A little background on the NYPD and firearms Back when most apartments were transitioning from revolvers to semi-auto, NYPD held on to revolvers for quite a while. Their revolvers used double action triggers, which means pulling the trigger both rotates the cylinder and also cocks the hammer. This means the trigger is long and heavy, you have to pull it a long distance back and with a good amount of force. Many officers would ‘pre stage’ the trigger, pulling it halfway back to an indent where the pull gets slightly harder. This is a horrible practice that no one should ever do, because it means you might unintentionally discharge if you get jostled, but it made them more accurate when it came time to actually fire. But NYPD didn’t train it out of the officers.
So then the department switched from revolvers to semi-auto. But they used striker fired pistols- these guns have a very short and much lighter trigger pull as the only thing the trigger does is move a catch to release already stored spring tension. That can make you much more accurate because the force of pulling the trigger moves your aim off, so less force needed to pull the trigger means more accuracy.
Problem was, a lot of officers had muscle memory from years or decades of carrying the double action revolver so they would try to pre-stage the trigger. And that would of course fire the gun when they didn’t want to.
NYPD’s solution to this was to simply make the trigger on their semi-autos really really really hard to pull. They had a custom spring designed that increased the trigger force- a semi-auto usually requires about 4-6 pounds of force to pull the trigger, they put a 12 lb spring. That allowed the officers to apply pre-stage force from their revolver days without discharging the weapon. Still absolutely horrible practice, but this stopped the unintentional discharges.
This had the side effect of course of making the guns relatively inaccurate. When you have to squeeze the trigger with that much force, it throws your aim off. And especially when you are in an emergency situation and adrenaline is pumping, it’s hard to shoot accurately when you need to pull that hard. And, for a very long time, they kept issuing these 12lb trigger guns even to new recruits, many of whom had never fired a gun before and could be easily trained with proper trigger discipline.
For the record, no other police department in the nation did this. Every one of them transitioned from revolvers to semi-autos without much problem, because they did not tolerate bad trigger discipline to begin with. And while some recommend a slightly stiffer trigger, NYPD is literally the only one with a 12 lb trigger.
It wasn’t until 2021 that NYPD started to back off, and started issuing new recruits weapons with ‘only’ 8lb trigger springs. That is still fairly high, but those 4 lb less makes it a lot easier to shoot accurately.
Point of all this– When I hear that NYPD is shooting multiple bystanders, I’m not surprised. Unless those officers first hit the streets in the last couple of years, they are still using the 12 lb trigger and it’s not surprising they have shit accuracy and are shooting bystanders.