a pistol, and its the easiest thing in the world to get a concealed weapons permit where we live (and the laws are written where you barely even need one).

She doesn't want anything to do with one and goes through life pretty oblivious to everything around her, completely depending on good luck. I'm more worried about her going to the supermarket than I am about myself when busting into a fortified drug stash house. We arrested a pretty bad actor a few months ago in a drug raid a couple of towns over, who I immediately recongized as living in a little pocket of ghetto near our subdivision, who I had seen walking to the convience store where we buy our gas a hundred times. When I told my wife about him, she didn't even know who I was talking about, even though she had to have seen him at least twice at many times as I had.

Partly, I think we see so much bad stuff on the job, and from being too damned observant, that we start to get a jaded view of life. But, I can't change being like that at this late stage in my life. :D

Your wife must be related to mine. I swear, her situational awareness is about like having a pillowcase over her head.

I came out of a 7/11 once to watch her chatting with a crackhead that had walked up to the passenger door. (took off in a hurry too when I gave him a look)

I mentioned that she really should not sit with the window open and her purse in her lap in a Stop-an-Rob parking lot at 1130pm.

She thought he was a very nice man. :eek:

[Group9]

I put one of our narcotics officers in the hospital once.:mad: We were called to a bar fight one night about 1 in the morning. It was a hell of a fight and still going on when we got there. Two narcs were driving by and decided to lend a hand. :rolleyes: Unfortunately, they looked just like the patrons and I nailed on with my flashlight in the ribs, breaking several. I felt kinda bad when I saw who it was, but it was incredibly stupid for those guys to be there. Every uniform cop there ended up with blood all over them, fortunately most of it was from the other guys. But way too much adrenaline flowing for us to distinquish faces at a time like that.

I got stuck with working the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. One night we had a huge riot when they tried to shut the House of Blues down at 4:00 am. Pretty soon the uniforms started pepper spraying the rioters and kicking ***. During the melee, we saw them grab one guy as we were standing back out of the way and laughing as they were kicking the **** out of him.....................until we all at the same time recognized him as an undercover GBI agent! :eek:

Then it went to really went to hell with us trying to rescue him. In the end, the APD wanted to charge him with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest and even handcuffed him. I then saw true leadership when a GBI lieutenent stepped up and said, "Listen, we have had a huge misunderstanding and mistake happen here. We can talk about this all night if you guys want to until we are all over it, but nobody is going to jail because of this."

And, sure enough, a little while later, all the hotheads on both sides had cooled off and it was over, and it was even starting to be kind of funny.

But, I sure learned a lot of lessons that night.

[retdetsgt]

I then saw true leadership when a GBI lieutenent stepped up and said, "Listen, we have had a huge misunderstanding and mistake happen here. We can talk about this all night if you guys want to until we are all over it, but nobody is going to jail because of this."

That GBI Lt was impressive. Nice to have a guy like that around.

I had about 5 years on when I went into vice and already had enough lousy experiences with U/C's from my dept that I was leery of any uniform guys. Before that, I had been working our ghetto and there were a lot of them around because of the high crime rate. Unfortunately, my partner and I hadn't been on for years and years and didn't know all of them by sight even though they seem to always expect us to recognize them even from behind. There were a few shouting matches now and then and no one got cuffed, but there was some bad feelings for a while.

But that was a different time and era from today. When I went into dope 10 years later, the training was better for both in how to handle those situations. I say better, what I really mean is there WAS some training.....

But still, that's why I'm so leery of pulling a gun off duty or now as retired unless I'm defending me or my family. Neither way do I have a radio to tell approaching officers or officers I'm trying to assist who the hell I am. Pulling a gun in their presence would be more of a distraction to them than helping them in most instances. Unfortunately, some people seem to think they have cop written on their foreheads or something.