NYPD officers on paid details are used to confronting hotdog vendors, not gunmen

The NYPD officer who was killed Monday in a Midtown mass shooting was earning extra pay in what is generally thought of as a low-stress assignment: working security, in uniform, for a private company.

For Didarul Islam, the once cushy side job turned deadly when a gunman entered the Park Avenue building at about 6:30 p.m., killing him, three others, and finally himself. The gunman shot a sixth person who remains in critical condition.

Paid detail work by off-duty police officers could become more common and more dangerous as threats against corporate executives increase and security shortfalls at office buildings become more apparent, security experts say.

The Monday shooting was the second time in less than a year that a gunman targeted someone in Midtown. In December, prosecutors say Luigi Mangione shot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson point-blank in front of the Midtown Hilton. Mangione is awaiting trial on murder charges.

“I think security of executives is, and should be, a growing concern not only in Manhattan but nationally,” said Christopher O’Leary, the former FBI assistant special agent in charge of the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The paid detail program began in the 1990s as a way to provide uniformed police officers to work security at certain locations around the city. The officers are considered off-duty contractors and are paid by the vendors who hire them, according to the NYPD. Assignments can include sports complexes, banks, department stores and office buildings.

O’Leary, now senior vice president of global operations with the Soufan Group, said he expects paid detail work to increase.

“I think we’ll probably see more of it,” O’Leary said. “If you have someone come in with a high-powered rifle, unfortunately, the advantage is always with the attacker.”

While security experts say more dangerous detail work is expected to increase, it hasn't always been that way.

NYPD officers described typically mundane security work while on paid details at Midtown office buildings in a series of depositions taken in a federal civil lawsuit over a payment dispute.

A number of the officers who worked details at Bloomberg’s headquarters – blocks away from Monday’s shooting – described tasks such as shooing away pot-smoking skateboarders, moving along hotdog vendors and making sure homeless people did not enter buildings.

“This is going to be the easiest gig you've ever done,” one of the officers, Burbran Pierre, recalled his supervisor telling him in a 2022 deposition.

Pierre added that one of his primary tasks was ridding the nearby sidewalk of food carts.

“There's no hot dog vendors, no guys selling hot dogs and burgers or such on this block,” Pierre recalled being instructed when he started the detail.

Another officer who also worked a detail at Bloomberg, Kenneth Walls, described in a 2023 deposition that he was instructed to clear kids from an outdoor plaza at the building.

“Watch out for kids coming through. Sometimes they want to skateboard in the middle area there. Watch out for people smoking marijuana within the little courtyard area, things of that nature,” Walls said in the interview.

O’Leary said that shootings like Monday’s could become more common, similar to how school shootings spread in the United States after the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

He cited the hyperpolarization of U.S. politics and an increase in serious, untreated mental illness as some of the drivers.

“This is a situation where it demonstrates that it's possible and it's likely going to initiate copycat attacks,” O’Leary said.