Armed with cap guns and the usual apprehension, two recruits from the New York Police Academy knocked on the door of a set in The Bronx meant to resemble a down-at-the-heels apartment. They had just received a radio assignment from an instructor: 911 had taken a complaint about an emotionally disturbed person in their sector. They were told to report to the location and advise.
As they entered the apartment last week, yelling: This is the police!, three more instructors in bluejeans started to enact a not-uncommon situation: the disturbed man, rejecting pleas to take his medication, suddenly pulled a knife on the officers and his own family. With hands at their holsters, the trainees had to improvise: They talked the armed man down, radioed for backup and hurriedly escorted the family out the door.
All the while, injecting real stress into the simulation, thirty of their classmates watched from above. Ringed around the railings of a balcony, their fellow cadets were looking down at them as if from the mezzanine of an Elizabethan stage.
The drill took place in what is called the Tactics House at Rodman’s Neck, the Police Department’s firearms training center in The Bronx, and it ended that day with nothing graver than a few bruised egos and some pointed words from the instructors. But, in late September, a chillingly similar situation in the real world did not turn out as well.
An elite team of officers in Harlem responded to a call at the home of Mohamed Bah, a taxi driver holed up naked in his apartment with a thirteen-inch knife. When the officers forced the door, Bah attacked, the police said, stabbing two officers in their protective vests. The rest fought back with Tasers, rubber bullets, and, eventually, their side arms. Bah, 28, was killed.
Although events like this receive outsize attention, police shootings— especially those resulting in fatalities— are rare. Last year, according to the department’s Annual Firearms Discharge Report, an exhaustive analysis of each police bullet fired during the year, the 35,000 officers on the force encountered an estimated 23 million civilians, and on 92 occasions, a bullet was actually fired. Of those shootings, nineteen led to injuries and a smaller number, nine, resulted in a death. According to those odds, you are much more likely to be killed in New York City in a car crash or by a heart attack than you are by the police.
But shootings take a toll, on the public trust and on the officers themselves. As the 2011 discharge report says: “One of the most abrupt, dynamic and potentially traumatic incidents that can happen in a police officer’s career is the line-of-duty discharge of his or her firearm.”
This year, there has been an unusual string of questionable and highly public shootings. It began in February, when a narcotics officer in The Bronx chased an unarmed teenager named Ramarley Graham into his building and killed him in his bathroom. The most recent came in October, when a veteran detective shot Noel Polanco, an Army National Guardsman, during a traffic stop on the Grand Central Parkway in Queens. In the intervening months, the police fatally shot Darrius H. Kennedy as he waved a knife at tourists in Times Square; injured nine civilians near the Empire State Building while shooting Jeffrey T. Johnson moments after Johnson shot a former colleague; shot Bah; and accidentally shot and killed Reynaldo Cuevas, 20, a bodega worker who ran into an officer while fleeing from a robbery in The Bronx.
The department’s guidelines for the use of deadly force include a cardinal rule that allows the police to take a life if an officer believes that his or her own life, or that of another person, is in danger. Warning shots are not permitted, though officers are taught to shoot their guns to stop, not to kill.
Nonetheless, there have been other periods when the police have been involved in unusual numbers of deadly interactions. Over thirteen months starting in 1999, the police fatally shot three unarmed black men— the most notorious episode involved Amadou Diallo— and, because of the cases’ similarity, a narrative emerged that a largely white police force was acting too aggressively while patrolling minority neighborhoods.
But this time, officials say, there are no similarities and no emergent narratives. “We learn from each shooting what could have been done differently, hindsight being 20-20,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in an interview last week. “There’s always something that you might do differently in any situation, but based on the incidents of this past year, I don’t see a trend.”
Some of Kelly’s troops disagree, going so far as to approach reporters with unsolicited views. One officer, who joined the force with a military background and spoke anonymously because he feared reprisals, said the problem was training. The department has “a factory line” approach to weapons training in which officers “get the basics— breathing, trigger control,” but not much else, he said. “It’s very brief, minimal.”
“Firearms training is important— it’s very important,” the officer concluded. “And it’s something that is not taken seriously.”
There are seven firing ranges at Rodman’s Neck, from Adam to George, and on most days, they crackle with the reports of weapons shot by new recruits or by officers who must requalify twice a year with an accuracy rate of no less than 78 percent in target practice.
Far more helpful, experts say, is so-called scenario-based training: practice in tactics and role-playing games that draw on ripped-from-the-headlines situations, like the EDP drill in the Tactics House. Each cadet at the academy gets thirteen days of weapons training, most of which are given to handling and cleaning guns, along with keeping hold of guns during physical confrontations and target practice, said Inspector Raymond Caroli, the department’s chief firearms trainer. One full day is spent at the Tactics House and another at what is known as the Tactical Village, an outdoor cityscape of parked cars and bodegas where recruits with paintball guns run through challenging, real-world situations: stumbling, say, across an off-duty officer in civilian clothes making an arrest with a drawn weapon; or learning not to shoot too quickly when a partner opens fire.
An additional day of training is devoted to a firearms training simulator, a device called FATS, which offers recruits more than two hundred scenes and situations. Armed with a laser-guided pistol and a canister of pepper spray wired to a computer, cadets are shown realistic footage of ferocious street fights or domestic violence in which husbands are beating wives. In a manner reminiscent of Choose Your Own Adventure books, an instructor manipulates the outcome of these scenes depending on how well or poorly a participant reacts.
