A few seconds later, four of the officers who had been on the east side of the perimeter came charging down the sidewalk toward us. Together, the six of us forced the knife out of the still struggling assailant’s right hand, rolled him onto his stomach, and handcuffed him behind his back. Aware of the danger posed by the gunman in the house across the street, two of the other officers grabbed the suspect and quickly dragged him out of the line of fire to a spot behind a car that was parked on the lawn of the house in front of which the shooting went down. Dennis and I, along with a sergeant who had rushed to the scene moments after we cuffed the suspect, ran up onto the porch of the house in front of which the suspect lay, crouched down behind its rock-and-mortar railing, and again trained our guns on the house across the street. Two paramedics appeared and began to work on the man I had just shot, who was now lying no more than twenty feet from me. For the next few minutes, I focused on the house across the street, still expecting the gunman inside to shoot, but intermittently glanced down at the medical drama that was being played out on the grass nearby. It was during the last of these peeks that I saw the urine flow, and I knew that I had just killed a man.
At some point while we were on the porch, I realized that Dennis wasn’t bleeding at all. This struck me as odd, inasmuch as I’d seen the blade of a large knife slam into his chest and had watched helplessly as the assailant pressed his follow-up attack while I was running across the street. But Dennis was wearing body armor under his uniform shirt that night, and it saved his life. The blade had torn most of the way through the vest on the initial thrust, but the last few layers of Kevlar stopped it just short of its mark. That Dennis had suffered no cuts as he retreated from his attacker could be chalked up only to Providence, because it was truly miraculous that his hands and arms had not been slashed to ribbons.
The sergeant used a phone in the house on whose porch we were crouched to notify headquarters of the situation, then told us to meet another sergeant who was waiting at our patrol car to escort us back to the police station. We ran to our car, met the other sergeant, and caravanned the four miles back to the station, where the watch commander directed the three of us to the captain’s office to wait for the detectives from Robbery-Homicide Division. When they arrived, they interviewed Dennis first, then me. At some point, we learned that SWAT had been called out to deal with the gunman in the house back on Vernon and, consequently, that we would have to wait awhile before we could return to the scene to walk the detectives through what had happened. While we waited, someone informed me that the man I had shot had indeed died, confirming what I had seen from my perch on the porch.
At about 2:30 A.M., after repeated attempts to contact the gunman had yielded no response, the SWAT team entered the house to find it empty. No one ever figured out if the gunman had escaped before Dennis and I arrived on scene or whether he had slipped away during the confusion caused by my shooting, but he was never found.
After SWAT had cleared the house, Dennis and I returned to the scene, reenacted the entire scenario for the investigators, and then returned to the station for more interviews. At some point during this process, one of the detectives told me the name of the man I had killed. I found out later that he was an ex-con from Texas, who had told associates in L.A. that he was tired of being “harassed” by the police and that he would kill the next cop who “bothered” him. The detectives from the shooting team finished up and let me go home at about 10:30 A.M. on July 26, 1981, almost exactly twelve hours after I had killed Edward Randolph.
• • •
About a year and a half later, I left the LAPD to take a job as a patrol officer with the city of Redmond, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, the city where I had attended college and received my bachelor’s in history three years earlier. In the summer of 1984, I quit police work, married a wonderful woman, and moved to Washington, D.C., to attend graduate school. After I received a master’s degree in justice from the American University in 1985, my bride and I returned to the Seattle area. I took a year off from graduate school, then started up again at the University of Washington, where I earned a doctorate in sociology. I took a job on the sociology faculty of the University of Houston in 1991, received tenure in 1998, and moved to the University of Missouri-St. Louis a year later.
Over the years, I thought many times about the desperate moments during the summer of 1981 that culminated in Edward Randolph’s death. In fact, during the first several years after the shooting, they were never very far from my mind. I had gone into law enforcement to help people, not kill them, and the shock of having taken a life stayed with me for a long time. It was a major reason why I left police work for full-time graduate studies rather than sticking with my initial career plan to pursue advanced degrees on a part-time basis, then move on to a faculty position when my days as a street cop ended. It also animated the course of study that I initially set for myself in graduate school.
