The owner of a company that trained paramilitary Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents testified that he was involved in at least four lethal shootings, according to a 2021 deposition related to a lawsuit reviewed by WIRED.
David S. Norman, the founder and proprietor of law enforcement training firm TruKinetics LLC, served as a Phoenix Police officer from the late 1990s until his retirement in 2020. Prior to founding TruKinetics the same year, according to records reviewed by WIRED, Norman was involved in six shootings while on duty that left four people dead and two more wounded. In every instance, the Phoenix Police Department said Norman fired on an armed suspect and exchanged volleys of gunfire in at least two of the shootings.
Based in Gilbert, Arizona, TruKinetics offers training on small-team tactics, hostage rescues, close-quarters combat, building searches, night-vision firearms proficiency, pistol and rifle courses, “vehicle interdiction,” breaching with explosives, and sniper tactics, according to the company’s website.
TruKinetics received $27,748 for a year-long contract to run a mandatory 40-hour training course that certain members of Department of Homeland Security Special Response Teams receive annually at Fort Benning in Georgia, according to government procurement records reviewed by WIRED. At least 700 SRT agents from the Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, and ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Office units pass through Fort Benning for annual training.
In an interview with WIRED, Norman says that his company conducted sessions with the Special Response Team from Arizona’s Homeland Security Investigations office. “They’re top dudes, and it was an honor to work with them,” he tells WIRED. Norman maintains that his courses, which took place in Arizona and Georgia’s Fort Benning, did not involve crowd control tactics or active shooters, but would not specify further. “It sounds like you’re one of those dudes who’s doing a hit piece on HSI,” he says.
TruKinetics posted two photos to Instagram in August 2024 of Norman and three TruKinetics trainers alongside 19 uniformed operators from HSI’s Arizona Special Response Team, posing in a “kill house” training course—a set of rooms and hallways filled with obstacles and targets designed to simulate close-quarters combat.
Customs and Border Protection did not respond to WIRED’s questions about how many SRT teams and operators went through the Gilbert, Arizona, company’s training course.
In a 2021 law enforcement podcast, The Modern Cop, Norman describes himself as “a fucking savage” who sought out high-risk experiences and shootings as a cop. “I wanted these experiences. I was super aggressive,” Norman said. He also appeared to joke about police shootings, telling the host that “you kind of hope it’s on your Friday, so you can actually have days off.”
Once reserved for armed or high-risk suspects, manhunts, and potentially dangerous building entries, the SRTs are now being used for civil immigration enforcement, crowd control, and basic warrant service, operations that the unit was once restricted from performing. Both Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed while protesting the militarized federal immigration surges in Minnesota, with SRT members implicated in both of their deaths. While recent debate over Homeland Security’s violent immigration sweeps have focused on whether agents receive adequate training, the background of SRT’s training contractor raises questions about who is training ICE’s and CBP’s paramilitary units, and what they are being trained to do.
For a dozen years of Norman’s two decades as a Phoenix cop, he served on the agency’s Special Assignments Unit, a plainclothes fugitive apprehension team that Norman repeatedly characterized in a 2021 deposition from a lawsuit filed the previous year as having morphed into what was considered a “SWAT” (special weapons and tactics) team. On those units, he worked as a “point cover” man and at times doubled up as a trainer on pistol usage for units within Phoenix PD, according to his deposition and Phoenix Police documents reviewed by WIRED.
