LA Police Gear Level III Budget Armor: Better Than Level IV Plates?

Welcome back everybody. Today we're doing another armor test and it's going to be on the plates that are in this carrier that you see right here. Some of you may be asking yourself, why the heck does he have a microphone on his plate carrier set? Great question. So the rest of the video that you guys are going to see here in just a second was filmed out of the range. And one thing I learned, I had my wire up through the plate carrier and I learned that armor plates, for whatever reason, they cause interference in Lavalier microphone wires. So we had to reshoot the beginning of the scene, which is what you guys are watching right now. But again, we're going over the level three plates from LA Police Gear. And I also wanted to cover the carrier here as well. They come in several colors. Obviously we have a Nody green here. They also make tan and another one black and I think one other as well. But it's really well-priced. And I think for the money is a lot of value. It has nice, appears to be laser cut, molly pals, whatever you want to call it, attachment system all the way around, including the cummerbund. The cummerbund is adjustable, so you can lengthen it or can pull it in a little bit tighter as well. It's cut to fit the 10 by 12 plates that they offer, which makes sense. And the plates are actually slightly smaller than that. I think I'll touch on that here in just a second as well. Has the loops here, so that way you can run either hydration, comms equipment, those sorts of things. Patches, of course, for your morale patches and mildly offensive patches that you might want to offend your unit commander if you're in the military. And also you can put the side armor in the cummerbund. You can also completely remove it and just run it as a very minimalist plate carrier because it does have clips underneath as well. But yeah, that's pretty much it. I think the rest of the video has decent audio, so let's jump out to the range and continue on. I'm sure that was terrible from an audio perspective, but of course we have the place here where you can add your Velcro patches up top. As you saw there, this one does open up one thing that's different from some of the competitive offerings out there about this plate carrier is that the portion that actually holds the plate up is this piece right here. There's not internal webbing in each of the plate carrier sections. So I personally prefer the interior webbing. I think it's a little bit more stable design, obviously though it adds cost to it. And like I said, these ones are pretty budget friendly. So there is that. There's the plate that we're going to start shooting here in just a second. And you guys can see there on the backside how the Velcro is. It's basically box stitched on there. Like I mentioned, your cover bond can come straight out and you can run it just with these clips if you want to kind of go really, really minimalist, cut the weight down. We have good padding here on the shoulders, good stitching here, reinforced stitching for the drag collar. The drag collar actually has kind of a cool feature on it. So it's got a piece of Velcro on there that keeps it down. That's a small thing, but I do like it. Honestly, I think more companies should use that. And you guys can see there it's very thick Cordura material. I doubt it's made in the United States. It doesn't say where it's made anywhere on that, but I mean, it's a pretty darn good plate carrier for the money. So anyway, I wanted to cover that. Now let's get into the plates. Getting into the plates themselves. Again, level three plates. These ones here weigh in right at five pounds. You guys can see it has a good curve to it there. So it's nice and comfortable when it hits your body. It also has the shooter's cut there. So when you have a rifle up in your shoulder pocket, it's not going to be as obstructed as it would be if it was just a perfect rectangle on there. These ones here, of course, are pretty darn thin, weighs in right at five pounds. So level three, for those that don't know, is rated to stop basically most common rifle rounds, including .308, 7.62x5.4R, etc. However, it will not stop armor penetrating rounds. Now this particular plate is constructed of aluminum, alumina rather, not aluminum, alumina, which is a type of ceramic. So if you have ceramics, what that's going to do is in front, in theory, it's going to break it up and cause bullet deformation or fragmenting. And then in the back, the ultra high molecular polyethylene will grab it. And that's how it's supposed to stop. Now, compared to other level three that don't have the ceramic, I would say this probably has a better chance of stopping some like M855. That said, it is 100% not warrantied for that, should stop any pistol, shotgun, and again, non-armor penetrating type of rifle rounds. So regardless, let's go set it up and then start hammering on this thing. We have the plate downrange at approximately 10 yards. Right now we just have some Minuteman munitions stuff, 125 grade 9mm and a Glock 19M from Big Daddy Unlimited and should handle this just fine. But we want to make sure it's not like completely defective before