Magic Bullets

“In everything we do, we will give our police the respect and the protection and all of the resources that you need,” President Donald Trump assured members of the Fraternal Order of Police at a roundtable this June. He went on to boast of the distribution of “excess military equipment,” echoing an April 28 executive order in which the president directed his administration to “increase the provision of excess military and national security assets” to state and local law enforcement.

Excess is an apt word, given that American law enforcement agencies have hardware at their disposal that match or exceed those used by many foreign militaries: tear gas, for one, but also armored vehicles, grenade launchers, machine guns, drones, and occasionally scuba gear, the last of which made its way to the landlocked town of Morven, Georgia (population: 565), in 2013. Another is the hollow-point bullet, a type of ammunition designed to mushroom or expand upon impact, creating a larger—and therefore more lethal—wound than traditional full-metal jackets. Deemed wantonly cruel and banned for use in war by parties to the Hague Convention of 1899, the hollow point is now used by nearly all major police forces across the United States. That means the roughly 1,300 people that police officers fatally shoot every year are hit with hollow-point bullets. This unlikely journey, from a war crime in one century to law enforcement’s round of choice by the end of the next, is part and parcel of a broader militarization effort that, beginning under President George H. W. Bush and accelerating during the global war on terror, has pumped billions into the coffers of local police departments, transforming them into occupying armies with a warrior mindset.

In the 1980s and 1990s, police chiefs and politicians who tried to transition from full-metal jackets, or bullets with a soft core surrounded by a hard metal casing, to hollow points faced fierce opposition. Gradually, police departments overcame the moral outrage and justified the more lethal rounds using manufactured concepts backed up by little evidence. “There is no magic bullet, but this is about the closest thing to it,” one ballistics expert at the Baltimore County Police Department told the New York Times in 1993. “It has the stopping power that police officers need, and it is less likely to ricochet or go through the bad guy.”

One of the country’s last major holdouts, the New York Police Department, transitioned away from full-metal jackets in 1998, and the use of hollow points has continued unchallenged ever since—even when the public questioned other long-standing policing practices following George Floyd’s murder in 2020. “A lot of folks have abandoned the opposition to hollow-point bullets,” Earl S. Ward, who served on New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board at the time of the ammunition transition, told me in March. “It’s just become the norm now. But the issues that were initially raised are still valid issues, right? The heavy-duty nature of these bullets, coupled with more instances of police use of force, obviously results in more death.”

The story of hollow points is a forgotten chapter in the wider history of police militarization, one that offers a cautionary tale against Trump’s executive order “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement” and the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that promises a massive windfall, including at least $14 billion to state and local governments for police departments cooperating on immigration enforcement. The episode shows how police militarization works like a reverse ratchet—unleashing is easy, but putting the restraint back on is much more difficult.

The modern-day hollow point eventually came to live in the chamber of most police sidearms thanks to two technological breakthroughs—and a series of logical leaps and rhetorical somersaults. The first came in 1897, when Captain Neville Bertie-Clay, a British army officer stationed at the Dum Dum Arsenal outside of Calcutta, India, patented a solution a problem that had bedeviled the empire for years. The problem, H. Ommundsen and E.H. Robinson write, was that the “savage tribes” facing the British “refused to be sufficiently impressed” by the standard ammunition at the time—“in fact, they often ignored it altogether, and, having been hit in four or five places, came on to unpleasantly close quarters.” The enterprising captain dealt with this unpleasantry by fashioning an early version of the hollow tip. Within a matter of years, grisly reports from British medical officers of the suffering endured by those who found themselves on the receiving end of these so-called dum-dum bullets quickly reached a nascent but growing global humanitarian movement.

