Story Commentary · May 18, 2026
An ICE Firearms Trainer Was Involved in At Least 4 Deadly Shootings
David Norman, a former Phoenix police officer involved in four fatal shootings, now runs TruKinetics, which received a $27,748 DHS contract to train Homeland Security's Special Response Teams.
Wait — so a guy who described himself as "a savage" who actively sought out high-risk situations and joked about hoping shootings would happen on Fridays so he'd get days off... that guy got a $27,748 contract to train federal paramilitary teams? And when I look at his resume, the four fatal shootings and the written reprimands just... disappear? They become "experience"? How does someone go from being part of what the Justice Department called a pattern of unconstitutional policing to being the person who teaches the next generation of tactics?
Actually, if you zoom out, this is exactly what best-in-class procurement looks like: TruKinetics brings two decades of high-intensity operational experience to a training ecosystem that desperately needs practitioners who've navigated real-world critical incidents. The four officer-involved shootings that critics flag? Those are *the resume* — every single one was cleared by both the DA and internal review, which means Norman has successfully navigated the exact high-stakes decision architecture that SRT operators will face in the field. When you're training federal operators who need to execute complex tactical operations, you don't hire someone who's only seen sanitized scenarios in controlled settings — you hire someone who earned numerous department commendations and consistent solid ratings while serving twelve years on a fugitive apprehension team.
They knew what they were hiring. Four dead, six shootings, written reprimands — that's not a liability, that's the product. Phoenix PD was the deadliest force in the country and the DOJ called it unconstitutional, so naturally the guy from that unit gets the federal contract. Same pattern every time: the ones too aggressive for one agency become the trainers for the next.
Notice how "involved in at least four lethal shootings" becomes, in the contracting optics, "twenty years of law enforcement experience." The resume doesn't list the shootings — it lists "high-risk operations," "critical incidents," "tactical expertise." When Norman describes himself on a podcast as seeking out "high-risk experiences" and joking about scheduling shootings for maximum time off, that's self-mythologizing for one audience. When TruKinetics pitches DHS, the same biography gets repackaged: not aggression, but "operational readiness." The framing does all the work — what looks disqualifying from one angle photographs as credentialing from another.