“Four of the shots that cops fired at a madman waving a knife in Midtown failed to penetrate his jacket — which was not bulletproof — and the NYPD will now check the weapons for malfunction, law enforcement sources told The Post.” The Post reports that the non-bullet-resistant jacket in question was a Carhartt. Regular reader will instantly wonder: how many bullets did the notoriously inaccurate NYPD fire at one Garry Conrad, how many hit him and how many failed to penetrate his outwear? Glad you asked . . .
A sergeant and an officer fired a total of nine rounds at 46-year-old Garry Conrad on Wednesday, with one of the shots killing the depressed Broadway stagehand who refused to drop the blade at West 49th Street and Eighth Avenue.
Four of the bullets got lodged in Conrad’s Carhartt jacket, sources said, adding that he was not wearing a bulletproof vest.
Another shot grazed the wrist of bystander Lauran Code, a 46-year-old lingerie designer from California.
Setting aside the controversy over bulletproof jackets for a moment . . .
The way I read it, New York’s Finest landed five shots on Mr. Conrad — no doubt at point blank range — four of which didn’t make it though his jacket. That’s a little over a 55 percent hit rate on the intended target. (Note: we’re not counting the injured bystander as a hit unless her lawyer cuts us in.)
That’s outstanding! You know, for the NYPD, whose “normal” hit rate is 18 percent. As for the hollow-point rounds not making it through Mr. Conrad’s jacket, you’ll be pleased to know that the cops reckon the cops GLOCKs didn’t malfunction.
John Cerar, a retired NYPD deputy inspector who headed the department’s Tactics and Firearms Section from 1985 through 1994, said the incident was difficult to fathom.
“I have not heard anything like this. There would be no reason for it,” Cerar said. “There would have to be some kind of defect. I would certainly look at the ammunition.”
Cerar noted that he recalled one incident in the 1970s in which the target of a police shooting escaped injury when one bullet struck his leather jacket and was somehow deflected, failing to wound the man.
“It was just an anomaly,” he recalled of that incident.
“An anomaly is one thing, but four anomalies is another thing entirely,” Cerar said, referring to the four bullets that never penetrated Conrad.
FYI: The NYPD switched over to “deadlier” hollow-point bullets in 1998. The Post article has been censored amended. The first version correctly named the cops’ ammo as 124-grain +P Speer Gold Dots. Check this out:
I’m carrying Gold Dots in my test and evaluation Kahr .380. We’ll contact Speer for a statement tomorrow. Meanwhile, what do you make of all this?