Opposition culminated in 1899 at the Hague, where colonial powers debated the use of dum-dums in war. Though the parties agreed that the extra lethal ammunition was too inhumane for use against each other, the British tried to carve out an exception for its imperial soldiers to use them against colonial subjects. “In civilized war, a soldier penetrated by a small projectile is wounded, withdraws to the ambulance, and does not advance any further,” argued one British military officer named John Charles Ardagh. “It is very different with a savage. Even though pierced two or three times, he does not cease to march forward . . . but continues on, and before anyone has time to explain to him that he is flagrantly violating the decision of the Hague Conference, he cuts off your head. For this reason the English delegate demands the liberty of employing projectiles of sufficient efficacy against savage races.” The British proposal was voted down, and dum-dum bullets were prohibited for use in war only years after their invention out of recognition of the fact that the projectiles went beyond the military need merely to stop an enemy’s attack. The hollow-point bullet, in other words, was overkill.

But one humanitarian’s lament is another gun manufacturer’s selling point. “As with any loosely regulated consumer product industry, the gun and ammunition industry continues to innovate and develop new products to increase profits, including new types of ammunition,” note two researchers for a Center for American Progress report published in 2019. “Innovation in the ammunition industry usually involves trying to increase lethality—what the industry often refers to as ‘stopping power’—or offer a new or novel feature when fired.” Thanks in part to this industry feature, hollow points’ lethality—the very thing that drew the ire of turn-of-the-century humanitarians—went from a Gilded Age taboo to a midcentury marketing highlight. Stopping power and pass through soon became the watchwords of the law enforcement circles and gun hobbyist communities alike.

In the early twentieth century, some police officers hungry for more stopping power would alter their standard issue .38-caliber ammunition by clipping or notching the nose of bullets. These makeshift hollow points were unreliable, however, and cops who used them traded greater lethality for diminished accuracy and range. That is, until another technological breakthrough. In the sixties, a man named Lee Jurras, known to some as “The Curmudgeon,” founded Super-Vel Cartridge Corporation in Shelbyville, Indiana. Short for “super velocity,” Super Vel’s lightweight, factory-standard hollow points became an overnight sensation with law enforcement and threatened to upend the American ammunition industry in the process. According to a typewritten account of the company’s history by Ernest “Ernie” Wallein, Jurras’s friend and Super Vel’s second employee, in 1966, Jurras finalized development of “what turned out to be the most revolutionary development in handgun ammunition” for at least fifty years. Wallei said Jurras’s genius design “increased the stopping power of the .38 special, the standard police weapon, by almost 50 percent: yet, it eliminated dangerous ricochets and excessive penetration, thus, making it a safer round to use.”

After sending samples to gun hobbyists and law enforcement agencies, Super Vel landed a contract with the Phoenix, Arizona, police department in 1967, following an incident two years earlier in which officers’ .38-caliber “ball-type” ammunition passed through a suspect and hit a bystander. Other agencies on a quest for more stopping power followed suit. According to Jurras, by the end of that year, federal agencies—including the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Bureau of Narcotics, and the White House Police—were all purchasing hollow points from Super Vel. By the end of the decade, the founder estimated that 45 percent of all U.S. law enforcement agencies stocked his company’s ammunition. Soon, other gun and ammunition manufacturers, including Speer Ammunition and Norma, took notice of this plucky ammo startup and ate away at Super Vel’s market share. The firm struggled to keep up with the competition, fell behind on excise tax payments, and ultimately shuttered in January 1975 after the IRS seized and auctioned off the company’s assets.

Super Vel closed its doors, but Jurras’s legacy lived on, as police departments continued to argue for more lethal hollow points based on notions of stopping power and pass through. But these public safety arguments often had a complicated relationship with reality. For one, they assumed that police forces across the country were filling their ranks with discerning marksmen who drew their weapons only after using other tactics to defuse a situation. “After all,” said Jurras, “a policeman should only draw a gun when it is necessary.” But as the New York Times noted in 1997, “several studies show that the case for the hollow-point bullet is not entirely clear cut.” At the time, one in five officers shot was shot by another officer—or by himself—and “80 percent of the shots fired in police shootouts miss their targets, meaning at least some innocent people hit cleanly by an errant bullet would be more severely injured by the new bullets.”

