It has happened again—still? New York City Police, in stopping a dangerous criminal—apparently legitimately—have also shot up the surrounding citizenry. It’s a problem I’ve repeatedly addressed, most recently in October of 2015’s Can The NYPD Ever Stop Shooting Innocents, which contains links to several related earlier articles. The New York Daily News reports an all-too-common narrative:
“The unidentified suspect was swearing at customers in the store and acting aggressively toward Food Emporium workers before his death.
A cop working a nearby Verizon picket line greeted the aggressive suspect outside the store, with a brawl ensuing that left both men on the ground, said O’Neill.
The officer escaped the man’s grasp, and the suspect then pulled the long blade, said O’Neill. He started menacingly toward the first cop and two other officers arriving at the scene, cops said.
The man ignored orders to drop the knife, and one of the officers and a sergeant began shooting. A 46-year-old female bystander at the busy intersection was winged and wounded by one of the [nine] police bullets.”
A careful, but hardly exhaustive, study of reality reveals that common knowledge is wrong: where firearms are involved, the police are not highly trained professionals. That many people buy this misconception is understandable. Americans are raised on a steady diet of cop TV shows and movies where the heroes, virtually every episode, end up shooting bad guys, usually dropping them with single, perfectly placed, shots, or even shooting to wound, which virtually always immediately drops and incapacitates the bad guy.
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The truth is—and should be—frightening: the overwhelming majority of police officers are not competent shooters.
Many police officers own few, if any, handguns, and many more own only a shotgun or a .22LR rifle of some kind. They rarely, if ever, practice on their own, and only a tiny portion of all police officers use their own time and money to attend advanced shooting or tactical schools, things a great many citizens routinely do. Far too many officers have only a single firearm: their issued duty handgun. Often, that handgun, as in the case of New York City, is a serious problem in and of itself.
in a September, 2013 article—New York City Police Shoot Up the Citizenry Again—I wrote about one of several shootings where the police accidently shot citizens. In one infamous case, two officers shot not only an actual killer, but nine innocent bystanders. Fortunately, all of them survived. In almost all of these recent shootings, the officers were justified in using deadly force. They just couldn’t help shooting up the innocent.
A major contributing factor is the NYPD requires 12-pound triggers on their officer’s issued handguns. Twelve-pound triggers greatly complicate accurate shooting, particularly when repeat shots are required. The heavier and longer the trigger pull, the more difficult it is to obtain consistent shot to shot accuracy. Triggers in the 12-pound range predictably cause officers to miss, and to miss badly. Consider that standard Glock triggers, those sold to the public, require only a 5.5 pound pull. Combine extremely heavy triggers with the mediocre training common to police agencies, and it would only be surprising if the police didn’t shoot innocents.
Many Law Enforcement Organizations (LEOs) are inherently anti-gun. They don’t trust their officers, and they fear accidental discharges far more than the consequences of accidently shooting citizens. Rather than spending the time and money necessary to maximize shooting accuracy and effectiveness, they focus on trying to prevent accidental discharges through mechanical means.
Some LEOs do provide professional firearms and competent training, but most don’t. Full-agency qualifications are very expensive, not only in ammunition, but in manpower. Qualifications take many days because officers must be taken off the street, which requires double shifts of officers not being trained. This usually means enormous overtime costs.
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Most officers are introduced to their duty handguns at some point during either their basic agency academy or basic state academy. Many states require a common basic academy for all certified officers, and virtually all agencies require their own in-house academy and a field-training program. The public doesn’t realize that officers in most places won’t be patrolling solo for nearly a year from their hire date.
Basic training experiences normally consist of basic handgun safety, marksmanship and rudimentary maintenance. They may be exposed to some sort of shoot/don’t shoot training. Shooting more than 200 rounds in basic training is unusual. Often, recruits fire only lightly-loaded practice ammunition, which has characteristics very different from duty ammo.
Officers qualify—shoot for a recorded score—usually no more than twice a year, and for most, only once. Qualifications normally consist of shooting only standard, stationary silhouette targets at known, never-changing, ranges. Usually, 25 yards is the outer limit. No more than 50 rounds are normally fired, and passing scores are generous, as low as 70%–hitting the target with only 35 out of 50 rounds. Virtually all allow reshooting as many times as necessary to pass. Hiring and training new officers because the old can’t shoot is prohibitively expensive.
Some agencies set up more advanced tactical training with a variety of targets and scenarios officers might encounter, but this is not common, as it requires specialized equipment and weapons of all kinds, to say nothing of manpower expenses.
What about shotgun or rifle training? Most agencies still carry shotguns, but some are transitioning to AR-15 type carbines. Such weapons pose their own problems. In most cases, officers are even less familiar with these weapons than their issued handguns. Training and qualification is commonly done less often than handgun qualification, and most often, fewer rounds are fired.
Shotguns and rifles are normally assigned to a patrol vehicle, not an individual officer. Because all firearms must be sighted for the individual using them, this is an enormous handicap.
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Qualification shotguns or rifles are seldom those carried by officers in their cars, but a few spare armory guns. An officer may do no more than fire a few buckshot rounds and a few slug rounds at targets at short ranges. As long as they manage to mostly hit the targets, that’s sufficient. This means that officers will normally have no idea how the shotguns they might actually use will pattern at any reasonable range.
Carbine qualification is equally sparse. It’s usually conducted on ranges of no more than 50 yards, and usually no more than 30 rounds—a standard magazine—are fired. Rifle ammunition is expensive. As with shotguns, most officers will never qualify with the rifle assigned their shared patrol vehicle; they have no idea where that gun is sighted.
Some agencies do require gun cleaning after qualification and provide the means, which is good, as many officers have no idea how to properly clean their guns, nor do they own cleaning equipment.
Consider my experience. At the last law enforcement agency where I worked, I was given my handgun, a S&W Model 686 in .357 magnum, at my basic state academy. I was told the weapon was “sighted in,” but the sights were badly misaligned for me, and I qualified–barely–by employing artillery-like Kentucky windage. I had to hold about a foot right and about 8 inches high. The instructors wouldn’t allow me the time or tools necessary to properly align the sights; we had only a day for training and qualification. People unfamiliar with handguns had no idea why they couldn’t hit anything, and many failed to qualify.
I saw the gun again at my first LEO qualification shoot. There, I had the time and tools to sight in the weapon and managed a 100% score. To that point, all shooting was done with light-loaded .38 special wadcutter ammunition. I wouldn’t shoot full-charge duty ammo in qualification for another year, though I shot considerable duty ammo on my own.
I was one of only about five people in a 100-person agency capable of 100% shooting. At least 10 struggled to make a minimally passing score whenever they qualified. About 50 were average and the rest somewhat better or worse.
Because virtually no one did anything to improve their abilities on their own, those averages never changed.
Shotgun qualifications were more or less once a year and consisted of shooting a few skeet, a few rounds of buckshot and a few slugs. We had no rifles. Other training occurred infrequently: a bit of low light shooting here, a bit of multiple target shooting there, and every five or six years, a shoot/don’t shoot experience with video and a laser system for recording hits/misses.
