I don't know about where you live but in the part of SE Florida where I live, we have armed off duty police in the banks. We had an armed armoured car guard shoot and kill one robber at my bank and wounded a second. After that, the bigger banks have gone to the police officers. Link Removed
I remember the day that robbery attempt happened. It was shortly after I started working in armored transport. I work in an office that was a satellite location of a larger city's branch office about 100 miles away. As such, our office had no branch-manager level supervision. The person in charge at our office was basically just a lead man, who worked on the trucks every day, and who had no authority to hire and fire, and no work history requirements or advanced training any different than our own very basic requirements. In short, our office was a rudderless ship.
At the time we had four full-time routes and two part-time routes. Each truck had to have two people on board before they could work the route, a driver/guard and the messenger who went in and out of the stops. Out of the 12 people working in that office, only three of us had ever carried as part of our jobs before. One was a retired sheriff's deputy, the other was a retired Army MP, and I had worked two previous armed security guard positions. Neither of the other two nor myself was the lead man. The three of us constantly bitched about the lack of training and tried to tell our superiors many times that the lack of training, combined with the lack of experienced supervision, was going to lead to trouble sooner or later.
The day the above-linked robbery attempt happened, the driver of that truck was interviewed. I just tried to find the video and couldn't, but he said something in that interview that gave us the ammunition (no pun intended) we needed to demonstrate the need for advanced training and experienced supervision in our satellite office. It was something to the effect of he and his messenger did what they were trained to do, and it was their management's attention to constantly refreshing their training that allowed them to get out of it alive. Both driver and messenger were wounded in the attack too, so he was saying specifically that without the advanced training they had received, they wouldn't have been wounded, but more likely than not, dead.
Within a year of that robbery, our office went from being a satellite office to a full-on branch office with a full service vault. Our training is mandatory to refresh every six months, but company policy has changed since that robbery attempt, and individuals can seek advanced training on their own at any of a number of qualified schools, including Gun Site in AZ, and the company will pick up the tab now. They won't pick up expenses for travel and accommodations, but for the courses, which is the expensive part so I ain't gripin'. Branch Managers are required to maintain a higher level of training than their subordinates, so any time one of us goes through an advanced course that the manager hasn't taken yet, he has to acquire the same or better level of training within a specified period of time, I think within six months, but it might be a year, can't recall right now. In any case, the new system is such that nobody supervises the field personnel who hasn't/can't qualify to perform their subordinate's jobs safely and professionally.
So I was kind of shocked to see that particular robbery used as an example of a point being made in this thread! Thanks for the reminder S&W645! My job has been made so much safer and I have gained so much useful knowledge because of that event, that even though both guards were injured, it's a good memory for me.
Now back to your regularly-scheduled Rambo and Rambette rhetoric. LOL
Blues
