NYPD Emergency Services Unit ESU patch
Safety issues with New York’s most highly trained unit, the Emergency Services Unit, which has the NYPD’s heavy-weapons, hostage-rescue, and counter-sniper functions, among others. Of course, it’s also the most heavily armed, perhaps the only officers with regular access to long guns and automatic weapons. Thus, Gawker’s report, Elite NYPD Unit Having Gun Safety Issues, is particularly disturbing.
From Jeff Neumann’s piece in Gawker:
Just last week, an ESU officer shot and killed a Bronx man, Alberto Colon while they were searching for his son, an alleged drug dealer. The officer who shot him was trying to turn the flashlight on his weapon on. But that’s not the only big time screw up. According to a report in the the Daily News:
A member of the ESU sniper team safeguarding the tree-lighting center at the tourist magnet accidentally let loose a rifle round on Nov. 30. It happened about 90 minutes after the ceremony, as the sniper teams were pulling out. The round hit a building and was found a block and a half away.
Four days earlier, an ESU detective getting out of his vehicle to respond to a report of a barricaded gunman accidentally fired a shotgun in Harlem. The blast went through an apartment window on W. 136th St.
As in the Rockefeller Center incident, no one was injured.
This is – let’s be clear – not about “bad cops.” It’s about cops working too much overtime, and an appallingly low ratio of training time to field time. The police officers need more basic firearms handling and usage. Less practice results in worse outcomes. It’s that simple. We appreciate Gawker’s coverage – excellent overall – but the remark about a cop being overweight is unfair. Consider the training that a U.S. infantry soldier receives – months or years – before being considered, say, for the Rangers – much less the Special Forces, SEALs or that more elite unit whose name we’re not to say aloud.
at Rockefeller Center
These cops – once initially trained (a story in itself) are expected to keep themselves in shape, keep their firearms skills near-perfect – and to bear any expenditure in time or money in addition to “routine” training themselves. The military assumes that ongoing training is part of the job. The NYPD – to the extent it makes that assumption – radically reverses the ratio. If training to field for an antiterrorist unit in the armed services is 10:1 – in the NYPD probably 1:100.
We make these assertions without citing our multiple sources – and with no fear of substantial contradiction. Anatole France is famous for saying that that the public wishes to know nothing of the making of sausages or laws; the same is true – in New York, at any rate – of how we train police officers, or to be more precise, how we don’t train them.
We would have half the officers at twice the pay and twice the training time; dispense with most of the counter-productive enforcement of drug and adult prostitution laws. We’d all be safer for it. This is a hypothesis not likely to be tested; those readers who think it a rash proposition should be reassured. Those readers who are concerned about the quality of our police protection – and the safety of our police officers – should continue to be concerned.
The underlying Daily News piece is: Elite cops from NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit fire three stray rounds in three months, by Staff Writers Bob Kappstatter, Rocco Parascandola and Alison Gendar.