"44 Minutes": North Hollywood Bank Robbery Movie on FX

[gobabygo]

The street wasn't crowded, except for with LEOs. The bank is by itself on a small block on a large street. Across the large street is a supermarket stripmall, but with a very large parking lot in front. There's probably a good 200 yards between the front door of the bank and the buildings across the street. The bank backs up against a residential neighborhood. The shootout happened primarily in the parking lot/street of that bank and on a street going into the residential area.

I grew up about 5 blocks from that bank. My first bank account was at that bank.

 

[GitSome45]

If I was there it would have been different...!

I would have pulled out my "Nuclear Fully Automatic Assault Thinga-Majiggy" and "BAMMO' BOOM" they would have been Neutralized....!



They woulda maybe atleast "slipped and fell" in the rather large "puddle 'o' pee" that would have ran down my leg and formed a lake surrounding the area...

I am just joshin' with you guys...

I don`t know what I woulda done, cause I wasn`t there...

Howard

 

[Sunray]

Grasshopper, I watched it go down live on TV. The coppers were against guys with rifles armed with handguns. They contained the situation as best they could. And in the long run they won. If you had jumped in, just like I would have, you would've likely been shot by the coppers. Those cops were pumped like you couldn't imagine. No blue suit and you're a bad guy.
The only question, many years later, is why didn't the flat feet have rifles? Easy. No need prior to that day and no budget for it.
Somebody refresh our memories, how many cops went down that day? The're the ones to remember. And NO, I'm not a cop. I do hold a Queen's Comssion though. And I'd have been providing aide to the civil power like a dirty shirt.

 

[LawDog]

If the majority of the officers responding were trained by the US military, things might have gone down differently.

Tsk, tsk, tsk. Don't you know that militarization of law enforcement is the single greatest evil facing the United States today, and is single-handedly responsible for the destruction of the Constitution, the decline in home-cooked apple pies, and the rise in childhood obesity?

Bad LawDog! Bad, bad 'Dog!

LawDog

 

[Ian]

FWIW, I believe one of the bad guys used an HK-91, and the other used an AK. Not sure if the HK was full auto.

 

[Hkmp5sd]

I believe one of the bad guys used an HK-91

Weapons used/possessed by the robbers:

3 Full-Auto AK-47s (7.62x39)
1 Full-Auto Bushmaster AR (.223)
1 Semi-Auto HK-91 (.308)
1 Beretta 92 (9mm)

 

[MAKOwner]

What exactly was the body armor they had? I've heard it was several cheap flak jackets layered to provide somewhat decent protection, and that they also had more of these cheap vests rapped around their legs as well.

Is that right or was it actually level III stuff on they were wearing?

 

[mike45]

Sadly, most police officers do not receive enough firearms and tactical training. What official, department sponsored training they do receive is geared toward training the officer NOT to shoot. If the officer shoots someone, the local government gets sued for 20 million dollars and the local politician is taking heat.

If a cop gets killed, they have a nice funeral and the politician gets to make a beautiful speech about what a wonderful person the cop was. Later, they put an ad in the paper and they have a bunch of bright eyed, dedicated, young men and women show up to take the test to be a police officer. Cost to the local city/state/county is minimal.

Could cops do a better job... hell yes. But, at least they are there doing the best they can with what they have and putting their a$$ on the line... which is more than I can say for a lot of the "gun store commandos" I hear all the time.

mike

 

[CB900F]

Just an open question to the thread members concerning Nightcrawler's lead post. Do we know whether or not the quoted comments are indeed actually from the LEO's who were involved in the shootout, or are just hype from the film's promo department?

Seems to me that knowing that may alter how we should percieve the comments.
900F

 

[Nightcrawler]

I'm going to give the police officers the benefit of the doubt and say those comments seen on the commercial were dramatizations. Knowing FX, this "documentary" is going to lay heavily on the drama. Docudrama I believe is what they call them.

Another interesting quote? An (I hope) fabricated Police radio broadcast you hear in the background of the commercial:

"They've got assault rifles...we don't have anything that can take them down..."

See, I owned two AK rifles over the years. Neither were select-fire, but so what? So the bullets don't come out quite as fast? In any case, I just never regarded it as that devastating of a weapon. To hear the people in the commercial talk, you think the AK-47 was some kind of powered armor suit with chainguns and high-tech armor.

 

[Greg L]

Didn't the police have to borrow rifles from a (now defunct) gun shop in the area?

 

[Coronach]

I know the patrol officers didn't have rifles. Is there any reason SWAT wasn't sent in? Is there any reason they couldn't deploy a sniper?

In 44 minutes?

What, are the SWAT guys just prepositioned with their gear in strategic locations? Possibly stored in a phone booth, with instructions that read "IN CASE OF RIFLE-ARMED, MILITARY-TRAINED BANK ROBBERS, BREAK GLASS"???

