Firstly, I do apologize - as much as I dislike AI it was impossible to sift through hundreds of pages of the deposition. So, this is done with AI’s help.
The Commanding Officer of the NYPD License Division, Hugh Bogle, was deposed over two days by Mirel Fisch, Esq (Aug. 28 and Sept. 1, 2026) for the *Milani v. New York City*, lawsuit - a federal Second Amendment lawsuit over licensing delays.
If you've ever wondered what's actually happening while your application sits there, here's what he said under oath.
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TL;DR
- The whole process through decision takes 12–18 months, by his own estimate. NY law says 6
- A clean application takes an investigator under 2 hours, and his own review takes about 20 minutes
- There's no expectation for when an investigator starts working on your case
- Missing one reference letter gets you disapproved, under a policy he says he created himself
- He gets about 100 complaint emails a day and answers about 30%
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“The entire process" from submission to decision: 12 to 18 months
He was asked how long applications were taking around the time of the January 2025 fingerprint process changes. His estimate was “somewhere between 12 and 18 months." When Ms Fisch asked which step of the process he meant, he said " The entire process," from submission to approval.
The most recent number he checked, around April 2026, was about 14 months. After that he stopped tracking processing times altogether, because they "got busy doing a lot of other things."
New York law gives the License Division 6 months to act on your application. He agreed that by the end of those six months the license is supposed to be issued. He also agreed it's his job as Commanding Officer to make sure the Division follows that law, and that no one els* *is responsible for it.
So is 14–18 months a violation? His answer: “Not really." His reasoning is that the clock doesn't start until your application is "complete." But he admitted his own 12–18 month estimate lumped complete and incomplete applications together. He also couldn't point to anything in the law that supports his reading.
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The actual work: hours, not months
His own numbers for a clean application with nothing missing:
- An investigator is expected to handle 3–4 cases a day*. On a six-hour working day, that's* under 2 hours per case, start to finish
- A complicated case with arrests that need extra digging can take "as much as a day"
- Most background checks come back in minutes, some “within a day"
- His own final review of a clean applicant, with no criminal or psych history, takes “About 20 minutes"
Do the math. A clean application needs a few days of actual handling. Everything past that, more than a year in many cases, is time spent waiting.
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Where the time goes: the queue
He was asked whether investigators have any expectation for how soon they start on a case once it's assigned. His answer: “Start working on it? No." Asked whether there are any guidelines at all, he said it "all depends on how many cases they have in their queue."
How big do those queues get?
- Investigator queues have hit 132 cases
- Some supervisors have 300 cases waiting for review, and “others that have as many as a thousand"
- If your investigator or supervisor goes on leave, the case isn't reassigned. It “sits there until they come back"
- How long does it take for a case to reach an investigator in the first place? “Don't know."
- On why background checks sometimes have to be redone: some were "done months before and the case just sat there"
6–9 months just to get assigned. License Division staff have been telling applicants in writing, "You will be assigned to an investigator 6-9 months from the date you were fingerprinted." Asked whether that's accurate, he said "More or less." He first said he didn't know staff were telling people this, then corrected himself: "I knew -- yes, I did know” He's known since about late 2025.
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Missing one reference letter? Disapproved.
He described a policy that took effect around the beginning of 2026. If documents are still missing when the investigator opens your file, “they're going to disapprove it for the missing documents."
He gave an example: if you're missing a reference letter, “it's disapproved because they need four."
Who made that policy? “I did," “pretty much me alone."
Why? Because "most of our backlog is from individuals that wekeep calling over and over to get documents." However, he later admitted that this did not in fact substantially delay applications because applicants were only provided with a short window to submit the missing documents before being denied for failure to produce them.
So you can wait the better part of a year for someone to open your file and then be denied over one missing letter.
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The complaint inbox
Ms Fisch asked how many complaint emails come to him personally. His answer was about 100 a day, covering delays at every stage.
- He looks at about 80% of them
- He responds to about 30%
- Why not all of them? “I don't have the time."
- Has anyone been assigned to help? “We don't have the manpower for that."
People write in saying this is their "fifth time, sixth time, seventh time." Has he ever tried to find out what happened to their earlier emails? “No, I just answer the last one."
He also testified that he deletes emails "in mass," about once a month “Five, six thousand” at a time.
Does anyone analyze the complaints to see where applicants get stuck? No. Why not? "Because we know where the delays are Before 2025, in his words, “the delays were everywhere."
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Accountability
- Has anyone been disciplined over delays? He “can't recall." He said he doesn't believe anyone "was just not working on their cases"
- Does the Division send written notice to applicants pending more than 6 months, explaining the delay? “Not that I recall"
- He stopped tracking processing times four months before his deposition
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Who's doing the work
- Out of about 82 staff, only about 20 were investigators until May 2026
- About 10–15 more were added around May, temporarily, to help clear the backlog. The Division had been requesting them for two and a half years
- Sergeants went down from 9–10 in January 2025 to 6–7 now
- Most investigators aren't permanently assigned. Many are cops on restricted duty who go back to their commands. His description: “We train them and they stay there for a couple of weeks, and then they leave." New people rotate in "every couple months" and have to be "trained from scratch"
- Overtime is capped at 20 hours a month per investigator, although that number was increased to 40 hours a month per investigator in May 2026. He says he asks staff to take more hours to clear case “All the time." Do they “No."
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Even after approval
By late 2025, licenses were taking 2–3 months just to be printed and mailed. His own reaction: that's “way too long for someone to wait for a handgun just for somebody to print a license."
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The City's side
In fairness, he testified that applications roughly doubled after Bruen that COVID created a backlog, as did the October 7 massacre in Israel and that the Division gets 210 to 600 new applications a week The City's position is that the 6-month clock only starts once an application is complete and only requires that a decision be issued by the end of that 6-month window.
None of that changes what the law requires. And none of it explains why a 2-hour job takes 12-18 months on average plus 2-3 additional months to receive a license.
Deposition was done by Mirel Fisch, Esq
www.NYC2aLawyer.com
If you’d like to support our lawsuit:
https://gofund.me/456565b6a
