State Police Superintendent Harry Cor bitt wants every troop car in New York outfitted with a high-velocity, semi-automatic assault-style rifle. And he wants every trooper to undergo intensive training on how to use it.
He’s right on both counts.
Corbitt made his appeal in the wake of last month’s frightening incident a few miles outside of Albany — in which a carjacking suspect, high on PCP, held troopers at bay for nearly an hour because he was armed with a semi-automatic AK-47, while the officers had nothing more than their .45 caliber handguns.
In fact, Corbitt says, it took police more than 40 minutes to get a rifleman to the scene, even though there was a trooper barracks just five minutes away.
Meanwhile, hundreds of lives were placed in jeopardy.
That’s simply intolerable.
Corbitt wants the state to spend $950,000 to buy some 700 AR-15 rifles — the civilian version of the M-16 military assault rifle — to add to the 264 such weapons in stock. And he wants to qualify every trooper and field investigator in their use — a process he says should take about six months.
New Yorkers have the right to expect that their troopers will be armed with modern, up-to-date weaponry — especially when the bad guys seem to have scant difficulty gaining access to such high-tech guns.
But they also have the right to expect that those same troopers know how to use them.
Because the last thing anyone needs is a repeat of the April 2007 tragedy in which a 29-year-old trooper was killed by friendly fire in another upstate shootout.
An official report labeled that incident a “tragic accident” — but left too many questions still unanswered.
Certainly, $945,000 isn’t too much to ask out of a $134 billion state budget in order to provide sufficient protection and training for New York’s troopers.
But a spokesman for the state Budget Division says Corbitt’s request will be considered “in the context of the state’s overall fiscal crisis.”
If money is an issue, we have a solution: Why not redeploy troopers from Gov. Paterson’s bloated personal security detail, and reduce hiring to reflect the savings?
Then there’ll be plenty of money for legitimate police expenditures — including an up-to-date arsenal.