Into the Kill Zone

by David Klinger

  • • •

  I worked the jail for the first three years after I got out of the academy. I’d been there about two months when one of my partners from the jail, a guy named Harold, and I got in an off-duty shooting when this gang-banger recognized him from custody. I didn’t fire any rounds, but my buddy got shot.

  I lived in a rough area, and the guy recognized Harold when he came to pick me up at my house one night. He told me that these gang-bangers had yelled at him from a car a few blocks away, followed him a little bit, then turned off before he got to my house. We were in no rush to get going, so I took a shower, we relaxed, and then left my place about forty-five minutes after Harold got there.

  When we got to the street where the carful of gang-bangers had turned off, Harold said, “Hey, why don’t we roll down the street, get the plate number, and we’ll give it to Ralph,” a buddy of ours who worked patrol that was going to meet us later on that night. When he turned down the street, it was totally black because all the streetlights had been shot out. There was a big old gang party going on, and the car that had the guys who had yelled at my partner was parked in front of us in the street. As soon as we saw that, we decided to get out of there. As we took off, the guys from the car recognized us and started pointing at us and yelling. They jumped in their car and pulled out after us, along with another carful of gang-bangers. When we got to the corner, the second car pulled up pretty close to us, and I could see that one of the guys in that second car had a rifle.

  We turned off real quick, went a few blocks, and pulled over at this 7-Eleven to call 9-1-1. We were going to tell them that there was a 417 with a rifle, the number of suspects in the cars, that sort of stuff. As we were talking on the phone, the second car came around the corner, and the suspect with the rifle popped up out of the window and started firing on us.

  The backdrop behind the car was a hamburger stand across the parking lot where there were about forty people standing in line, so we couldn’t fire back. Instead we dropped the phone and dove behind my buddy’s car for cover. After the guy stopped shooting, the car drove off around the corner. We ran to the corner with our guns in our hands to see if they were stopping or if they were going to keep going. They continued, so we both ran back to the car, jumped in, and I said, “Let’s get out of here!”

  As we jumped in the car, the guys came back. There was a lot of commotion in the parking lot; people were running all over the place. My partner was looking over his shoulder, backing out the car, so he didn’t see the guys coming at us from the left front part of his car. When I saw the gangsters’ car, one of the suspects was hanging out the window with his rifle. I remember distinctly that another passenger in the rear was holding on to him as he leaned out the window so he wouldn’t fall out of the car as he leveled his rifle at us.

  I came up with my gun, getting ready to shoot the guy hanging out the window, and I saw Harold out of the corner of my eye. I was thinking that Harold was going to get shot, no doubt in my mind. I don’t know what it was, but I knew he was going to get hit, so at that point I chose to grab him and pull him down rather than shoot. Well, as I grabbed Harold and pulled him down, the guy hanging out the window fired several rounds. At that point, he was right on top of us, about ten to twelve feet away. Three of the rounds struck Harold, one in the shoulder and two in his left forearm. We later found out—when the detectives did the trajectory thing where they put rods through the windshield and all that stuff—that the one that caught him in the shoulder would have been a fatal round, right in the middle of the chest.

  After they went by, I jumped out of the car. By the time I got out, they had turned the corner and were gone, so I couldn’t return fire. Harold was bleeding. He was wearing a white shirt and he was bleeding a lot. He said, “Man, I got shot. I got shot in my heart.” I said, “No, stupid”—I mean, we grew up together—“No, stupid, it’s your shoulder.” He goes, “Yeah, yeah, it’s my shoulder. I’m all right.” So I drove Harold to the hospital, and they took care of him. I gave the officers who responded to the hospital the info on the car, and they ended up getting everybody except for the shooter that night. They got the shooter about a week or two later.

  I had a hard time dealing with what happened for the longest time because I didn’t know if I had done the right thing. I wondered if I should have dumped the guy with the rifle or if I did the right thing by pulling Harold down. I also thought that I could have reacted a little quicker the first time they came around and engaged them before they turned the corner, but I eventually came to grips with what I did. Harold was OK, he didn’t sustain any long-term injuries, so I figured it worked out for the best. But I still think that if I would have reacted faster after the gangsters made their first pass that I could have got them. I was inexperienced and I hesitated a little bit. When the guy first started shooting, it caught me off guard. It was like, “Wow, this is for real.”

  • • •

  Whether it is the extreme intensity of the stories in the last section or the less dramatic introduction to policing that most rookies receive, what young officers go through in the academy and in their first months on the streets has a lasting impact on what type of cops they will become. All new officers have to make many choices about how they will carry out their duties once they graduate from rookie status. And no choice is more important than developing a personal sense of when they will be willing to shoot someone; for as the last story indicates, the proper course of action during tense, rapidly evolving circumstances is not always clear. Consideration of this issue is the subject of Chapter Three.