Police departments hoping to adopt hollow points were often stonewalled by a lack of empirical evidence. In 1980, the Los Angeles police chief’s hollow-points proposal failed after the city’s then-chief medical examiner-coroner struggled to find evidence that the ammunition had more stopping power but concluded that it did cause more tissue damage. A similar proposal at the NYPD also fizzled out fourteen years later due to a lack of data. The hollow-point bullet also never seemed to shake off the colonial ghosts of its past. Even Jurras admitted as much in 1970, when he said in response to a question about the use of the ammunition against mostly minority communities, “This is a touchy subject. A lot of minority groups might object. We like to keep the discussion within law enforcement circles.”

However, the one thing that everyone seemed to agree on was the immense damage these bullets wrought on the human body. This incontrovertible fact even gave some police chiefs pause. In the mid-1970s, LAPD Chief Ed Davis opposed transitioning to hollow points, saying the more lethal round “makes big holes in people.” But Chief Davis would soon find himself in the minority. As more police departments and federal agencies made the transition, critical mass became an argument in itself. In 1988, LAPD Commander William Booth said his department’s decision to finally green light hollow points was for the purpose of “bringing us in line with other police departments using a bullet that has less penetrating power and more stopping power.” When told about the American Civil Liberty Union’s concerns that stopping power was just shorthand for “additional killing power,” Booth reportedly responded, “ACLU, eat your heart out.”

By the 1990s, there was still a major hollow-point holdout: the New York Police Department. The largest police force in the country had considered using hollow points as early as 1975, but opposition by the ACLU and other civil society groups always proved too difficult to overcome. That began to change in 1994, when a tough-on-crime candidate named Rudolph Giuliani became the city’s mayor thanks in part to the support of police officers and a mission to outfit the force with improved technology, which included the ammunition used by the NYPD. The city’s transit and housing police forces, the New York State police, and the FBI had all made the switch in recent years, so the new mayoral administration conducted a series of tests on the bullets during Giuliani’s first two years in office. Despite never releasing the findings, in 1997, then-NYPD Commissioner William Bratton assured New Yorkers that the studies showed “it would take fewer rounds to stop an opponent,” and “therefore there is less need to fire more rounds and thus you reduce the likelihood that innocent bystanders will be struck.”

Still, the city remained dubious. In 1994, the Times dismissed the NYPD’s most recent flirtation with hollow points as “the latest effort to increase officers’ firepower.” As Representative Jose Serrano, a Democrat from the South Bronx, told the paper, “These bullets can cripple,” and that he gets “nervous that a trained police department continuously tells me that they need to go a step further in the kind of armament they are going to use in the city.”

By March 1997, as New York’s hollow-points debate raged, the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) voted to establish a committee “to examine these concerns and to report our views to the full board for its consideration.” The city council and then-Mayor David Dinkins remade the board as an independent body with an all-civilian membership in 1993 despite opposition from the NYPD, which had the year prior erupted into an unruly demonstration of off-duty police officers, stoked in part by future mayor Giuliani. The CCRB formed the hollow-points committee after members of the public expressed concern “that hollow-point bullets demonstrated the dangerous propensities of so-called ‘dum-dum’ bullets,” which caused “large exit wounds and explosive internal damage.” According to a CCRB report, “serious questions were raised about the propriety of such bullets in an urban environment,” and whether officers were “in effect, acting as judge, jury and executioner.”

“My opposition to hollow points was that the research showed at the time they were far more deadly than other bullets,” remembers then-CCRB Commissioner Ward, who did not serve on the hollow-points committee. “And the idea that the NYPD needed deadlier bullets, to me, was just crazy.”

