Snipers sharpen skills, tactics
The specialized officers need to be ready to battle smarter enemies.
By JONATHAN ABEL
Published April 7, 2007
PINELLAS PARK - Sniper Week is probably a lot like the training sessions your boss sends you to. Hours in a classroom. Some hands-on workshops. Maybe some real-life simulations.
Except, of course, these participants pack a high-powered rifle and a sighting scope.
Sixty-two sniper teams from 18 states descended on Pinellas Park this week for a tactics and training program geared toward police SWAT situations.
They spent Wednesday and Thursday in classrooms discussing legal questions: What happens if you take the wrong shot? And how do you explain your decisionmaking process to a jury?
But on Friday, the snipers traded in the classroom for a series of shooting drills at the Wyoming Antelope Club. The shooting competition wraps up today.
The event was organized by Snipercraft, Inc. of Fort Lauderdale, a nonprofit group that specializes in training police snipers.
"Society is more heavily armed, and we've got more bad guys with military training," said Derrick Bartlett, the director of Snipercraft and a police sniper. "Our level of training has to exceed theirs."
At the range Friday morning, a small army of men in green fatigues milled around, lugging rifles with distinctive sniper scopes and talking shop.
Once the shooting started, however, the conversations were drowned out by hundreds of shots, a cacophony similar to pushing metal dumpsters off a two-story building.
At one stage, the snipers donned white chemical suits and gas masks. Fifty yards down the range, their target was a photo of an Arab man with a head scarf, a bomb strapped around his waist and a detonator in his hand.
Hit the bomb or any of the wires, and he explodes, potentially killing innocent bystanders. Most snipers hit him in the head.
At another station, snipers were given pictures of people they were supposed to kill. Then they were tasked with hitting the right faces and sparing the others.
Clearwater Police Department sniper Jonathan Maser had just finished shooting tea saucer-sized targets from 100 yards away at yet another station. He cast a critical eye over his own target.
"It's real challenging," he said. "You want to do good out here."
Snipers don't just shoot people, explained Pinellas sheriff's deputy Bryan Bingham.
During a standoff, the sniper's first job is to gather intelligence, to watch the assailant's movements and call them in to a command center, he said.
But there's no getting around the fact that killing is what Bingham and his colleagues are trained to do.
"It's something you feel before you become a SWAT cop," he said. "And that increases by an unfathomable factor when you become a sniper."
Jonathan Abel can be reached at jabel@sptimes.com.