Into the Kill Zone
Page 8
On deadly force, they told me that at any given time, in any situation, you might be called to use your weapon. The one thing they always emphasized is that when you pull the gun and you’re getting ready to point the gun, it’s not to be used as a bluff. If you’re gonna pull the trigger, it’s because you need to take a life, not to wound the guy, not to shoot the gun out of his hand, but to take a life, so don’t pull it out unless you plan on using it.
• • •
I recall on my first day out of the academy, we went to do a warrant, and I remember just shaking and I couldn’t stop. It was cold out, but it wasn’t that cold. I was going, “Damn, I’m really scared.” I’d never been that scared before. I’d jumped out of airplanes in the army, and there was fright there, but not like on that warrant. I was sitting there shaking, going, “Man, I can’t stop myself from shaking.” My training officer and I were standing outside next to this door, and the guys we were assisting told us the guy in there may be dealing narcotics. Well, I knew narcotics and guns go hand in hand, so I was thinking rounds were gonna be coming through the door any second. We were just standing out in front of a wall that based on my military experience I knew was not gonna stop a whole lot of types of rounds. I think that my fear was fear of the unknown: Is this guy just gonna be complacent and come out, or is he gonna just start shooting through the wall? That was probably the main reason for the intenseness at that point.
It was interesting to see myself doing that, and over time I learned to control it by focusing on what I need to do. I think fear is a good thing because fear will keep you alive. If you go into situations with your head up your ass and you have no fear, you can get hurt. I see guys out there that have no fear factor, and they just go in blindly and they sometimes get hurt. Fear to me is something I can control. I can contain it and then I use it to my advantage. If I’m fearing something, that means I’m missing some important information. So when I feel it, I try to pick up what I’m missing. Once I get all the info, it brings me back into a calmer state, a more controlled state, and I can do my job safely.
• • •
Some of my training officers were better than others concerning deadly force. Some of them were out there just going through the motions, and you could tell which ones were and which ones weren’t. The lousy ones never brought it up. The really good ones talked about it. Let’s say we were in an alley, and we were gonna contact these two guys. The good ones would say, “If they turn around and start shooting, you need to think about where you’re going to go, where your rounds are gonna go,” things of that nature. That really clicked in: “Holy shit. It could happen.” So that’s what I do with the rookies I train now. I tell them, “Don’t think that because you’re at a slow division that you can’t get in a shooting. It doesn’t matter where you are. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, you can get in a shooting. You should always think of that.” So I’ve always remembered from when I was a rookie that no matter what you’re doing, where you’re at, what call you’re on, it could turn into some kind of shooting situation.
• • •
Some of my training officers talked with me about shootings and some didn’t. When they did, most of it involved some sort of a lesson. The one I remember best was that my first FTO took me to Orange Avenue Park, where two officers had been shot—both fatally—a few years before. I had seen a video re-creation of what happened at the academy, but when I went to the park and actually saw where the officers had been shot, I started feeling sort of like, “Wow, this is where it happened.” It felt a little eerie seeing the bench the suspects had been sitting on, the exact places the officers were standing when they were shot, the pond where the suspect hid for several hours before he was caught. It was kind of neat and kind of eerie to see where all this happened and brought it home to me that getting shot is a very real possibility.
• • •
I had one FTO who was a SWAT officer, and he would drive to a place, stop, and ask questions like, “OK, if this was happening at this time what would you do?” One time we went to a 7-Eleven, and he asked me if someone had hostages inside and they came out by themselves with a gun, then turned to walk back in, if I would shoot that person in order to make sure they did not go back inside. I was fresh from the academy and was thinking about the legal aspects, but I was also trying to think of what I would do in that split second.
We had dealt with issues like that in the academy, but when you’re sitting at a spot instead of just being told about it on the chalkboard or seeing it on video, I think it hits home more. Even though you think about these things in the academy, you’re also thinking about a million other things, because you’re pretty much overloaded—at least I was, mentally and physically overloaded—so not everything sinks in. But when you’re out here in the field, and it’s three o’clock in the morning, and you’re sitting in front of a 7-Eleven, it makes you really think.
My first answer was, “Yes, I’d shoot him because I don’t want a hostage situation.” But then I thought, “Well, where are the hostages? Exactly where are the people in the store? Are they behind him? Are they within the range of being shot?” So it really makes you visually see a scenario. Even though you can visually see scenarios on tape in the academy, they’re pretty much plotted out for you. But when you’re in the field, you see that there are a lot of things to consider.
Baptism by Fire
Some officers don’t make it very far into their apprenticeship before being hit in the face with the stark reality of the dangers involved in their new line of work. Some rookies see colleagues shoot people, others have colleagues who are shot or otherwise severely injured, and some experience both phenomena. Being witness to extreme violence by or against fellow officers can have a profound effect on how rookies view the job they are learning to do. As the following stories indicate, this was certainly the case for some of the officers I interviewed. From a recruit who is sent out to help search for a man who murdered a police officer and ends up witnessing other officers kill the suspect, to a young officer who had completed the academy but not yet started his field training who finds himself on the business end of a gang-banger’s rifle, the stories show how exposure to police-involved violence fits into the overall picture of rookies learning the ropes.