From my own experience, discussions with numerous other officers who had also shot people, and reading law enforcement publications, I was keenly aware that police shootings can have a dramatic impact on officers who pull the trigger. Officers who are involved in shootings can experience a variety of short- and long-term reactions, such as recurrent thoughts about the incident, a sense of numbness, nausea, sadness, crying, and trouble sleeping. Indeed the existence of such responses has led mental health professionals to identify them as symptoms of a type of post-traumatic stress response, commonly called post-shooting trauma in law enforcement circles.1
A closely related issue that also interested me was officers’ reactions during shooting events themselves. It was common knowledge in the law enforcement community that during shootings officers can experience a variety of unusual reactions, such as a sense of disbelief that the incident is happening, intrusive thoughts about irrelevant matters, and sensory distortions such as a narrowing of the visual field, decreased auditory acuity, and altered perceptions of time.2 At the time that I left police work in 1984, however, no thorough research on officers’ reactions during and after shootings had been conducted, so what was known about these topics was quite limited.
I had intended to devote my academic career to developing a deeper understanding of how shootings affect officers who pull the trigger, but during grad school, I became interested in different aspects of policing, so I put deadly force on the back burner. A few years ago, however, my interest in the consequences of shooting people heated back up because very little sound research on the personal impact of shootings had been conducted since I left police work. So with the help of a grant from the United States Department of Justice, I started to interview police officers who, like me, had been involved in shootings. By the time I completed my research, I had interviewed eighty officers from nineteen different police departments spread across four states.
During each interview, I asked the officers about their lives before they became involved in law enforcement, their experiences during academy and field training, instances in which they believed they had cause to shoot someone but held their fire, situations in which they did shoot people, and what took place in the aftermath of these shootings.
The fact that I was a former officer who had been there increased the officers’ willingness to talk candidly about their experiences, as did the fact that under the terms of my grant I was (and still am) forbidden by federal law to divulge their identity to anyone without their express permission. In the end, the interviews I conducted yielded detailed information about 113 incidents in which the officers I interviewed had shot citizens (several of the officers had been in more than one shooting) and thousands of pages of interview transcripts.3 This book draws on this material to present a picture of the role that deadly force plays in police work from the point of view of officers who have used it.
I wrote it to shed light on one of the most intriguing, yet least understood, aspects of the American experience. Americans have been both drawn to and repulsed by deadly
force since municipal police officers started carrying firearms in the 1850s. Psychologists would tell us that this is so because at some deep subconscious level humans are both drawn to and repulsed by violence of any sort.4 But our schizophrenic posture toward police shootings springs also from a deep cultural well. Our nation has a long-standing tradition of clamoring for government protection from the actions of criminals, while at the same time rebelling against the constraints that those protective activities place on our lives.5 So we are drawn to police shootings not just because they are violent acts but also because they are the most dramatic instance of government doing battle with the bad guys that threaten us. And we are repulsed by them not only because of the damage they inflict but also because they are the ultimate form of government intrusion.
In recent years, this sense of disquiet about deadly government power has repeatedly been expressed in the form of social unrest. A good many of the major civil disturbances (and many of the smaller ones) that have erupted in our nation in the last four decades have been spawned by anger over law enforcement activity, often the use of deadly force. Indeed one the first large-scale riots of the tumultuous 1960s occurred in July 1964, after an off-duty New York City police lieutenant fatally shot a black teenager who attacked him with a knife. Two days later, a riot that claimed one life and caused nearly two dozen injuries broke out when a crowd marched on the local police station house to protest the shooting. The rioting spread, and over the next few days the police battled brick-tossing crowds, and firefighters doused flames set by Molotov cocktails in the minority enclaves of Harlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn.
Similar violence broke out following police shootings of minorities in Tampa, Florida, and other cities during the remainder of the decade.6 This pattern was repeated in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, as riots broke out in the wake of police shootings in several cities, including Miami and St. Petersburg, Florida, Washington, D.C., the Gotham suburb Teaneck, New Jersey, and New York City itself. The spectacle of community upheaval following police gunfire has carried into the new century. As I write these words in the fall of 2003, Cincinnati, Ohio, is still recovering from a series of disturbances that erupted in the summer of 2001 after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man during a foot chase.
This book is not about police brutality or the response of minority communities to police violence. It does not explore why some officers go bad, nor the complex historical, social, and economic forces that give rise to violent conflict along racial lines when minority citizens perceive that officers have used too much force.7 At the same time, however, I am painfully aware that it is commonly asserted by critics of the police that American law enforcement is full of bigoted officers who enjoy expressing their prejudice through the barrels of their guns. In making this argument, the critics point to the fact that although black citizens make up only about 12 percent of the U.S. population, blacks account for about half of all people felled by police bullets—and a much higher percentage in many large jurisdictions that have large black populations.8 Although these numbers would at first glance seem to offer clear support for the assertion that officers use deadly force in a race-based fashion, careful consideration of the matter indicates that the issue is not so simple, and that the racial disparity in the likelihood of being shot by the police may be explained by patterns of criminal offending.
