Shotguns fall further and further from favor with police agencies these days. It seems like more and more agencies are phasing them out entirely, relegating them to special use needs, or just not doing any real training or updating of their guns and policies.
I could throw bricks up in my glass house and blame the police administrators, but at the end of the day they're usually confronted with choices that are always a compromise. Right now the current batch of police candidates are typically not gun people, and many aren't military veterans. That means that a lot of police recruits will have no real firearms experience prior to arriving at the academy.
Making things worse on the training front is that budgets aren't unlimited, so when you tell the administrator that the recruit needs training on multiple weapon systems, the usual retort is "why?" In the era of "defund the police" and inflation crushing fixed budgets, administrators are looking for more and more places and ways to cut costs.
Lastly for the agencies that do keep shotguns around, the incentive to outfit those shotguns with modern advances such as stocks of the correct length, good side saddles, lights, and optics just isn't there. If you tell the Captain that all of your shotguns need another $300 worth of items each, you'll likely get told about the outlay of similar expense for the patrol rifles. And if the patrol rifle has all of those goodies, why would you bother with the shotgun?
So when an administrator starts looking at time, money, ability to train/retain, and makes decisions, a lot of times the shotgun is the loser in that decision tree. A lot of agencies want to simplify as much as they can, where they can.
It is a sad thing for sure, though. There are some times and places where the shotgun is king in the police world. The number one thing that comes to mind is high risk vehicle stops/takedowns. Shotguns have amazing penetration power when it comes to vehicle use, and shotgun rounds tend to go much straighter though things like windshield glass, as compared to pistol or rifle rounds.
Even setting aside vehicle stops, shotguns have an 80-85% "one shot stop" percentage, at least the last time I checked. This is better than any pistol or rifle that is currently fielded by modern law enforcement agencies. When it comes to long gun employment, the shotgun definitely has some disadvantages, but stopping power is not one of them.
During my police career I've watched the shotgun go from something required at the Academy to an afterthought. Many of the agencies in this area don't issue or authorize shotguns for patrol any more. I wonder if one day there won't be any call for police shotgun training in this area due to them being completely gone from general use. If that does happen, it'll be a sad day.
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