NIJ finally revising the compliance standard!

abomb5800

Newbie
So in the near future NIJ I revising their compliance to encompass current threats for CONUS LEO, particularly rifle threats...cough cough M855/SS109. I will throw a link below to the NIJ website. Now that being said has anyone heard when they are rolling this out. I have some guys that are coming up on their 5 year mark on their armor and I am going to get them new rifle plates with the soft armor.
 

Oak City Tactics

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Staff member
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Why wait? Almost every legit company already has special threat testing data on 855 or 855A1 if it’s applicable to their armor. A change at NIJ doesn’t really affect that at all.
 

abomb5800

Newbie
It does affect us in LE that agencies require NIJ compliance and/or use the OJP vest grant. For instance, my armor load out right now my plates (Tencate 6400SA/ Velocity Systems 7.62x39(API-BZ) are not NIJ compliant, so they are not covered under the OJP grant. We don't require our guys to have NIJ compliant plates, but an agency near me does. When NIJ revises their compliance level, and if Tencate gets the 6400SA plate RF2 compliant then I can get the grant to pay of 1/2 of the armor purchase. Once I can get 1/2 of a roughly $3000 armor setup paid for by the OJP grant, then I can get my guys better and lighter armor. So basiclly NIJ is jumping on the shirt tails of those legit company's (i.e. HP White) testing armor to the III+ level.
 

Oak City Tactics

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Gotcha, insert stop being poor comment here. No I’m kidding. We were eligible for some of the DOJ funds and pursued them for agency Concealment armor but not for Swat armor. We used the same Exact plate as well. I never had to deal with any constrictions in Swat armor so I didn’t even consider that my bad.
 

Oak City Tactics

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The way we got away from the restrictions years back and got into the open market was by convincing the bosses to restructure how we bought Swat armor. We went from all at once to the divide by five formula. Team positions( filled or not) divided by 5 equals the number of armor sets bought every year. We were able to squeeze more money out them in exchange for a predictable budget that they could budget money for well in advance. If we had a vacancy and the Chief got a wild hair on Friday afternoon to fill it, there was fresh armor sitting there waiting. They don’t even balk at buying kit that might not be used anymore. After a few admin changes the new guy doesn’t even know he’s buying kit for a vacancy. Try and hit him up for $5000 that was unbudgeted like we used to do it and they have a heart attack. Sure there’s kit that never gets worn it’s entire 5 year warranty period but oh well. I had Crye Cages that never came out of the box before cycling out. Doing it the old way hurts more now. Same goes for blankets and bunkers. Bosses like predictability. We maintained a spreadsheet with position numbers and armor was assigned to that. When a guy fell in on it we just put his name in the blank next to that armor set. Procurement was so much easier.
 
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