Criminological research consistently finds that black Americans—due to historical, economic, and social forces—are more likely than whites to commit serious crimes, and the research on the use of deadly force by police officers indicates that the racial disparity in shooting rates is quite similar to the racial disparity in serious criminal offending (especially in larger jurisdictions).9 So a deeper look at the question indicates that it may well be that blacks are more likely to be shot because they are more likely to commit serious crimes, not because the police are quicker on the trigger when facing blacks.
That racial disparities in shooting statistics would seem to be explained by differential involvement in criminal activity does not mean, however, that all officers at all times use their firearms appropriately. Even though all of the available evidence indicates that it very rarely happens, there have in fact been cases in which officers apparently shot citizens with no lawful justification. The most recent notable examples of this come from Los Angeles and Miami, where small groups of officers stand accused of fabricating evidence to cover up illicit shootings. But these incidents do not suggest that racial bias motivated the accused, for many of the officers involved are themselves minorities.10 So it would appear that the issue of illicit shootings is related more to problem officers, who arise from time to time in police work, than to a systematic bias or some other sort of generalized desire among police officers to abuse citizens.
Unfortunately, police departments are not required to report to any national body when their officers shoot someone, so there are no comprehensive national figures on how frequently officers fire their weapons.11 But scholars who study deadly force have offered guesstimates based on the data that are available. In the late 1980s, for example, the low estimate for fatal shootings per year was six hundred, the high a thousand, and the estimates for nonfatal shootings ranged from twelve hundred to fifteen hundred per year.12 If these estimates were correct, then American police were shooting between eighteen hundred and twenty-five hundred people each year during the 1980s.
These figures have not been updated, so current estimates of national police-shooting figures are not available. We do know, however, that the annual number of police shootings in many big cities declined substantially during the 1990s (in New York City, for example, from thirty-nine fatal shootings in 1990 to eleven in 1999).13 This suggests that the number of people shot by police each year has likely decreased since the 1980s, perhaps to as low as twelve hundred. Whether this figure is correct—or too low by half or more—when one considers that there are more than 750,000 police officers in the United States and that these officers have tens of millions of interactions with citizens each year, it is clear that police shootings are extremely rare events and that few officers—less than one-half of 1 percent each year—ever shoot anyone.
The notion that officers rarely shoot runs counter to popular conceptions about the use of deadly force in police work, which are driven by fictionalized portrayals of police work in movies, TV shows, and other media; press accounts of police shootings; and the pronouncements of antipolice activists and other bloviators who are more concerned with promoting themselves or their cause than they are with an honest accounting of matters.
Incidents in which police officers shoot citizens are dramatic events that fit perfectly with the news media’s “if it bleeds, it leads” dictum, so police shootings can generate substantial local press coverage. Any hint of controversy can turn a shooting into a cause célèbre that gets massive local, regional, and even national press play. Sensational reports of “garden variety” shootings and constant “updates” on the latest developments in controversial ones give the impression that police officers frequently use their firearms in the course of their duties. Popular entertainment reinforces the perception that officers often shoot people, serving up shoot-outs as regular fare in TV shows such as Miami Vice and movies about the police such as the “Dirty” Harry Callahan series. And people who make careers of complaining about alleged police misconduct have a vested interest in perpetuating the belief that officers shoot people on a regular basis.
In addition to presenting a false front about how often officers shoot, critics of the police typically gloss over or simply ignore an important fact about police work: it is an inherently dangerous job. According to FBI statistics, 644 police officers were murdered during the decade that ended in 2000. Most of these officers were slain with firearms: 452 of them with handguns, 114 with rifles, and 35 with shotguns. The other three-dozen-plus officers who were murdered during the decade were either stabbed or slashe
d to death with knives, swords, or other cutting instruments; purposely run down by motor vehicles; beaten to death with blunt instruments; punched or kicked to death; or fell victim to some other sort of gruesome fate. Tens of thousands of other officers survived assaults—many of them just barely—during the 1991 to 2000 span, including several thousand who were shot.14
It is in the context of this climate of ever present danger that officers operate with the power over life and death through their firearms. They have the responsibility to use their power judiciously: to protect themselves, fellow officers, and innocent citizens from harm, on the one hand, and to refrain from shooting if at all possible, on the other. It is hard for those who have not been police officers to understand what it is like to have the awesome responsibility to carry and possibly use firearms in the course of serving society. As we will see as this book unfolds, police officers often have to make their decisions about whether to shoot or hold their fire in split seconds, with limited information, in situations where the wrong choice can lead to needless injury or death and even the right choice can have substantial repercussions.
Into the Kill Zone Page 2