• • •
I applied to the PD when I was still on active duty, but I didn’t get out on time because Desert Storm had everybody locked in. I had to turn down an academy start date, so the general I was bodyguarding for said, “As soon as the war is over, I’ll get you out. I’ll get you an early out, and we’ll get you in the next academy.” In fact, I was actually still active duty for thirty days when I started the academy. I came in with a lot of high expectations even though one of the guys who interviewed me said, “I’m gonna tell you this off the record ’cuz I don’t want to see you dismayed by this job, but don’t expect out of your peers what you expect out of yourself.” At the time, I didn’t really fully understand what he meant, but then once I got in the academy, I saw that there were people in my class who didn’t really have a grasp on reality, who had no idea what they were getting themselves into. Then we also had people who got into it for paychecks. I got into it because it was something I always wanted to do, not just a paycheck. It was something I always wanted to do, and something I took pride in doing once I got in. So when I saw what some of the other people were all about, I understood what the interviewer meant.
Some of the differences between me and those other cadets became evident during what they called Hell Week, where the instructors went through all the officers from the PD who had been killed in the line of duty. They showed the autopsy photos and really delved into how they were killed. When I saw the photos, I thought, “I don’t want to be in one of those pictures,” so I focused on what the instructors said about mistakes the officers made. I tried to learn from it. There were several other people who thought the way I did, so there was a group of us that were really
serious, really intense. Every day we went to the range, we focused on what we did. Our attitude was, “We’re not gonna let what happened to those other guys happen to us.” The other people didn’t take the firearms training days seriously. Their attitude was, “Hey, it’s just another day at work. Its just a job that’s gonna pay the bills.” Most of those people ended up quitting over the years. Once they saw the ugliness of the job, they quit and moved on to other things.
Besides the regular Hell Week, we had some other stuff happen during the academy. Not too long before we got out, a patrol officer was shot and killed in Northwest Division, and we got called out of the academy to do a quote “evidence search” while the scene was still hot. We had been out at the range, just about to start shooting class, when the instructors told us to put our guns away and meet at this CP. When we got there, they tried to feed us the line that they thought the suspect had already fled the area and that we were just going to be searching for the weapon. But I could tell—I knew from my military experience—that they were doing a grid search, not an evidence sweep.
Plus the SWAT guys were out there with Benellis and MP-5s, and they were searching some houses. We were probably about a hundred feet away when they found the suspect, shot and killed him. We could hear the rounds being fired. It was pretty wild.
When it was all over, there was a lot of anger in the class. Anger toward the suspect for killing the officer and anger toward the department for throwing us out there unarmed. It shocked a lot of the people who weren’t really squared away. Probably about five of them. They started going, “You really can get killed doing this job.” And we were like, “No kidding.” Those of us in that group that was highly intense, we said, “You know what? You should have known this going in. It could happen. You may even have to kill somebody yourself.”
• • •
The academy taught us the normal procedures—patrol, how to handle certain situations, a lot of role-playing. We did a little red-handle training, where we’d have a nonworking gun and run scenarios, shooting scenarios. The emphasis was on instruction in the law, the state and federal laws about deadly force. Then we also did firearms training on the range. The state has a six-hundred-hour requirement, so I was at the academy eight hours a day, five days a week, for four months. Then I was out on the street.
None of my family members had ever been in any shootings, and I don’t believe that I ever talked to any of the family friends who were officers about being in shootings, so I didn’t really think much about shootings before I became a cop. That changed pretty early on in my career. Not too long after I started on the street, my sergeant was killed. I was working the desk on the midnight shift when an alarm came out at a women’s clothing store in the Westpark Shopping Center. My sergeant responded; then the other units couldn’t raise him on the radio. They kept calling for him, but there was no response. Then, when they arrived at the store, they found him lying in front of his car. He’d been murdered and his gun was missing. It turns out that he had interrupted a burglary and had the drop on two suspects. Unknown to him, there was a third one that was hiding behind a parked car. He came up from behind and jumped my sergeant. The guys ended up taking his gun. Then they pistol-whipped him and took his life; shot him with his own gun. The case went unresolved for about three years; then we finally caught two of the guys. They both stood trial, and one was acquitted and one was found guilty.
About a month and a half after my sergeant got murdered, we had an officer shot after he pulled over a vehicle. He had stopped a car with two occupants that was reported stolen. The passenger wouldn’t show his hands at first, then he whipped out a gun, and shot. One round hit the officer in the lower abdomen and he went down. The suspects were gone by the time the first backup officers got there, but later on they found the guy hiding down in the business section of the city.
So even though I started out in a small town, it was by no means a slow town.
