Liberty Sanders
Master
I am a retired police officer. I now do some training with law-enforcement agencies. I have read a lot of posts on here by people who felt they were treated badly by police, especially when open-carrying. I would like to ask the members on here how they would train officers to deal with someone who is open-carrying. Please try to put yourselves in the shoes of a training officer who is teaching new officers how to respond to these situations and calls.
Some of the rules that I would like for us to abide by are:
1. Can we please keep this civil and professional?
2. Remember that there are bad people who carry guns too and not everyone who is open-carrying is automatically a good guy.
3. Most officers who approach someone who is open-carrying are doing so because they are responding to a dispatched run about that person. The officer has a responsibility to their community to do their job and investigate why this person has a gun and to confirm that they are legal if they are dispatched to do so.
Thank You
I am surprised to hear this from someone who purports to be a retired LEO.
The mere fact that a LEO has received a MWAG run does NOT mean that a LEO "has a responsibility to do their job and investigate why this person has a gun and to confirm that they are legal if they are dispatched to do so."
A LEO's responsibilty at ALL times is to respect the civil rights of citizens. It is NOT a citizen's responsibility to prove that he has a legal right to possess a gun. It is the responsibility of a LEO to prove it if a citizen does NOT have a right to do so. A LEO does not have the right to detain an armed citizen minus a reasonable articulable suspicion that the citizen's firearm is being used to further a crime.
It greatly alarms me that you have been placed in a position to train law enforcement officers.