A New York Police Department (NYPD) officer has been killed and another gravely injured while responding to a domestic disturbance call.

A suspect was also killed in the shooting in Harlem, said a department official, who was not authorised to speak publicly and did so on condition of anonymity.

The official said a call had come in of a mother needing help with her son. Three officers responded to the ground floor apartment on 135th Street.

They spoke to the mother in a front room and then two officers went to a back room where the son was and shots rang out, the official said.

NYPD officers gather at Harlem Hospital after a shooting
Other officers gathered in large numbers at Harlem Hospital following the shooting (Yuki Iwamura/AP)

The officer who died was 22 and had been on the job since November 2020 and the injured officer, 27, has been on the job for four years, the official said.

Police dispatch audio captured some of the chaotic scene, including an officer screaming for assistance and another officer informing the dispatcher that two officers had been shot.

One officer asks for “three buses” or ambulances to the scene, a six-storey apartment building, and police to block off traffic on the route to nearby Harlem Hospital. The building is on a block between two iconic Harlem avenues: Malcolm X Boulevard and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.

Mayor Eric Adams, himself a former police officer, was at the hospital where the officers were taken after the shooting, the third time in four days that officers have faced gunfire on the job. Inside the hospital entrance, a line of officers stood shoulder to shoulder at the top of some stairs.

An officer was wounded in the leg on Tuesday evening in the Bronx during a struggle with a teenager who also shot himself. On Thursday, a narcotics detective was shot in the leg on Staten Island.

The last NYPD officer fatally shot in the line of duty, Brian Mulkeen, was hit by friendly fire while struggling with an armed man after chasing and shooting at him in the Bronx in September 2019.