Sounds like my agency. Folklore and assumptions with no hard testing to back the claims. I brought my crew out one day for a car and materials shoot. Needless to say I got a lot of .45 guys thinking about switching to the 9 or 40.Originally Posted by BehindBlueI's
"A man with an experience is not a slave to a man with an opinion."
AZ DPS is under new command and is making a bunch of changes--"Troopers" instead of "Officers," "State Police" on the cars instead of "Highway Patrol," more criminal interdiction, and new duty weapons in the form of FNS .40s instead of the P226/P229 .40s they were issuing. Avondale (a smaller city in the west Phoenix metro area) issues SIGs, I believe 220s, or at least they were as of a few years ago when I was interacting with LE a lot more at work (including running face to face with an Avondale Detective with his SIG in hand coming out of our bathroom because his holster broke), and Yuma PD (Yuma is at the intersection of Arizona, Mexico, and California, and is either a gas stop on the way to San Diego, or a jumping off point for Marines to bomb the desert, is a far cooler city than it has any right to be, and don't miss Chili Pepper for kick-ass taquitos if you're ever passing through) was also issuing 220s in the mid-2000s (Yuma was a very .45-centric place at the time, with the city police issuing 220s, the county sheriff issuing Colt 1911s, and the jail DOs carrying 4566s IRRC).
Add San Francisco PD to the DA/SA posse. The department issued Sig P226R .40 is the only duty weapon .....no POWs other than registered and qualified secondary/backup guns. For years all striker guns were banned as secondarys because cheap, plastic, dangerous, unreliable. Still have guys who call their issued 6360 ALS a "cheap plastic piece of crap" because it isn't "quality leather". I'm to the point of avoiding gun talk with cops.....like taking advice from the average gun store commando.
Last edited by AMC; 05-19-2017 at 11:45 PM.
Any good reason for the changes in title? It's probably a small thing but my curiosity is piqued.
I'm a gun store commando by trade so ymmv but there's nothing worse than talking to a potato who's "best friend is a cop and HE said..."
"Customer is very particular" -- SIG Sauer
I know this forum has a lot of people that are fond of Berettas but be honest, has Beretta ever had a drop in quality or a bad rash of QC issues pertaining to the PX4 and M9 series in the past 20 years or so? I haven't really heard anyone complain about their Berettas yet there's so many problems with Sigs, Glock BTF (which I experience) and M&P pistols barring the Shield having serious accuracy issues.
I recently bought an LE trade in P226R that seems to have been made in late '05 that I might replace my German 226 with. If the gun has any issues, I might just sell them both and get an M9.
The titles are interesting, and have a distinctive East Coast feel--the Officers are now Troopers, and the Director is now a Colonel--not titles frequently used in West Coast LE. Even more interesting is that the current #1 and #2 at the agency came from Phoenix PD, so it's not like they brought the lingo from where they came from.
There does seem to be a definite effort to change the department's mandate. My understanding is that when DPS was formed, there was political pressure from other AZ LE to limit their mandate, and strong opposition to the title of "State Police." As such, the agency's most well known role was highway/freeway/commercial vehicle enforcement (their patrol cars were marked "HIGHWAY PATROL"), although their gang unit and UCs had a reputation for being pretty good. In some rural areas DPS did not provide 24 hour coverage, leading to jokes that DPS = Daylight Patrol Service, as well as the derogatory "taillight chasers" and "Triple A with guns" comments from city officers. In the larger cities DPS was rarely involved in "off freeway" enforcement. In the rural areas they were more active in backing up rural deputies/small town officers since some of our counties are the size of small states, and backup was, as someone more eloquent than I once put it, "approaching an abstract theoretical concept."
Under the new administration I have heard there is a push for DPS to be more involved in criminal investigations outside of criminal traffic offenses, and, if I understand correctly from a friend who is a Sergeant in a small rural town in northern Arizona, actually taking some calls for service that would have been traditionally handled by county sheriffs. Since I don't currently know anyone within the agency I can't say how well the new titles/direction is being received, but if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the Trooper/State Police titles, and the new vehicles (including a really cool "ghost decal" that from certain angles looks like a fully marked car, and from others looks like a regular gray SUV) are morale boosters.
I've also talked to a few Troopers about the new FNs, and their reaction seems generally positive, including one guy who came from a Glock agency and was worried about the FN because he hated the Glock, but was pleasantly surprised by the FN. The rollout seems to be mostly completed, but occasionally I'll still see a SIG thrown in the mix, in both the metro areas and in the rural areas. Interestingly enough, all of the remaining SIGs I've seen lately have been P226s. I can't remember seeing a P229 in a while, even though the agency used to issue both and gave officers their choice between the two, with a majority seeming to choose the P229. I'm not sure if it's coincidence, or if the P229s were pulled first for some reason.
Last edited by Sero Sed Serio; 05-20-2017 at 02:37 AM.
There's a pretty good article on Pistol-training.com that goes into some of the problems Beretta had with LE and the 92/96.
I'm kind of the opinion that Beretta didn't feel the need to work too hard with the LE side because they had the M9 contract. Sort of the same reason I think they stopped making all the "super cool" versions several years ago, they had the M9 contract to concentrate on.
Further, by most accounts, the PX4's father was the Cougar, and it is not well liked here on PF. The PX4 wasn't either until Mr Langdon gave it a fair shake out and reported favorably on it. And there was the awful 9000s that Beretta made.
I'm sort of assuming that your question was in part regarding why there aren't more Berettas in LE holsters than there are. To me it seems that they didn't really try all that hard, and when they did with guns like the Cougar, they fell on their faces.
FWIW, I'm one of our Beretta lovers here.
Last edited by Jared; 05-20-2017 at 06:49 AM.
FWIW my agency issued .40 P229s for over 20 years. When we started getting the long extractor guns we started seeing feeding issues. Up until then we only had one problem. We had several guns that the takedown lever broke on. It would spin freely and had some occasions where the spinning takedown lever would engage the slide under recoil and lock the gun up. SIG said it was a known issue. They fixed it buying sending us a few hundred takedown levers.
I still have the last short extractor P229 that was issued to me. I will be buying it when the dealer comes to pick them up. We have phased out almost every P229 and replaced them with Glock 22s.
I know they have. Plastic parts weren't substituted because they were awesome.
True that. I think BBI nailed the manufacturer paradigm in one of his posts. Big firearms companies aren't run by shooters trying to make the best product. They're run by MBAs trying to increase the stock price.
"Gunfighting is a thinking man's game. So we might want to bring thinking back into it."-MDFA
Beware of my temper, and the dog that I've found...
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