• • •
I didn’t take the possibility of getting into a shooting too seriously when I first came on the job. I’d been an MP in the army, worked on the DMZ in Korea, spent a few years as a guard in military prisons, and worked in the federal correctional system before becoming a cop. In all those experiences, though, the threats were pretty distant. Sure, it was tense sometimes in Korea, but when we weren’t up in the trenches, it was really one big party. Back in the states, there wasn’t much so far as crime on the bases I worked because the military community is pretty squared away. It was the same way in the military prisons. It’s not like a state prison, where the inmates can grow their hair long and have mustaches and beards. These guys had to keep a military appearance, the whole business; even some of the lifers were real squared away. There was some inmate-on-inmate violence, but nothing really against the guards. When I was with the federal corrections system, I worked mostly a roaming patrol they had on the outside of the facility, so I didn’t see much violence there. I mean, I knew that shootings could happen, but I never actually thought about it. Same thing in the academy and during my FTO phase. I got all the deadly force training and my training officers talked to me about shooting situations, but I never really gave it much thought.
That all changed not too long after I got done with the FTO phase of my training. I was still on probation when I got a call of a family disturbance where the son, who had just gotten out of prison, was supposedly threatening his mother and brothers. He was upset with them because they had some hand in getting him sent away about two years prior. He was over at their place threatening to kill them for what they did. There were no other patrol units available to cover me on the call, so my sergeant came over the air and said he’d back me up. When we were a few blocks away, the dispatcher gave us some more information. She told us that the mother had called back and reported that her son was standing outside with a gun. This didn’t bother me much because citizens in that area regularly report that people have guns even when they don’t in order to get us to respond quicker. Well, my sergeant got to the location just before I did. As I was pulling up and he was getting out of his car, a guy who matched the suspect’s description to a tee ran out through a gate between some apartments just in front of my sergeant’s car. My sergeant started to chase the suspect, and I got out of my car to help out. As I was running toward them, I couldn’t see what was happening real well because the head-and spotlights of my sergeant’s car were shining in my eyes. Just as I was breaking through the glare of the lights, the suspect pulled out a big chrome .357 revolver—I guess he had it in his pants. I was about one car length away when my sergeant dropped to his knees, brought his gun up, and fired a round that killed the guy.
That was a real wake-up call for me. It was when reality set in for me with this job. I mean, up until then I was really just a happy-go-lucky kid. The criminals I’d dealt with in the army and federal corrections were in a secured environment, and their weapons are limited to daggers and stuff. Then, when I first came on the job, I was just a young cop driving around in a police car, chasing bad guys and having a blast. But reality hit when my sergeant killed that guy. I realized that I was going to run into people like the guys I’d worked with in the pen, but they were going to have better weapons, and they weren’t always going to do what I told them to. They weren’t confined, so they could choose to fight to try to get away. The shooting made me realize that being a cop was different, that it’s life and death.
• • •
I worked for the sheriff’s office for about two years before coming to work for the city. The agencies are different in a lot of ways, and that started in the academy. The sheriff’s academy taught me more about how to be a better officer in the sense of contacting people, that you always need to be in command of any situation you come in contact with. The city academy expounded more on the officer survival mindset, basically the notion that you gotta be able to take care of yourself and your partner and the people that you’re gonna be working for.
There were also some big differences in field training. I worked with the same partner for four months at the sheriff’s department, and he basically was in charge of me. He would tell me what to do, and I was expected to do it. Where officer safety goes, he really stressed that if you get into a shooting, it will probably be when you’re not expecting it, so he made sure I was aware of that and stressed that I had to be ready all the time. He told me to make sure that all the people we talk to have been patted down before we have any conversation with them, just for our safety. He basically told me, “Damn everybody else, damn who you’re talking to, just make sure that they’re not packing when you talk to ’em. Anybody who comes up asking information of you, you gotta go ahead and pat them down for your own safety because they know who you are and you don’t know who they are.” He made it very, very clear that he expected me to search everybody.
When I got to the city, I worked with several different training officers. There was more give-and-take with them compared to my first partner at the sheriff’s department, because once they found out that I had prior police experience, they felt comfortable with me. They were more into just teaching policies and procedures, how things should be done. They would offer a couple of suggestions here and there on tactics and explain why they did things in particular ways. So it was more of a give-and-take situation, where I could make suggestions about things and we would agree on a solution.
One thing that was the same about being a young cop in both agencies is that I worked in places where there was a lot of violence going on. I saw officers die in the street in both places. When I was in the sheriff’s department, a classmate of mine was shot and killed. I responded to the help call. It made me sit back and reevaluate the situation I was in: seeing a classmate lying on the sidewalk, shot in the head, blood running down the driveway into the gutter while the paramedics were trying to work on him. He died three days later. I stuck with law enforcement, but his death hit me with the reality that it could happen to me. Then, when I got to the city, one of the guys on my shift was deliberately run over by a suspect during a pursuit. I watched him die right there in the street. It’s tough, seeing officers at roll call, and then a few hours later they’re gone.