Courtesy photo
Shayna Kendall with SCSU officer Kim Clare at the training.
When 16 female cops and soldiers assembled to brush up on their firearms training, they learned about alternative techniques and safe gun-carrying from the state’s first-ever black woman to be certified for the task.
A full class of law enforcement and military women joined New Haven police Sgt. Shayna Kendall for a Saturday course to brush up on their range shooting and learn alternative techniques to shooting fundamentals and safe gun-carrying.
That training took place this past Saturday at the state police academy in Meriden. The team of instructors included Sgt. Kendall, the state’s first black woman-officer to be certified as a firearms instructor.
Kendall has been a sergeant for the police department’s Patrol Division since 2017. During this time was when she also submitted her request to be a firearms instructor.
“For me, it would have been absolutely empowering to see a female on the range while I was getting taught,” Kendall said.
The eight-hour First Annual Basic Tactical Firearms Course was led Saturday by all but one of Connecticut’s 10 female firearms instructors. The course filled quickly and had a wait list of interested cops and military women.
Jessica Wassil of Cheshire Police Department’s patrol division reached out to Kendall with the opportunity to help and learn from those who signed up for the course. The course was offered on a law-enforcement communication network called CTIC, to both police and military women. Attendees came from departments in West Hartford, Stratford, and Southern Connecticut State University, among others.
Maya McFadden Photo
Shayna Kendall.
The majority of the instruction for the eight-hour course was on the shooting range. But the instructors began with an hour of in-class preparation. They refreshed the women on range safety, shooting drills, concealed carry mechanisms to purchase specific to women, and alternative duty rigs and holsters that help women-officers to maintain comfort while worn.
The instructors worked to correct any range deficiencies and offered shooting adjustments for the women like alternative hand positions and grips when handling firearms. The lessons ranged from malfunction drills, box shooting drills, and drills specific to when shooting while behind barricades.
“I think there should be females on the firing range, because females have questions that some men can’t relate or accommodate to,” Kendall said.
Kendall credited former New Haven cop Robert Strickland (now a Madison cop) for her own firearms training. And she credited former Chief Anthony Campbell for encouraging her to become a firearms instructor for the department.
Strickland said he identified Kendall as a promising prospect when she was a cadet at the police training academy, where he taught firearms. He said he “saw how poised, how disciplined she was, and the pride she took in everything she did.” He said the department had previously had only one female firearms instructor, now-retired cop Jo Schaller. (Schaller is white.)
Campbell said he asked Kendall to pursue the needed certification to become a firearms instructor. That’s one of the areas in which few departments have women in general, he said.
“I told Shayna, ‘I want you to be the first female firearms instructor from this department,’” Campbell said. “She is brilliant. She is well-educated. She is one of if not the best supervisor on the second shift. You can count on her for anything. I believe Shayna Kendall will be New Haven’s first black female chief. I’ll be there, God willing, when that day comes.”
For now, Kendall said she felt blessed last Saturday that she was given the opportunity to help state law-enforcement officials improve their skills.
“It was a very non-judgemental environment knowing that we were all in it together to be better at what we all enjoy doing,” Kendall said.
Kendall was surprised when some of the women shared that the Saturday course was one of their few opportunities to ask specific questions that seemed to be more difficult to ask with their academy instructors. “They were more expressive about wanting to learn new ways of doing things,” she said.
During the course, there was no social stigma against the women being weak, and the environment was stress-free, Kendall said.
Kendall initially wanted to go to law school to become an attorney. That plan changed after the traumatic experience of her brother’s and cousin’s murders. She said she found hope in the goodness of the detectives who helped to solve her brother’s case and bring justice to her and her family. Kendall said the detectives handled the case with dedication and compassion, from phone calls updating her family in the middle of the night to personal daily check-ins.
“You would’ve thought that it was one of their family members that died tragically,” Kendall said. She decided to become a cop herself. (She’s also a competitive weight trainer; read about that here.)
This experience of Kendall’s demonstrated to her the epitome of community policing. “Without the community we have nothing,” she said.
As she continues to move up in her law enforcement career, Kendall said, she hopes to continue to work towards bridging the community and law enforcement gap.
Paul Bass contributed reporting.
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