David Norman, a former Phoenix police officer who later reinvented himself as a firearms instructor, has been reported to have trained Homeland Security’s paramilitary Special Response Teams after a career in which he acknowledged taking part in multiple on-duty shootings. His Gilbert-based company, TruKinetics, landed a small federal contract in 2024 to run a mandatory 40-hour SRT certification course, and the revelations are reigniting scrutiny over who is shaping the tactics and mindset of heavily armed federal teams. Local advocates and civil-rights attorneys say the episode highlights broader worries about Phoenix’s policing culture and how that culture may bleed into federal enforcement.
What the reporting found
According to WIRED, Norman testified in a 2021 deposition that he was involved in six on-duty shootings during his Phoenix Police career, incidents that left four people dead and two others wounded. WIRED also reports that Norman described himself on a 2021 podcast as “a fucking savage” who actively sought out high-risk encounters, language that civil-rights lawyers say raises stark concerns about the worldview being passed along to trainees.
The federal contract and local training
Procurement records show that TruKinetics received about $27,700 in 2024 to deliver the mandatory 40-hour Special Response Team course, with the work listed at Fort Benning (Fort Moore), according to GovTribe. On its public site, TruKinetics advertises close-quarters and small-team tactics classes around the Phoenix metro area, and the firm has posted images showing its trainers working with uniformed HSI operators in simulated “kill house” training lanes, per TruKinetics.
How SRT training connects to federal deployments
Special Response Teams are built for high-risk operations and follow a defined training regimen that includes multi-week courses and intensive force-on-force drills, according to ICE. Critics point out that as SRTs have been used more frequently in civil immigration enforcement, scrutiny of who designs and delivers that training has sharpened, especially after federal tactical teams were implicated in deadly incidents, as reporting by ProPublica shows.
Phoenix accountability context
The disclosures land as the Phoenix Police Department faces its own reckoning. The Department of Justice concluded that Phoenix police engaged in a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional policing, including unjustified deadly force, ABC15 reported when the DOJ released its review. Civil-rights attorneys quoted in that broader reporting described Norman’s plainclothes unit as a “group of plainclothes cowboys,” and said Norman himself was “especially aggressive,” observations compiled by WIRED.
What officials have said
Neither DHS nor Norman immediately responded to inquiries, The Independent reported, and ICE has not publicly detailed how it vets private contractors who provide SRT instruction. For Phoenix residents, civil-rights advocates and local attorneys, that silence has only amplified calls for more transparency about how federal tactical teams are trained and who sets the tone inside those classrooms and shoot houses.
Questions about contractor vetting, the overlap between local police culture and federal paramilitary tactics, and the influence of trainers who openly boast about past shootings are likely to stick around. For now, documents and reporting outline a modest federal award to a Phoenix-area trainer with a controversial record, and they are fueling fresh demands to spell out exactly who is teaching some of the country’s most heavily armed immigration units.
