New York City ex-police officer Peter Liang sits in court during his trial in Brooklyn Supreme Court in New York City, Feb. 10, 2016. (Photo : Getty Images)
A New York Police Department (NYPD) Police Academy instructor has been stripped of her badge and gun following reports that she failed to teach CPR properly to recruits, including the officer involved in the fatal shooting of Akai Gurley in November the previous year.
Officer Melissa Brown, who is assigned to the NYPD's Recruit Training Section, was placed on modified duty Monday and is now restricted to administrative work, an NYPD spokesman told the New York Daily News on Tuesday.
A probe by the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau identified Brown as the academy instructor responsible for teaching CPR to recruits, including since-fired officers Peter Liang and Shawn Landau, in 2013.
Liang was convicted of manslaughter on Feb. 11 for the slaying of Akai Gurley on Nov. 20, 2014.
Liang and Landau were patrolling the Pink Houses residential complex in Brooklyn when Liang accidentally fired a round that ricocheted off a wall and hit Gurley in the chest. Neither of the officers tried to resuscitate Gurley, according to witness testimony.
Landau testified that he spent "less than two minutes" training on a CPR mannequin at the academy and that his academy instructor gave out nearly all the answers to the CPR test.
"The last 10 questions they didn't want to give the answer [sic] because they didn't want everyone to have identical scores," Liang testified in court.
A third officer, John Funk, who was in the same academy class as Liang, corroborated claims that NYPD recruits were helped to cheat on the test and spent little time on CPR training, according to the New York Post.
The NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau launched an investigation after the training issue was raised at the trial.
The academy instructors are under scrutiny for training lapses, sources told the New York Daily News, adding that NYPD officials are considering increasing the amount of CPR training.
