Constitutional Law

NYPD police gun discharge study

Pdf here. A number of interesting results. A majority of shots were fired at 1-2 yards, and hit rate was only 43% at that range (both results not uncommon, actually). At 3-7 yards this drops to 23%, then at 8-15 yards rises again to 40%. Perhaps the officers have the ability to take better aim there, or maybe it's a fluke of the small sample size,

What's very interesting is that only 45% occurred on duty, in uniform. 36% were, I assume, undercover, and 18% off duty and out of uniform. From the individual reports, many of the undercover shootings did not involve a gunfight with the suspect: the officer was investigating one event when he saw an unrelated crime taking place (in one case, bank robbers had the bad luck to try to car-jack an undercover officer).

32 shootings were dog-related, 28 involving pit bulls.

On the less pleasant side, 26 accidental discharges, which fortunately resulted in no deaths but several injuries.

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on October 25, 2008 (boomark / email).