we start actually testing it out. Not a terrible shot. I was aiming dead center. And of course you can see we hit there. There's already starting to be some ceramic breakup, which is to be expected. There's almost no back face deformation at all. A very, very slight bulge, which is what you'd expect. Now that we've verified the plate is actually constructed correctly, we're going to test it. We're going to hit it with some M855 out of a 10.5 inch barrel. So if you guys have watched my level three videos in the past, they haven't. This has been the failure point. However, I tested it with an 8 inch barrel, same ammo before, and they did okay. So we'll see how this one does with that ceramic up front. Maybe, maybe it'll pass. Again, it's not rated to, but we'll see. You guys can probably see the tips there from the camera. We have a 10 and a half inch fax and barrel in there, and we'll see how it does. I'm giving it like a 10% chance just because of that construction, but we'll see. Let's check it out. As you guys just saw, it stopped it. We had plenty of ceramic upset there in the front, a little bit of back face deformation, but not bad. So what that's telling me, again, we're just going to kind of ammo nerd out on you guys. Ceramic up front designed to sort of break apart, disrupt the path of the bullet, depending on the type of bullet that it is. And then the polyethylene in the back, what that does when a bullet comes into it is that, I mean, this happens really, really fast, obviously, as you can imagine, but the heat generator by the bullet momentarily melts the polyethylene. And then the way the substance is designed is that as soon as it hits that melting point, again, goes back to the solid point. And what that does is grab it. So it sort of melts, grabs it real quick. And when you see very little back face deformation like that, it's telling me that it wasn't exactly hitting that hard when it went into the polyethylene. So the ceramic took most of the blow. Now, for those of you guys that are subscribers here, and if you're not subscribed, go ahead and hit the subscribe button if you like this kind of video, because I test tons and tons of armor. This is the first to date level three plate rated plate that has stopped 855 out of 10 and a half inch barrel. So that's awesome. And again, that has to do with the construction of it like we already kind of triple tapped on. But the cost of it is that it's a little bit heavier than some other level three plates out there. So I'm impressed by that for sure. It is again, not rated to do that. I'm going to run the same ammo in a 16 inch barrel and see what happens. Same exact ammo as you guys can see 16 inch Delton middling barrel here. And we'll see. Let's check it out. I don't think I mentioned it earlier, but the box behind where we're setting the plate up, that is filled with a bunch of like clay dirt, it's probably got about 50 to 60 pounds of dirt in it. So it has some actual resistance, sort of like a body would if you're wearing armor. When we shot this one, obviously, this is our impact there. It didn't move a lot that typically when that happens, that's telling you that it went through, because there's not a lot of resistance as it just punches right through. So I totally thought it went through. It didn't go through. So that's pretty impressive. Obviously, more back face deformation than we had here with the 10 and a half inch. Because as you'd expect, it's got more energy when it punches through that ceramic. Now, there is a term in the armor industry, again, for those of you guys that are kind of new, and it's called level three plus. And that's not an official NIJ rating. And I should also mention that these plates do not have an NIJ certification to them for those of you guys that that's important to but level three plus is essentially a plate that can stop 855 like you guys just saw up to a certain speed out of a 16 inch barrel at 10 yards like we're at right now. But it can also rather will not also stop in a 30 cal armor penetrating round, which is what level four is level four is indicating that it will stop that. Well, I happen to have one of those out here today. So I did not expect to get this far. But anybody who's watched these videos over the years knows I kill the armor one way or another. And I totally thought it would be dead by now. So regardless, let's set it up and then really hammer this thing. But it is doing well. I'm laughing because of how absurd this is. Guys, this is not braided for it. That plate is a level three plate it should not in any way stop and it shouldn't have stopped the 855. But we're gonna see if it'll So that's the AP round out of my 1903 a four here I need to do a video on this rifle. It's beautiful girl here. I've had it forever. I've just never done a video on it. So let's see if it'll do it. Again, guys, this is the standard for level four, not level three. So let's see. Go high. Let's check it out. I'm not sure how it looked in slow motion. You guys know that better than I do at this point. But I totally thought it went through tons of energy transfer, as you'd imagine 30 out six AP is a hammer of around. And I thought it went through especially when I saw