NY Police Officer on NYPD Training

A reader sent this along, from a NY cop detailing how much training the typical New York Cop receives. Someone in the comment section brought up citizen concealed carry holders, and he remarks:

Any average CCW citizen who practices more then twice a year pretty much has most of the department beat in terms of training.

That’s scary. I’m also struck by this admission:

The NYPD offers once a month training for members to use, on their own time. However, all that is done during these sessions are the same basic dumbed down qualification exercises. You will only receive real help if you outright fail. Missed 12 out of fifty @ 7 yards? GOOD ENOUGH!

MOST NYPD officers fire their FIRST gun, ever in their entire lives, at the police academy, some as young as 21 to as old as 35 shooting for their very first time, and on a DAO pistol.

As I mentioned, when you destroy your civilian gun culture, you have nothing to draw from when you need a cadre of men proficient at arms, and bureaucracies are very very bad at providing this kind of training. This is merely dangerous when you can’t hire competent gunmen to be police, when you can’t find them for military purposes, it represents an existential threat to national security.

This would have been no surprise to William Church, New Yorker, Civil War veteran, founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Journalist for the New York Times, and founder of the National Rifle Association. Nor would it have been any great revelation to General George Wingate, New Yorker, Civil War veteran, and also a founder of the National Rifle Association. These men started the NRA to address the very problem Bloomberg now faces today, who believed the solution was a healthy civilian shooting culture, even in New York City. Indeed, the NRA’s first range wasn’t far:

The first President of the “National Rifle Association,” as it was called, was General Ambrose E. BURNSIDE, who made a very good figure-head, but under whose leadership nothing was accomplished. It was not till the second year of its existence that any real progress was made. Then, by the efforts of the new President, Colonel CHURCH of the “Army and Navy Journal,” and the Secretary, Mr. George W. WINGATE, the New York Legislature of 1872 was induced to appropriate $25,000 for the purchase of a range near New York city, the Association agreeing to raise $5,000 on its part.

Can you imagine the State of New York helping NRA build a range near New York City today, and allocating money for its construction? Witness Chicago doing everything it possibly can to keep ranges out of its city. Witness New York City, whose Mayor goes into fits any time we dare to speak of restoring the Second Amendment for New Yorkers, including for its police officers. Other, more sensible New Yorkers, from an earlier time when people did not recoil at the thought of firearms, knew the solution. It’s a pity Bloomberg never will.

31 thoughts on “NY Police Officer on NYPD Training”

  1. Please note this is unverified; the OP refuses to post any verifying information.

    1. I noticed that… but I also haven’t seen any answers that trip my bullshit meter, based on what I know about the NYPD. Usually when someone is taking a large group of people for a ride, you can detect it because one or two things would be off. There was a question in there about pay scales. He stated he didn’t know the averages, but said what he made. Someone found the pay scale online somewhere, and he was where he should be for the number of years of service he mentioned. He’s also been right on the firearms used, and I’ve cross referenced some claims with LEO boards and they all check out.

      I’m naturally a pretty skeptical person, so I do check, and I was convinced enough to post it. Could still be fake, but it’s a pretty good fake if it is.

      1. It meshes with information I’ve gotten from another source (though that source admittedly got it second hand, from several years ago).

        It would not surprise me in the slighted if 100% of that information is true. It’s probably only the tip of the iceberg.

        1. I had a friend who was NYPD and a competition shooter and what he said about firearms training matches up to what the reddit post said.

          He gave up bothering to train at the NYPD’s range facilities and preferred to drive to a State Game Land range in Pennsylvania. He could actually run, get this, drills if nobody else was there, and he didn’t have to worry as much about somebody shooting him on accident.

          1. Probably true. I’ve run into more than a few cops on public ranges in PA who freely violate the range rules with no consequences.

            1. I did that too. When I was at PSU damn near 10 years ago we used to go out to the Scotia SGL range and run IDPA drills. If there was a PGC ranger there the attitude typically was “As long as nobody else wants to shoot from the 25 yard pistol line do what you want so long as you’re safe.”

            2. I have a horror story of an arrogant cop at a range here in PA. The range was crowded, and the guys beside me used the wrong bench beside the lane for their stuff, so *I* had to use the wrong bench. Then they left. A cop came in and was using the lane next to me and took offense that I had my bag on the wrong bench. He came up behind me in the lane *while I had my gun on target* and *thumped me in the back of the head.* I shit you not. He got tossed from the range, but I imagine that if I’d done that I’d have gotten a permanent ban.

              Trust me, you do not want that to happen to you in the lane. I nearly had a heart attack.

  2. Most police officers receive little to no training. Usually you have to qualify with you duty weapon twice annually. Which can vary from 30-50 rounds in a non moving, non realistic range. I personally shoot several times a month, coach, train and do everything I can to make sure that friends and like minded individuals have training beyond the basic point this way and pull the trigger. If your interested in some great hands on training Google search for your local IDPA club.