Are you serious? If we had a similar situation go down, we'd be lucky to get anyone with a rifle on-scene in under an hour. An hour. LAPD, unless they have secretly developed Star Trek transporter technology, is probably no better. They're a bigger department, but they also have a much larger area to cover, and the operational tempo of their SWAT team is probably even higher than ours...which means they're spread out even further, and in more congested areas.

Methinks that we all watch too much TV. A situation like that is going to be a 100% patrol response for the first hour, at least. Probably longer. Remember Columbine? Remember the DC sniper with the Balaclava-clad SWAT guys? THere was a reason for that.

Things like this are examples of the shining need for rifle armed and tactically trained patrol officers. But when we're not opining at great length about why they didn't effectively deal with a situation like North Hollywood, we're all busy screaming about the militarization of the police.

Mike

PS Yes, I know its often not the same people on both sides of the debate, but it highlights the problems faced in policing a democracy. We need to figure out which we want.

 

[Hkmp5sd]

SWAT did arrive fairly quickly. The robbers were spotted by police entering the bank with masks and rifles. That is why so many cops were around when they came out of the bank. Otherwise, they would have been long gone.

The whole thing was over before SWAT could actually form up and begin to deploy as a group. Some SWAT officers did join in the fight as individual police officers.

This is another reason to provide the patrol officers with long guns since they are onscene quickly and may be there, on their own, for quite a while.

What exactly was the body armor they had?

I'm not sure of the exact body armor they were wearing, but they did have armor from the neck down. This turned out to be more of a problem than an aid. The reason they were walking around upright wasn't due to bravado. It was because they had overdone the armor and lost flexibility in the process. They couldn't kneel down and use available cover.

Didn't the police have to borrow rifles from a (now defunct) gun shop in the area?

Yep. They borrowed some pre-ban Bushmaster ARs from B&B Sales. Following the incident, B&B auctioned the rifles and attempted to donate the proceeds to the Los Angeles Police Memorial Fund. IIRC, the donation was turned down because it was not deemed politically correct.

In way of thanks, B&B Sales went out of business due to Californias ever growing firearm restrictions.

And some of my favorite comments about the shooting were made by CNN:

Police Badly Outgunned

That none were more seriously hurt was remarkable, considering that until the heavily armed SWAT units arrived, patrol officers with pistols were up against automatic rifles and armor-piercing ammunition.

Police were still sorting out the gunmen's arsenal, but it appeared that each man had at least one AK-47 automatic rifle or a similar SKS rifle, and had 100-round ammunition drums and 30-round clips, Lt. Nicholas Zingo said.

Both weapons, originally designed for the Soviet military but widely cloned by gunmakers worldwide, fire powerful 7.62x39mm cartridges.

The gunmen fired steel-jacketed bullets easily capable of penetrating body armor worn by patrol officers, Cmdr. Tim McBride said.

"Maybe an armored tank would stop these rounds," Zingo said. "If our officers were hit in the chest cavity area they would have been dead..."

"We can't give all our officers AK-47s," said the LAPD's Williams. "But we are outgunned, and we need to find ways to narrow the gap."

 

[TheeBadOne]

The bad guys were armored quite literally head to toe. They had duct taped armor plates to their arms, legs, and heads. These plates are normally held in a center pouch of ballistic armor and will even stop some rifle rounds. The bad guy that was shot in the head by the cops was hit in the eye area, where he was unarmored.

 

[pittspilot]

My question is this.

Wouldn't slugs fired from 12 gauge shotguns pierce the armor, or at least hit with enough kinetic energy that it would have quickly stopped those guys?

Almost every squad car has a 12 Gauge right, although I don't know if they carry slugs.

 

[Coronach]

Pittspilot-

I dunno about LAPD...afaik they carry Ithacas, and I don't know if they're issued slugs, or how many patrol units are so-equipped.

When you get down to it, however, a pump shotgun with bead sights and slugs is still dicey against semiauto-rifle-armed and heavily armored assailants. Its a LOT better an option than handguns alone, but its still not ideal.

And, by way of example, there are about twenty officers that work my precinct. We have 2 shotguns. How officers are armed varies wildly from department to department.

Mike

 

[twoblink]

Hmm..

Here is where I struggle..

I have a lot of great LEO friends, and I support them, they have a tough job to do, they are the janitors of our streets...

That said, I have also seen some LEO's at the range, and the quality of shooting they have..

I'm always curious if it wasn't LEO's, but a bunch of THR'ers that was in that situation, would we tactically fair a lot better?

In this situation, I would have thought a shotgun would have been a great weapon of choice.. A low shot would have immobilized the lower part of the perps..

I have seen some footage, and it is awesome!

Also, it makes me wonder if the cops learned about the anatomy of a car, like where to hide.. Most of them didn't know the power of a 7.62x39.. And some were hiding behind car doors, not the strongest or thickest piece of metal..

The armor they were wearing was more than sufficient to stop pistol rounds, which is what most officers were shooting at them with..

 

[Coronach]

Well, there are two issues, training and equipment. Both are likely sub-optimal.

Mike