By ANDREA POTEET
Sunday Times Newspapers
MELVINDALE– Police officer training here just got a little more high tech.
A new, state-of-the-art gun range was installed at the Police Department last month, Police Chief Rick Cadez said.
The new gun range features updates including computer-controlled moving targets.
“They shoot and the targets turn, they go away from the officers and come toward them,” Cadez said. “It allows them to create scenarios that the other range couldn’t do.”
The old gun range was installed in 1980 and had fallen into disrepair, Cadez said. The targets moved at one time, but the machinery had failed and the replacement parts became obsolete, he said.
The department paid $50,000 for the new range with funds from the $1 million in cash the city was awarded from the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office after it went unclaimed after Melvindale police recovered $1.2 million in cash in 2009 from a suspicious semitruck.
The money must be used for drug law enforcement. Some of the money also went toward a new scoreboard for the Melvindale High School football field that carries an anti-drug message.
Cadez said the new range will improve officer training. Each of the department’s 22 full-time officers undergoes firearm training four times a year for handguns and once a year for rifles.
“It’s pretty important to have them well-trained in firearm usage,” Cadez said.
(Contact Andrea Poteet at [email protected])