Twenty-five San Diego police officers failed all five of their firearm qualification shoots this year, nearly double the 13 officers who failed in 2025. Officers who flunk every attempt are pulled from patrol duty, assigned to a desk, and forced into remedial training before they can carry a badge back onto the street.
The jump comes four years after the department shuttered its outdoor gun range, a move it made in 2022 after about a dozen officers reported elevated levels of lead in their blood, according to NBC 7 San Diego. Since then, the department has been sending officers to a private range in Poway to train and qualify, a contract that could cost taxpayers as much as $4.1 million at its maximum potential total, dating back to 2022.
Union Points to Lost Practice Time
The failures still represent a small slice of the overall force — about 1 percent, per the same outlet's reporting — but the near-doubling has drawn attention inside the department. The police union president attributed the rise to barriers created by the range closure, arguing it has made it harder for officers to squeeze in extra practice time beyond their scheduled qualification shoots.
SDPD Captain Michael Ramsay offered a partial counterpoint, saying the department still averages roughly 60 hours a month of free, available training time for officers who want it. But when pressed on what's actually driving the increase in failures, Ramsay didn't offer a firm theory. Speaking in Spanish to Telemundo 20, he said, “No tengo una respuesta definitiva” — I don't have a definitive answer.
A Policy With Five Chances Built In
The five-attempt structure isn't new. A 2024 department order on mandatory handgun qualification shoots laid out that officers get five chances to pass, and those who fail all five are pulled from the field and required to complete mandatory firearms training, according to a redacted copy of the order posted by the San Diego Police Department.
San Diego isn't alone in wrestling with how qualification standards square up against real-world policing. An analysis from Officer.com notes that some agencies nationally have moved toward tougher qualification standards, with a handful requiring officers to post perfect scores to pass. The same piece points out that actual hit rates in armed confrontations often land far below range performance, frequently somewhere between 15 and 35 percent.
Officer.com also floats a possible framework for agencies rethinking their standards: pairing a legally defensible minimum qualification bar with a separate, higher benchmark meant to push the median officer's performance up over time. Whether San Diego adopts anything like that remains to be seen, but the debate over what's pushing more officers to the sidelines — lost range access, tougher conditions, or something else — is still unresolved, with the union and the department's own training captain offering different read on the cause.