It is almost impossible to comprehend the amount and the complexity of the rapid-fire information that a young recruit is asked to assimilate in seconds. In one FATS situation, Drunk Man With Baby, a weaving figure appears in an alley carrying an infant in a car seat. Within ten seconds, he is already upon you, drawing a machete from the car seat. The man ignores all orders to stop and to place the baby on the ground. Then, with one hand, he suddenly lifts the machete to strike while holding tightly to the baby with the other. You have no choice but to shoot him and hope for the best.
Experts on the use of deadly force contend that only highly stressful training like this, which simulates the tunnel vision and the loss of time perception that often come with tension, can prepare recruits for the nerve-racking work of actual policing.
“Static target practice teaches you how to fire a gun, but it’s not really relevant to the real world,” said Geoffrey P. Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina. “You want officers in stressful situations to revert to their training, and unless you do scenario and role-play training, they’re not going to have the experience to fall back on.”
Few people criticize the quality of the training that New York City’s recruits and officers receive, but quantity seems to be a different matter. Beyond their classroom work, cadets practice real-world situations for only three days during their stint in the academy. Full-fledged officers go to Rodman’s Neck two days out of the year to shoot 150 rounds on the range and practice more dynamic techniques, like firing rapidly, to simulate the adrenaline rush of gunfights. The officers get a third day of training at the department’s Tactical Village. “The truth is, they should do a lot more,” said one former instructor at Rodman’s Neck, who spoke anonymously because he did not want to offend friends who were still on the force. “Target practice is meaningless; it’s not a moving person shooting back at you.”
The former instructor said that officers needed more instruction in realistic and dynamic shooting, or what he called running and gunning. “You have them out on the streets with a weapon, possibly taking someone’s life,” he said, “and they’re not receiving all that much in terms of real training. The more you train, the better off you are. Dealing with dangerous situations is a perishable skill.”
The vast majority of officers in New York City, and across the country, never fire their weapons in an average twenty-year career. Because of this, the former instructor and others said, they believe that the department made an actuarial decision to limit the amount of firearms instruction. “I can understand the bean counters’ point of view,” the former instructor said. “They have limited budgets. But I have to say, the best quarterbacks throw three hundred footballs a day. That’s the bottom line: train, train, train.”
Commissioner Kelly was aghast at the suggestion that weapons training was purposefully curtailed because of budgetary concerns. At the same time, he pointed out that officers were regularly taken off patrol for sick days, court appearances, parade-protection details and other sorts of instruction, and that his chief responsibility was to protect the residents of New York City. “You can always train more,” he said. “We can train people thirty days a year, forty days a year. But obviously we have an obligation to get people on the street. We’re down six thousand police officers already. How much training do you do?”
In November of 2006, a team of plainclothes officers in Queens shot and killed a 23-year-old former high-school baseball star named Sean Bell, who, after leaving a strip club with friends, accidentally crashed his car into an unmarked police van while trying to flee an undercover officer who had approached his vehicle with a gun. The five officers at the scene fired fifty bullets. It turned out Bell was to be married that day and the club visit had been for his bachelor party. Within two months, Kelly had hired the RAND Corporation to analyze the Police Department’s firearms-training regimen. The resulting report, published in 2008, commended the department for giving its cadets lessons that were “heavily focused on workshops and practical exercises in policing”. It also praised officials for establishing rules of engagement that went beyond the New York State penal code (city officers are not allowed to use deadly force to protect property even though it is permissible under the law) and for putting in place an “exemplary” method of studying police shootings after the fact.
The RAND report was less congratulatory when it came to the efficient administration of firearms instruction. With four thousand recruits and nearly 35,000 officers passing each year through Rodman’s Neck, the authors said, the department was rushing people through instruction without opportunities for adequate practice. “The size of the class in attendance... and the limited amount of time allocated to the role-playing exercises meant that no single recruit participated in more than one exercise and that approximately half of the recruits did not have an active role in any exercise,” the report noted, adding, “The number of trainees and limited time for the class meant that there was no time for ‘do-overs.’ ”
In a similar vein, RAND’s analysis concluded that, while the department’s twice-yearly target tests for officers met state standards (the state requires only one day on the range), they did not “demonstrate that the officer has mastered his or her firearm and is ready for a shooting confrontation on the street.” In one particularly pointed passage, the authors wrote: “Given the number of officers who must requalify each year, the objective seems to be to get the officers through as quickly as possible rather than to have them master the art of realistic shooting.”
Kelly has promised to increase the amount of scenario-based training for recruits when the department opens its new academy next year in College Point in Queens. However, his efforts to improve the firearms proficiency of officers already on the job may be hindered by logistics. Even RAND acknowledged that the Police Department “faces a difficult task” in keeping a force as large as the population of some small suburbs in peak fighting form.
Back at Rodman’s Neck, Inspector Caroli, who runs the Firearms and Tactics section, put it this way: “We try to give the absolute best training we can, but they only come up here twice a year.” He was standing at the front steps of the large construction trailer housing the FATS machine. Rodman’s Neck, with its prefabricated buildings and ambient pops of gunfire, has the feeling of a military base, and inside the trailer a company of thirty or so recruits was receiving yet another course of quasi-military training.
Under the instruction of Officer Tony Louis, two recruits with laser pistols holstered at their waists were running through a video scene of a robbery at a convenience store. There was the gunman pointing a revolver at the cowering cashier. Police! Don’t move! one of the cadets called out. A sudden shift in perspective revealed a second gunman in an aisle. Ka-blam! He fired his shotgun. Officer down.
Not long after, Officer Louis led the recruits through a critique. Did they see the second man come in? Did they notice he was walking with a stiff leg to hide his weapon?
Were there any other questions? “Remember,” he reminded them, “at the end of the month, you guys will be real cops.”
Rico says that, if 'the rest fought back with Tasers, rubber bullets, and, eventually, their side arms', it's no wonder that Bah was killed...
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