During the mid 90s we were pushing about 600-700 recruits at a time through the academy. Beretta 92fs was the issue weapon, the guns had a dull finish,lacked the final polishing , which allowed them to have night sights installed for the same price as a standard contract Beretta.
We trained hundreds of smaller stature officers to shoot the 92FS with great success, very few firearms failures, and most graduated with some sort of shooting medal. Still someone complained to someone high up and we had to come up with a program to TRY an alternate smaller grip frame pistol.
I think mostly because of cost , and the fact that it was already on the departments approved weapons list, the 3906 Novak night sight model was chosen. We issued 16 ? or so of them to all the female officers in one recruit class. They were issued with quad mag holders so had close to the same amount of ammo availability as an officer with a 92fs.
Since these guns were not being made at that time, S/W put together the guns from what was in stock, and whatever spare parts were around. I thought some of these guns came 2-tone , but Im running from memory. The guns worked great , recruits all passed and went out to the field.
We kept track of these shooters, within 1 year, all but 1 had purchased their own 92fs and qualified with it, using it as their primary duty weapon.
Several of these guns came back to the armory, for one reason or another. 8 or 10 of these guns were eventually sold to a local distributor, so they are out there somewhere. I know a couple armorers who bought a few, I am not one of them. I had a 3904.
It should be noted that with the exception of 1 single (law suit) issuance(3913) these were the only 3rd gen Smith and Wesson Semi Autos ever issued to regular Police Officers by the L.A.P.D. . Other than S.I.S who had their issue 4506/4566s. But no other SWs were issued until the M&Ps in 2015 or so. All the other thousands of 3913/4, 4506/66,5906,6906 so many models I cant cover here are ALL private purchase guns.