I'm just a little ol' civilian whose daddy taught her to shoot a .45 and a .30'06 deer rifle . . . I worked one summer for the police department, and I could out shoot every single one of the officers on the range except for one lieutenant who was also a sport shooter and gun collector.
I think you were on the thread where I mentioned a shootout between two officers of one of our local PDs and an armed robber . . . the officers had 9mm Glocks with a couple spare magazines and the best they could figure afterwards nearly 100 rounds were fired and NOBODY hit ANYTHING . . . not even the robbers car . . . although a dumpster at the edge of the parking lot sustained a couple of hits.
I think the problem is that to your average police officer the sidearm is just another tool, like a radio or a flashlight, and their competence is about what you would expect in that situation.
Giving them full auto is going to just encourage more "spray and pray" with predictable results.
They need to find the sport shooters and hunters in the PD, give them each a nice Remington 700 in .308 with a Leupold scope on top, and a couple hundred rounds for practice. When they are MOA accurate at 200 yards, they're ready. Shouldn't be too hard.
I think I "missed" that one (lol) but sadly it's not an unusual situation. Witness the Tacoma News Tribune from several years ago (I used to be stationed at Fort Lewis) where there was a true movie like shootout featuring a notorious drug gang and a squad from the 2nd Ranger Battalion who had a sergeant living in the neighborhood.
This guy sees all the carnage, and terrorized residents and gets together with some buddies from the battalion and they decide to run a little "operation" on their own.
They connive to get a couple of SAW's and an M60 and some M4's from their arms rooms along with some stashed ammo and they light up the area one quiet summer evening. Thoughtfully, they warned the good guys living in the KZ. That was a good thing because none of their rounds (estimations were they fired something like five thousand rounds) struck a hostile target. In fact nobody was hit by either side. But the homes, cars, dumpsters all looked like Beirut. I teased my officer buddies at the time in that battalion no end that they all need remedial marksmanship training.....but the problem is symptomatic of a bigger problem:
Why can't most current soldiers and cops shoot? They don't view their weapons as tools, they see them as necessary evils. This is because the liberals have done such a pervasive job of convincing the public schools via their curriculum that ownership and even justifiable use of firearms is in itself, evil.