the hole in the box. But no, you guys can see here I'm not pulling a fast one on it. That is a level three plate says it right on there. Not a level four. I'm not substituting anything. This is insane performance. And again, I do this all the time. So color me impressed by these plates here. So as you guys saw, tons and tons of back face deformation is about four inches of back face deformation, three, four inches separation as well. And one thing I should point out here that I want to point out rather, is that if we can see it, one thing that's different about aluminum versus again, like the 3m stuff that I was talking about earlier, in terms of a ceramic, is that the alumina is a hard product. And when it actually gets hit, it tends to flake, break those sorts of things along very clean lines. Like you see here, there's nothing wrong with that. The only downside to it is that if you're looking at multi hit capability, you sort of lose a little bit there. Because when it hits, I'm not sure if the camera will pick that up. But there's like an edge there in the alumina. So if you were to hit this exact same spot again, basically what you're getting is the level three performance from the polyethylene. So it's definitely multi hit rated. And we're going to test that here in just a second. Because again, I totally figured that would have killed it. But we're going to hit it with some multi hit stuff. But I mean, what can I say it's, this has never happened on the channel before. Like I just said, we're going to test the multi hit capability. So we have Remington double op buck, you guys can see high brass there. 12 gauge stuff coming out of my 1301 Langdon tactical shotgun, which is fantastic. I actually kind of doubt it will make it through all these the plate will probably bounce. But one thing I didn't mention so far guys, is that this thing, the plate is not expensive. So I think it's right now MSRP around $100. There'll be a link down below in the video description or pinned in the comments. But again, impressive performance to date. If this thing stays upright, we'll put all four, four rounds of buckshot into it. Let's check it out. So the plate stayed upright, and we hammered the crap out of it. As you guys can see, not a single pass through at all. With all that buckshot and that buckshot was centralized there. So that's like a six inch pattern there. And it was hammering it for sure. It stayed together, definitely a little bit more separation here on the side that we had in the past. And actually a little bit on the bottom starting to form you guys can see the ceramic falling out, which kind of goes to illustrate my point earlier about how you lose that sort of what would typically be considered AP type protection from the ceramic or higher protection level from ceramic. Right now it's just relying on the polyethylene there in the spots anyway without the ceramic. There's still ceramic though there's there's probably about a quarter of the plate surface is covered with ceramic. All of this is covered with ceramic, a little bit of this, and then down here on the bottom is all ceramic as well. So yeah, I've never had a plate survive here on the channel. So we are going to see if we can kill it. Again, did not expect us to still be here. In an attempt to kill it, we busted out the 6.5 Grendel. This one here is loaded up with 120 grain Federal American Eagle open tip match. So not as fast as some 6.5 Grendel out there out of our radical 16 inch upper here. But I'm going to try to just kind of one hole it and see if we can just punch through. Again, guys, it's way beyond what it's ready to do at this point. Now we're just kind of doing our best to kill it. So let's see. Looks like we had one push through. Let's check it out. As you guys probably saw from the slow motion footage, we did have penetration. I think it was actually the second one because that's the first one right there. And that one didn't go through. But I bet there's like one layer of polyethylene there. And then this one here punched through there. So again, guys, it is not rated for any of that. We went well above beyond what it's rated for. But at this point, I feel confident saying that that is an excellent plate for the money. It seems to perform well above the level three standard. Again, that's probably why it weighs a little bit more. It's just a little beefier and a little bit more rugged, a little bit more durable. Now, generally speaking, outside of the weight factor, that is a desirable thing when we're talking about armor. So there is that. But yeah, I think they're putting out a pretty solid product from everything I've seen, especially at the price point. So if you guys have any questions about the plate, anything like that, you can always post down below in the comment section. As always, if you need an answer to your question, the best place to reach me is over at my Facebook page. I do get back to all the messages over there because I don't see them elsewhere. Sometimes it takes me a few days because there's a few hundred thousand of you and only one of me. But I do get back to folks over there. That's it, guys. Thanks for watching. Look forward to seeing all of you in the next video.