Mid-Life Crisis
Culture
As important as all these developments were, none of them were as significant as the overall change in CHP culture, from the brass on down to the street.
Prior to Newhall, the department desperately wanted to be seen as the premiere traffic enforcement agency in the world, and jealously protected its positive reputation with the public. These things did not change after Newhall, but there was a new level of maturity about the dangers of law enforcement and the risks to officer safety. It was as if the blinders were finally off, and the agency finally awoke to the very real (and increasing) threat of violence that officers faced when they hit the streets of the turbulent 1970s.9 The administration slowly began to shift the focus from protecting the public image to protecting their officers. Officer safety issues gained more attention, and greater resources were committed to training and equipping the officers to handle the threats they were likely to face on patrol.
The CHP also began to embrace the idea that it was more than just a traffic safety organization. It began to view itself less as a traffic enforcement agency and more as a law enforcement organization with a specialty in traffic enforcement. The distinction is slight, but it was critical to the mindset of the agency and the officers themselves, since it forced each of them to realize that the growing threat of violence directed towards law enforcement applied as equally to them as it did to their brothers in blue and green. It was clear that the public, and especially the criminal class, made no distinction between highway patrolmen, deputies, and police officers—they were all cops, and therefore they were all subject to the same risks and threats. This understanding alone was crucial to the development of a true officer safety mindset and culture within the CHP. It was also crucial to ensure the success of the CHP’s ever broadening law enforcement mission in the years to come.10
Evangelism
By 1975, the CHP had completed a full-length training film that dissected the Newhall shooting and identified some of the mistakes made by the officers. The principal message of the film was that the officers in the Newhall shooting prematurely rushed into contact with the suspects when backup was just moments away, and they paid for the mistake with their lives and the lives of their brother officers. This was a notable learning lesson from the incident, but as the foregoing analysis indicates, it was not the only one. The film was used to train and educate both veteran CHP officers and cadets alike, but it was also distributed to allied agencies as part of the CHP’s effort to share the critical lessons of this incident with other law enforcement officers; perhaps not surprisingly, the training and tactics deficiencies that contributed to the problem were not addressed in the film.
It was recognized early on that the Newhall Shooting was more than a tragedy for the California Highway Patrol. It was also a watershed event within the greater law enforcement community, one of those rare moments that change the way an entire industry looks at a problem and adjusts their methods. The shooting was championed as a wake-up call for law enforcement, and many of the changes instituted within the CHP were also put into effect in agencies around the nation. Just about every agency and law enforcement training academy throughout the nation saw its training, tactics, equipment, and procedures affected by the shooting in some way.
The shooting encouraged the development of an “officer survival” movement within law enforcement agencies, and in the commercial sector, as well. Previously, there had been little interest in private-sector training in law enforcement subjects, but the shooting helped to create a new market of officers and agencies that were hungry for the training. Professional journals began to seriously address training and tactics, and a host of authors, many officers themselves, began to write some of the classic books of this genre.11 Workshops and seminars (such as the popular Calibre Press “Street Survival” series), sprang up throughout the country, imparting life saving lessons to officers who wanted to go beyond the minimal training provided by their agency. Privately run firearms academies, such as the acclaimed Gunsite (1976), Chapman Academy (1979), and Lethal Force Institute (1981), began to offer firearms training superior in content and quality to that offered by the majority of agencies and law enforcement academies, and their classes were filled with officers and armed citizens seeking to improve their defensive skills.
Loss of Inertia
As with all movements that have their birth in crisis, the intensity of the officer survival movement eventually began to fade a little. That’s not to say that advances in tactics, training, and equipment came to a halt, because progress was still being made (especially in the most professional departments), but that progress came at a more measured pace.
After pushing hard to learn and incorporate the lessons of Newhall, many agencies fell into a mindset that the job was done and the problems that had existed before had been “fixed” and so needed no further attention. In these agencies, the push to evaluate doctrine, tactics, training, and equipment was relatively short-lived. They were content as long as their programs met the mandates of the certification authority within their state, and didn’t feel it necessary or desirable to spend additional time, effort, and money in this area, especially during the economic downturn of the latter 1970s and early 1980s.