Officers practice at the police shooting range. The administration of Chief Charles H. Ramsey is pushing officers to train more with their weapons; for several years, most officers ignored requirements that they requalify at the firing range twice a year. (By Rick Bowmer – The Washington Post)

The first accident occurred in February 1989 – less than a month before the guns reached officers on the street. Officer Adam K. Schutz was helping to test and clean the first shipment of guns when he shot himself in the fingers.

"It bit me," said Schutz, who was left with permanent damage to a finger on his left hand. "I was moving my hand to lower the slide and it jumped forward. I had assumed the gun was unloaded."

Nine months later, the 2-year-old daughter of a D.C. police officer died after accidentally shooting herself in the head with her father's pistol in their Northwest Washington house.

By October 1989, the department had experienced 13 unintentional discharges, double the rate of 1988, the last year with revolvers, according to an internal police memo. Then-Assistant Chief Max Krupo noted in the memo to the chief that such problems were to be expected in departments switching to semiautomatics. Krupo suggested that increasing the five-pound trigger pressure to eight pounds "would be satisfactory." But after studying the issue, Krupo decided that a five-pound pull was just as safe as an eight-pound one.

In February 1990, the Use of Service Weapon Review Board – responsible for monitoring department shooting trends – issued a report by Catoe, the deputy chief, in response to "the increasing number of unintentional discharges." The report examined nine incidents, blaming "human error" in each case. The report found no deficiencies in either the Glock or the department's training procedures.

But the report reached a troubling conclusion: "The department is obviously experiencing far too many accidental Glock discharges . . . [which] must be eliminated promptly so that serious injury or death can be avoided."

By the early 1990s, the Glock's alleged problems with unintentional shots were the talk of the gun world. Lawsuits against Glock for accidental discharges piled up. The Firearms Litigation Clearinghouse in Washington, an advocacy center against gun violence, currently is monitoring about 60 pending lawsuits against Glock across the country – 90 percent of all the cases the center is tracking, the center's executive director said.

Despite such publicity, many firearms experts retain deep admiration for the gun.

"Some of the same factors that give it tremendous high-speed hit potential while you're fighting for your life also make it more prone to accidental discharges," Massad Ayoob, a New Hampshire police captain who also runs a firearms instruction institute, said. "You don't want your 16-year-old kid out of driver's ed driving a Corvette Stingray. The Glock is like a Corvette Stingray."

Alexandria Police Chief Charles E. Samarra, who as a D.C. assistant chief headed the committee that chose the Glock in 1988, called it "the perfect weapon," but said training is essential.

"Training has a lot to do with accidental discharges," Samarra said in an interview. "Our only concern was training."

Three months after D.C. police started carrying Glocks, the department began a crash program to hire 1,500 officers in 18 months. Police officials now acknowledge that the officers from those recruit classes of 1989 and 1990 were, in many cases, poorly screened and trained by the department.

"They just rushed through this stuff," said former lieutenant Lowell Duckett, who was a firearms instructor at the police academy then. "We had taken firearms training up to eight days. We were in the process of making it two weeks. After 1989, [with] the big flood of recruits . . . firearms went to five days, maybe three in some cases."

Of 93 accidental discharges studied by The Post where information about the officers' academy classes was available, 49 involved officers from the Classes of 1989 and 1990. In other words, half the accidental shootings involved a group of officers who never made up more than 35 percent of the force.