NYPD’s Firearms Training Woefully Inadequate, Former Trainers Say

A day after Officer Brian Mulkeen was fatally struck by “friendly fire” in the Bronx, NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill pledged to closely review the incident and seek lessons from it.

“Each situation is different and fluid, and we'll be able to learn from this,” O’Neill said. “And that's a promise we can make to Officer Mulkeen's family.”

Listen to Yasmeen Khan’s report on WNYC:

There have been calls for more training, as there were with other high-profile police shootings in New York City. The killing of Amadou Diallo in 1999. Sean Bell in 2006. Detective Omar Edwards in 2009, killed by another officer in a case of mistaken identity. And, earlier this year, Detective Brian Simonsen, killed by a fellow officer’s bullet while responding to a robbery in Queens.

But there are fundamental problems with the NYPD’s firearms training that audits of individual tragedies won’t fix, according to former firearms instructors with the police department. They said that officers do not get nearly enough coaching on how to handle their weapons or enough high-quality training on armed confrontations and managing the stress involved.

“Just as consistent and meaningful training tends to minimize occasions for mistakes, poor training invites them,” said Daniel Modell, who served as a training coordinator in the department’s firearms and tactics section. He retired from the NYPD in 2015 as a lieutenant.

Modell is one of the five former trainers and two police officers that WNYC/Gothamist spoke with for this story. They all contend that the NYPD is not being honest with itself about how poor its training programs are, especially for a department that proclaims itself the “finest.” They say it’s unfair to cops on the street, and to the public.

“I mean, for God’s sake, we have police officers right now in New York City who don’t even know how to take their gun out of their holster properly or put it back in their holster correctly — after they’ve been trained,” said Steve Minguez, a former firearms trainer who retired in 2012 after 27 years with the NYPD.

New York City police officers rarely use their guns and hardly ever fire them. Of the more than 5 million police calls that officers responded to in 2017, which involved nearly 290,000 arrests, officers fired their weapons just 52 times. Twelve of those discharges were accidental.

“For the most part, the average police officer probably does not take his or her firearm out unless they're going to the range,” said Keith Ross, a former police academy instructor who retired in early 2018 and is currently an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Avoiding the need for guns on the street is a good thing, the instructors said. But it makes the need for repeated, immersive firearms training even more important. They stressed that younger officers especially, with fewer years on the street and who are patrolling at a time when overall crime is at historic lows, need more regular practice.

Police recruits receive 15 days of firearms training while in the academy, including instruction on the use of tasers and pepper spray. All officers must then get recertified every six months by hitting marked targets at a shooting range, and they must meet a “score” of at least 78 percent, police officials said.

If officers don’t meet the standard on the first try, they get another chance. If they fail on the second attempt, or if they don’t handle the firearm safely, then their guns are removed until they receive more training and pass the target shooting requirements.

As of this past July, all officers must also go through a brief tactical course twice a year.

“This is an extremely interactive training, where officers are moving while shooting while also remaining aware of their surroundings,” said Devora Kaye, a spokesperson for the NYPD.

The police department is also rolling out borough-based centers where officers can practice armed confrontations on a video simulator, Kaye said.

Officers who are part of specialized units, like Mulkeen’s anti-crime unit, receive more advanced tactical training. Kaye said that starting next week, all anti-crime teams must attend enhanced tactical training as a team.

But the instructors said that current training practices do not push officers to master the techniques needed to handle violent street encounters — which can be wildly unpredictable. Much of the NYPD’s post-academy training is conducted online, for example. Officers watch a training video and then answer a quiz.

Instructors said that both recruits and current officers do not get enough time in experiential training, a concern echoed in a 2008 evaluation of the NYPD’s firearms training programs by the RAND Center on Quality Policing. Firearms training must include simulations that mirror on-the-ground confrontations, and officers must go through them regularly.

Minguez added that while trainers at the firing ranges were certified to teach the subject, not all of them had a background in firearms. He said instructors with a real depth of knowledge of weaponry and armed confrontations were much more effective at training officers.

During his time as an instructor, Minguez said the firearms curriculum was continually truncated to make room for other subjects, like counterrorism training. The required firearms lessons and simulations were covered, but only for a short period of time, he said.

“They're putting a huge amount of material in, and they're not focusing on the most important thing,” said Minguez. “And the most important thing is shooting fundamentals: being able to hit the target, and how to handle that gun in a confrontation situation.”

The new tactical training could be a positive step if done well, said Modell, who co-founded a security consulting firm. But only if the training forces officers to assess risks and threats and if it simulates high-pressure encounters. There are physiological and psychological responses that kick into gear under duress.

“We have to remember that police officers, however much we're trained, are still human beings and when we confront stressful situations we have the same reactions that everybody else would,” Ross said.

Those reactions include adrenaline rushes, tunnel vision, and loss of hearing.

“I do believe that the more that we train on these incidents, the better we're able to control those emotional aspects and rely more on the rational aspects of our training,” said Ross.

In the case of Officer Mulkeen’s death, what transpired early Sunday at Edenwald Houses is still being pieced together from the officers’ body-worn cameras. Police officials have described a violent struggle between Mulkeen and the suspect he was attempting to question, Antonio Williams. Mulkeen fired his gun 5 times. The other five officers on the scene, all in plainclothes like Mulkeen, fired their weapons a total of 10 rounds.

The gunfire lasted approximately 10 seconds, according to O’Neill. Two of the rounds fired by fellow officers hit Mulkeen, killing him. Williams was also struck and killed. Though Williams was armed, he never fired his gun, O’Neill said.

“We lost two of our officers,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday, speaking of Mulkeen and Detective Brian Simonsen. “That’s very, very painful. It means by definition we have to keep understanding what the NYPD can do better, and I think training is always part of the solution.”

“But I would say to you, overall I think the big picture is that every time we’ve invested in training it’s had a very powerful impact, and we’re going to do more,” de Blasio said.

The mayor spoke in response to a question about inadequate training following comments made by Leanne Simonsen, the widow of Detective Simonsen. She told The New York Post that the department should better explain, and scrutinize, how officers make decisions to shoot.

But, according to Modell, the department needs to substantially improve its firearms training overall. And to do that might require a bit of soul-searching on the part of the NYPD, and changing how it conceives of itself.

“The NYPD is and has been gripped by a culture of superlatives,” Modell said. The NYPD is the finest. The department has the greatest detectives in the world. He contends this is a dangerous way to think.

“If you believe that you are the biggest, best, greatest and finest,” he said, “what would be your motivation to change?”

With reporting from Shannon Lin.

Yasmeen Khan is a reporter covering crime and policing at WNYC. You can follow her on Twitter @yasmeenkhan.