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Bruce Cartwright
Great post you've done here on Bureau ammo in the day. I was a Detective assigned to my PD's Intelligence operation and was seconded to an FBI-Dallas Organized Crime Task Force from 1987-1996. It was a great assignment full of frustration, success and great folks to work with. As a firearms guy, I paid very close attention to firearms training, tactics, support gear and ammo all the time. The PFI at Dallas was a legend by the name of Robert P. "Bob" Butler and I'd known him since 1979 from field schools he put on all over Texas. Bob was also a gifted sketch artist and his written communications were the ones collected into a binder for "First Office Agents" to use as examples of how the paperwork should be written. He was larger than life, but a great guy and very helpful to me.
Since I was assigned to the Dallas office in 1987, there was a seismic wave of work being done on ammo and firearms after the Miami Shootout that had killed two agents and wounded several more. There was literally a frantic search for answers and fixes going on and it was very interesting to see that from an inside view that wasn't public yet. Later, I got to spend an afternoon with Ed Mireles in 1994 at Metro-Dade's Officer Survival Instructor School and got lots of insight not generally published.
Ammo seemed to be the main focus and by then, the Bureau had held a conference where LE guys from all over the US had been invited to discuss their opinions and theories on ammo performance. A review of that 30 years later is useful in seeing that we didn't know what we didn't know. The 9mm load was still the WW 115 STHP that had short penetrated on Platt in Miami and the idea of a 147 grain JHP seemed odd. We were wed to velocity and expansion. The concept was found to be solid, but the execution took a long time to be accepted and be effective. I'd say it's been just since the past 10 years or so that it's become a solid performer.
The .38 Special ammo in Dallas was the Remington 158 +P LHP and it was the very best of that type of load. Allan Jones of the Dallas County Crime lab had done the first viable ammo testing outside of Fackler and Letterman Institute and he was the one who influenced Dallas PD to adopt that first concept of the load from Winchester. He told me that he found the Remington load to be the best because it was much softer lead, a larger HP cavity and it had a semi-hollow base, which caused it to upset in the cylinder throats fully, which resulted in better accuracy and no leading. The Federal and Winchester versions had a much harder alloy, causing erratic expansion and considerable forcing cone and bore lead fouling. That load worked very well both then and now. It typically penetrated all the way through a torso, stopping under the far side skin or clothing, with good .55 - .60 expansion. Many turds were flushed with that load nationwide, with Dallas area agencies validating it very frequently in OIS incidents. I recall pallets of it in the office and boxes in BuCar gloveboxes. It's my favorite .38 Special duty load to this day.
The follow on 147 +P+ loads I saw in the office were the Federal version and they seemed OK but I had no experience with them, given the known performance of the tried and true LHP load.
The .357 load was the WW 145 STHP and it was carried by quite a few agents, mostly in the 3" Model 13s, but also in lots of Model 19s. SAC approval was required to carry the load and the SACs deferred to the PFI on that decision. Some of the agents had a NIS version of the Model 19 that I lusted after: 4" satin blue, round butt with a yellow insert front and white outline rear. That load was also the Dallas PD issue .357 load (one recommended by Allan Jones from his testing) and it was an absolute asskicker in street shootings. DPD shot and killed two or three dozen per year of bad guys in the 80s and 90s and that load was an astounding performer. Since it did well on bad humans, I thought it would work well on Texas whitetails. It did, and very effectively from my 4" Model 19s.
All in all, my time working and training there was a great time and I'd never trade for it.