LITTLE ROCK — After more than a year of discussion, debate and research, Little Rock police are finalizing the steps to equip patrol officers with semi-automatic carbine rifles.
In a memo that has circulated through the department since March 1, Little Rock Chief of Police Stuart Thomas said that by April 4,department policies will allow officers to furnish the weapons that would ride along with them as they patrol their beats.
While other state and local law-enforcement agencies, including the North Little Rock Police Department and Pulaski County sheriff’s office, have carried rifles in their patrol cars for years, the only Little Rock officers currently allowed to carry rifles are SWAT members, according to Little Rock police spokesman Lt. Terry Hastings.
“These guns give patrol officers an advantage in [hostile] situations,” Hastings said. “They allow greater distance and firepower and can help when department-issue shotguns just aren’t as effective.”
The rifle in question is similar to an AR-15, one of the rifles currently used by SWAT officers, and will fire .223-caliber bullets from 30-round clips, giving officers more range and stopping power than the department’s Glock .40-caliber handguns and tactical 12-gauge shotguns.
Officers wanting to carry the rifle while on patrol would have to take department training to qualify to wield them and would have to radio in for authorization to use them, Hastings said.
Unlike other area departments, the officers would have to buy their own rifles for $900 apiece.
Hastings said Little Rock officers are constantly at a disadvantage without such weapons. He said his men often are outmanned and out-gunned.
“We’re facing criminals carrying AK-47s and other assault-type weapons,” Hastings said. “[The new policy] can put us on even turf with the bad guys.”
Police said the seizure of military-style weapons and rifles modified to be capable of fully automatic fire is common. As of Thursday, officials said there were more than 20 confiscated assault rifles sitting in the department property room and dozens more modified rifles.
Capt. Tom Bartsch, head of the Little Rock police’s southwest patrol division, said that although most shootings and seizures involve handguns, the landscape is more heavily armed than it was 20 years ago.
The makes and models - such as AKs, SKSs, AR-15s and MAC 10s - are more influenced by the media than anything else, Bartsch said.
“A lot of what’s out there depends on what’s on TV,” Bartsch said. “We’ve got a lot of gangster wannabes ... whatever’s popular on TV, like when HBO put on all their gang shows.”
But criminals aren’t the only ones whose arms are influenced by the media.
Images of “active-shooter scenarios” playing out on television - such as the 1997 North Hollywood bank robbery in which two men in body armor used assault rifles in a 44-minute-long fire-fight that wounded 11 Los Angeles police officers and seven civilians - have driven the debate over rifles in departments nationwide.
In the North Hollywood robbery, the rounds officers fired from their department 9mm handguns and short range shotguns bounced off the suspects’ body armor, and officers went to a nearby gun dealer to grab AR-15s in order to subdue the armed suspects.
Bartsch said events like that are a call to arms for departments in and outside of the state.
“There has been talk about [outfitting patrol officers with rifles] for over 20 years,” Bartsch said. “Whenever a high-profile case, like the two West Memphis officers who were shot and killed by extremists last year, it fuels the fire to do something about it ... try and prevent it.”
Last May 20, Jerry Kane and his teenage son, Joseph, killed West Memphis Police Department Sgt. Brandon Paudert and officer Bill Evans during a traffic stop. The Kanes were killed in a shootout later that day at a nearby Wal-Mart.
North Little Rock police spokesman Sgt. Terry Kuykendall said that just a year after the North Hollywood shootout, his department started to equip patrol officers with rifles if they trained and qualified to use the guns. The 16-year-veteran said there are multiple rifles riding around in patrol cars every shift.
“Shootings like that and in [West] Memphis are tools to re-evaluate what types of weapons are needed,” Kuykendall said. “Chiefs across the nation recognized that criminals, serious, hardened criminals ... they’re doing what they do with high-powered weapons.”
Central Arkansas law-enforcement agencies haven’t encountered any “active-shooter” scenarios and have had few officer-involved shootings over the past 10 years, but Pulaski County sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Carl Minden said that’s not a good enough reason not to arm officers.
“It’s an officer-safety issue as much as it is a public-safety issue,” Minden said. “Law enforcement has been kind of slow, to be honest. This is not something popping up overnight.”
Police officers in Chicago, Dallas and southern California carry rifles. Arkansas State Police spokesman Bill Sadler said troopers do patrol with AR-15s in their car and that his agency has more than 500 of the rifles at its disposal.
He said that the national push by law-enforcement agencies for more-sophisticated weapons is nothing new.
“Look back during the gangster era in Chicago,” Sadler said. “The tommy guns were in the hands of the bad guys just as much as they were in the hands of law enforcement.”
Hastings said being behind the weapons curb is nothing new for his department. Officers still relied on Thompson “tommy” submachine guns, the iconic prohibition and World War II weapon, well into the 1980s. Up until the early 1990s, officers were still issued six round .38-caliber revolvers.
“[Criminals] upgrade and we have to follow,” Hastings said. “It’s said that we trail behind that. ... [Officers] see these guns every day out in the street.”
For Robert Webb, using the rifles seems less like a policing measure and more like a military action.
The former Little Rock Board of Directors candidate and community activist who lives at West 22nd and Martin streets said the potential negative effects of such a proposed policy would manifest themselves in his neighborhood.
“The police already make me think my neighborhood is a war zone,” Webb said. “Doing this will just solidify that impression, that you need a high powered weapon in a war zone and that’s just not the case [in this neighborhood].”
Webb said he’s spoken with officers who don’t see the need for the rifles and said their presence could cause more than they’re aimed to prevent.
“You’re putting these high powered rifles in neighborhoods ... but what if you miss and it kills a kid in a house?” Webb said. “We’ve never had incidents where there’s shootouts with police. ... They’re saying, ‘Well, what if it happens?’ Well, if ifs and buts were candy and nuts we’d all have a Merry Christmas.”
Director Ken Richardson said he shares Webb’s concern that greater firepower could put bystanders in harm’s way, but that ultimately he trusts the judgment and the policies of the department.
Richardson said he hadn’t heard anything about the proposed changes until Friday and said he hoped the department was moving forward with the policy because of a real need and not because of vague threats and external trends.
“I trust the expertise of our chiefs and personnel,” Richardson said. “The question I’ll pose: Are we taking this action based on a thorough assessment of defined needs? ... I’d like to make sure it’s not just a case of [the department] keeping up with the Joneses.”
Bartsch said the same concerns were voiced when the department moved away from its from six-round “wheel guns” to semi-automatic guns with 15-round clips in the early 1990s. He thinks giving officers better options can actually deter criminals and prevent shots from being fired in the first place.
“There’s a psychological thing going on,” Bartsch said. “When a perpetrator knows you’ve only got one bullet, he’ll take a chance,” but might not take the same chance if he’s up against more rounds of ammunition.
Tracy Siska, the executive director of the Chicago Justice Institute, doesn’t agree that weapons will deter armed criminals. As a criminal justice scholar, Siska thinks deterrence is impossible to measure and more wishful thinking than it is a plausible phenomenon.
“For [deterrence], you’d have to take the psychological state of someone willing to kill an officer,” Siska said. “The fact that officers have an assault rifle may not make a difference for someone in that mind-set.”
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 03/14/2011