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American police officers began carrying revolvers in the mid-nineteenth century. There were few efforts at developing handgun proficiency until the 1920s; however, thereafter they often ascribed gunfighting successes to their new-found skills. The evidence the police relied upon was highly selective and subjective, but it likely helped spread an interest in firearms training. Being qualified with the police handgun was a status that followed relatively quickly and, since the 1960s, state certification requirements generally have included handgun qualification for police, first as recruits and then periodically throughout their employment. The universal acceptance of both the process and product of handgun qualification today strongly implies that officers exceeding prescribed minimum performance levels are proficient. Although police handgun doctrine and techniques, together with the training and qualification courses which flow from them, suggest somewhat of a consensus among police firearms trainers, empirical evidence raises doubts about whether these substantially enhance officer or community safety.After briefly considering officer safety over the past quarter century, police handgun training and qualification are examined, as well as the evidence which indicates that no clear predictive link exists between training and gunfighting performance. We conclude that there are serious reasons to question the validity of police recruit and in-service handgun training activities which supposedly enable the police to fire accurately during armed confrontations and thereby incapacitate their opponents-though not necessarily kill them -or, at the least, cause sufficient physiologic disruption to degrade their opponents' abilities to carry out harmful actions.

Fatigue among police patrol officers arising from departmental policies and practices may degrade individuals' abilities and hence the performance of organizations. Few U.S. police departments have established comprehensive shift, work-hour, and fatigue management policies despite the well understood, long-standing, and profound influences that round-the-clock schedules have on worker health, safety, performance, job satisfaction, and family life. After reviewing the sources, costs, and impacts of fatigue as well as recent research into the prevalence of fatigue among police, the authors discuss policies and practices that police executives, managers, and supervisors can employ to minimize officer fatigue.

Significant progress has been made in radiation protection for children during the last 10 years. This includes increased awareness of the need for radiation protection for pediatric patients with international partnerships through the Alliance for Radiation Safety in Pediatric Imaging. This paper identifies five areas of significant progress in radiation safety for children: the growth of the Alliance; the development of an adult radiation protection campaign Image Wisely™; increased collaboration with government agencies, societies and the vendor community; the development of national guidelines in pediatric nuclear medicine, and the development of a size-based patient dose correction factor by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, Task Group 204. However, many challenges remain. These include the need for continued education and change of practice at adult-focused hospitals where many pediatric CT exams are performed; the need for increased emphasis on appropriateness of pediatric imaging and outcomes research to validate the performance of CT studies, and the advancement of the work of the first pediatric national dose registry to determine the "state of the practice" with the final goal of establishing ranges of optimal CT technique for specific scan indications when imaging children with CT.