    1. At the LAPD, all police under the rank of Captain have to qualify five times a year.

  3. Is that because the Dept. offers no training or even training-time, and if they want training they have to self-train – but doing that may put them in a dangerous, over-skilled, legal area?
    Sorta like ghetto kids being warned-off acting too “white” -?

  4. The one officer, Johnson, was in the US Coast Guard and I’m sure he had some training there. I was in the Coast Guard under the Department of Transportation and we trained and shot regularly!

  5. “Missed 12 out of fifty @ 7 yards? GOOD ENOUGH!”

    And that’s on a human silhouette. I get pissed when I miss a pie plate at 7 yards with my 3″ XD subcompact.

    1. I can hardly bring myself to believe that’s the standard. I shot that well the first time I picked up a 1911, and I’d only been shooting six months at the time–and nearly all .22s.

  6. About an hour or so after the shooting and before the facts were made public, I got a call from one of our guys who works for the NYPD. He said he was willing to wager that most if not all of the people shot were hit by police rounds. According to him when one officer starts shooting they all do. At the time he didn’t know if they opened up with their service pistols or M4s which they carry in sensitive areas.

  7. It’s scary, but it’s also funny as the NYPD is often portrayed in pop culture as one of the world’s most elite police forces. The sad part is a lot of people believe that. I’ve heard people say, “See? This is why concealed carry is stupid. Even super duper elite trained NYPD officers can hit bystanders. A redneck with a concealed carry permit would surely hit 3 times as many!”

  8. I think what’s most appalling is that it doesn’t take much training to be able to not miss a pie plate at 7 yards. Shooting isn’t like riding a bicycle, but once you master the fundamentals, even you don’t practice that often, you can still be on a pie plate at 7 yards. If this is really the case, you have to wonder if they are even getting real training at all.

    1. Case in point. I just went to the range for the first time in a year, and if I’m far into my second thousand rounds for my handgun, I’d be surprised. I popped off around a hundred rounds from my Glock, and every one of them hit the 6″ shoot-n-sees I was using, at 7 yards. The vast majority of them were 9-ring or better. And that’s with no formal training on handgun beyond a single NRA Basic Pistol course.
      That is, of course, on a well-lit, one-way range, slow-firing on a weapon with a notably longer sight radius. On the other hand, no formal instruction to speak of and a year of no range time at all.

      Even prior to this long drought, I rarely made it to the range, every 2-3 months was the norm, and 200 rounds was a high-round-count session.

  9. To be fair, I should add that the NYPD does get a lot of grief from the self appointed so-called community activists whenever there is an officer involved shooting.

  10. And also to be fair, with the number of laws on the books, they have to mke sure of enforcing all of them. All the laws, codes, acts…

    I blame that part on the lawyers we keep electing that somehow never find time to remove laws.

  11. And you know what is really sad? The guy from CA offering to help find a job for the NYC officer because the gun laws are more favorable.

    Isnt that just telling.

    1. As he said, it’s not great, but compared to NYC it’s like Arizona. And from everything I’ve read he’s right (that’s without microscopically examining their respective AW bans, but with the California “Bullet Button” loophole…).

  12. “As I mentioned, when you destroy your civilian gun culture, you have nothing to draw from when you need a cadre of men proficient at arms”

    A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

    Perhaps one of the victims can use this as cause in court to justify a liberalization of the gun laws since the “militia” is OBVIOUSLY NOT “well regulated.”

  13. My UTAH non-residence CCW license trainer here in NYC spent quite some time bashing NYPD’s shooting skills. He’s a NYPD police trainer.

    So, unverified, very true. But NYPD doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their shooting skills based on past facts and histories.

    But which one is more scary: if the article was completely incorrect, and NYPD receive weekly top-notch training, and focus like a laser on shooting skills, and still manage to shoot 9 innocent bystanders.

    Or, they just don’t train [as much as they should], hence the lousy handling skill.

  14. This bit from the comments (which were REALLY good… a nice for Reddit…) got to me regarding responsible CCW holders and cops.

    The answer I give to that line of argument is that at least CCW holders are liable for their mistakes, unlike police who are protected. If a carrier brandishes unlawfully, they will lose their permit. If they kill someone and are not justified, they will go to prison. They will lose their gun rights for life. A police officer gets a paid vacation.

  15. The land the NRA purchased and was foolishly chased off by the public, houses a psychiatric facility.

    My security management professor expressed, after class lectures, that when he was with the department, he was “scared white” of working with some guys because they “couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a f@#$ing boat”.

  16. RAND conducted a study on the NYPD training regime. It was handicapped by the apparent lack of knowledge about firearms among the RAND researchers. However, it arrived at conclusions that basically confirm the anonymous poster you linked to.

  17. I know this a tangent, but *Burnside* was the first president of the NRA? No wonder they didn’t get anything done for the first year.

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