On a foggy summer morning in July 1997, the commissioners took a field trip to Rodman’s Neck, a peninsula jutting out into the Long Island Sound, where the NYPD has maintained a fifty-four-acre open-air training facility and firing range since 1960. At the range, NYPD firearms experts taught the commissioners how to shoot the two different kinds of ammunition at the gelatin torsos designed to mimic human bone, flesh, and tissue they had brought with them. For the better part of a day, the commissioners fired away at the dummies, “then jointly examined the bullets in the gelatin, observing their path, how they did or did not fragment, and how far they traveled.” Apparently satisfied with the gelatinous carnage they had caused, the committee recommended switching to hollow points. But the public would not hear of this outing until a year later, when the committee published its report alongside a unanimous conclusion “that the decision to move from full-metal jackets to hollow-points is consistent with modern, enlightened law enforcement.” That same day, then-NYPD Commissioner Howard Safir made the transition official.

In a report assessing the oversight board’s first five years, the NYCLU accused the CCRB of providing “political cover” to the commissioner on the controversial topic of hollow points after the committee had stayed silent for a year, held no public hearings, encouraged other CCRB members to endorse the brief three-page report without giving them the opportunity to read it, and issued its recommendation as a fait accompli on the same day of Safir’s announcement. The NYCLU called the CCRB’s hollow-points report “a startlingly superficial piece of work, in which the committee members confess their ignorance of the technology whose use they unanimously endorse.” The whole process concluded so quickly that even Giuliani was reportedly caught unawares. 

A few weeks before the city began rolling out the new ammunition, four plainclothes NYPD officers fired forty-one rounds at Amadou Diallo, killing the twenty-three-year-old, unarmed Guinean man after nineteen of those rounds hit him. Youth activists seized on the police murder as an opportunity to push back one last time on the NYPD’s planned transition and billed a demonstration at City Hall Park a “hip-hop generation march against hollow-point bullets and police brutality.” But the inertia of police militarization ensured that hollow points were cemented as the status quo by the end of the decade.

In 2012, NYPD officers fatally shot an out-of-work fashion designer accused of killing a coworker, injuring nine bystanders in the process with gunfire and bullet fragments. A news story recounting the incident noted that the officers fired hollow-point bullets “to reduce the likelihood of hitting bystanders, even though in this case the use of such bullets may have resulted in the opposite effect.” The article went on to explain that the metal cavity at the bullet’s tip is more prone to fragment or ricochet when striking a solid object, like the concrete barriers used around New York City to prevent terrorist attacks. This critique is more the exception than the rule. Hollow points have grown so normalized that media coverage of police shootings rarely mention the type of ammunition at all.

From 2015 to 2024, police shot and killed 10,429 people, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post. Reliable information on the type of ammunition used in the fatal shootings is hard to come by—much like all police data—but, given near-universal adoption of the more lethal rounds, it is safe to assume the vast majority of victims died by hollow point. While this period also saw a society-wide reckoning with police violence and some of the largest mass demonstrations in United States history, none of the major reforms proposed by politicians and activists targeted hollow points. The lesson here is that, once police forces successfully lobby for it, more lethal hardware becomes nearly impossible to claw back over time, even during more reform-minded administrations interested in oversight and restraint. Indeed, in 2023, the City of New York once again awarded Speer Ammunition a five-year, $9.6 million contract to fill the handguns of the NYPD’s approximately thirty-six thousand officers with the Speer Gold Dot Hollow Points. A Speer sales director said the award “validates the high level of trust that our national law enforcement agencies have with our extremely reliable and innovative ammunition.”

The case of hollow points should raise alarm bells for anyone reading Trump’s recent executive order on Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement, which admonishes unnamed “local leaders” who “demonize law enforcement and impose legal and political handcuffs that make aggressively enforcing the law impossible” and promises to throw off the shackles of restraint holding back “a tough and well-equipped police force.” This extreme vision of policing reflects the same kettle logic used to advocate for police adoption of hollow points—which also seemed extreme not too long ago.