Lubbock Police Chief Greg Stevens held a press conference Monday morning to address what he described as recent “negligent firearm discharges” at the department firing range.
According to Stevens, a firearm discharged Sunday morning in a classroom while it was being disassembled and cleaned. The bullet struck the ground.
A second incident occurred on September 28. During that incident, an officer was cleaning his firearm when it discharged and went out a side window of the patrol vehicle.
Chief Stevens said the LPD Firing Range has been temporarily closed and all training events have been canceled while the the incidents are investigated.
He said the investigation will focus on three specific areas: overall gun safety, training complacency and verification the instructors are following the rules.
“Gun safety is fundamental to law enforcement, so we’ll be looking at that, we will also look at how this current training regimen that we’re using is different from ones in the past, I think there may be a complacency issue,” Chief Stevens said.
“If one of these instances occurs, that’s a problem, that’s something we need to look at,” Chief Stevens said. “But when it happens twice, to me that’s a systemic failure, that we need to pause, we need to stop what we’re doing, and figure out why that’s occurring.”
Chief Stevens said a shooting review board is looking into both incidents and he hopes they will wrap those up by the end of the week.