  Notes

  1. The full citation for the Garner decision is Tennessee v. Garner, 105 S. Ct. 1694 (1985).

  2. A discussion of the effect of Garner on state laws governing the use of deadly force can be found in “Garner Plus Five Years: An Examination of Supreme Court Intervention into Police Discretion and Legislative Prerogatives,” by James J. Fyfe and Jeffery T. Walker, American Journal of Criminal Justice 14 (1990): 167–188.

  3. Discussions of shooting policies, as well as sample and model policies, can be found in Deadly Force: What We Know, by William A. Geller and Michael S. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum, 1992).

  Chapter Three

  Holding Fire

  The federal laws, state statutes, and shooting policies that officers work under are quite broad, providing only general directions about firearms use. For the simple reason that no two encounters between cops and citizens are exactly alike, it is not possible for judges, legislators, and police administrators to develop laws and policies that provide specific details about whether officers should shoot in any particular case. Because legal and administrative deadly force standards are so broad and general, young officers must somehow make sense of them as they pass through their apprenticeship and head toward their unsupervised time on the street. As young officers do this, they develop their own personal set of standards about when they will use their firearms—in essence, their own shooting policies.

  In developing their personal shooting policies, many officers choose standards for pulling the trigger that are more restrictive than those set forth in law and administrative directives. This is so because the written rules do not mandate that officers shoot whenever they are chasing a violent felon or each time someone’s life is in jeopardy. Rather, legal and departmental standards say only that officers may use deadly force when such circumstances arise. Consequently, officers are free to decide that they will hold their fire in cases in which pulling the trigger would be justified by law and policy. And many officers do just that. Some, for example, will decide that they will not shoot fleeing suspects—the position I took during my academy training. Others will conclude that they will not shoot a gunman unless he points his weapon directly at them or someone else. And so on.1

  Largely because the bounds that many officers set in their personal shooting policies are more narrow than those established by legal and adm
inistrative directives, the history of American policing is chock-full of cases in which officers did not shoot when they had legal cause to do so. Indeed police insiders have long known that officers hold their fire in the lion’s share of instances in which their life or the life of another is in danger. Police hesitancy to fire even when life is in jeopardy was first formally reported outside of law enforcement circles in the early 1980s, when a study of police shootings in four major cities disclosed that officers in these departments shot in just a fraction of the cases that law and policy would allow.2 This finding has received very little play around the nation in the last two decades, however, so the fact that officers exhibit substantial restraint in the face of deadly threat is not widely known.

  I had been in several potential shooting situations during my brief tenure in Los Angeles—all face-to-face confrontations with gun-toting citizens—and I wanted to get some sense of the experiences that other officers who had shot people had in this regard. The first step I took to garner information about police forbearance in shooting situations was to ask the officers I interviewed if they had ever held their fire when they had legal cause to shoot. A dozen of the officers told me that the only situations they’d been in where they believed the use of deadly force would have been justified were the cases in which they fired. Among the other sixty-eight, most reported that they had been involved in fewer than a handful of cases in which they didn’t shoot when they could have, about twenty reported that they held their fire in five to ten cases, and thirteen reported that they’d been in more than ten such situations (including a few who’d been in thirty or more). In total, then, the officers I interviewed held their fire in several hundred interactions in which they had legal cause to pull the trigger.

  I asked those officers who had been in at least one situation in which they held their fire to tell me about them (or in the case of those who had been in more than three, to tell me about some of them). I asked them to describe the circumstances of the cases, why they held their fire, and how they felt about their decision afterward. In this way, I was able to gather information about more than 150 cases in which officers held their fire when they could have shot, which allowed me to develop a picture of the sorts of things officers consider during close calls, how they discern the difference between shooting and nonshooting situations, and what they think and feel after situations in which they hold their fire.

  The following stories afford the reader a robust look at that picture, the most compelling facet of which is arguably the stark image of police officers showing remarkable restraint in the face of substantial danger. The unveiling begins with stories from the place where most policing is done, where most of the danger lurks, and where most of the near shootings occur: patrol work.

  On Patrol

  Patrol is the backbone of American policing, the place where nearly all young officers cut their police teeth, the place where the largest number of officers work, and the place where the vast majority of the contacts between the police and the public occur. It is therefore not surprising that patrol officers are involved in more near shootings than are officers assigned to other policing tasks: there are simply more of them, and they are involved in more interactions with people. The following stories offer a glimpse of the sorts of close calls experienced by the officers I interviewed during their time in patrol. From unarmed people who simulate that they are carrying weapons, to knife-wielding madmen apparently bent on their own destruction, to gunmen whose foolish behavior nearly gets them killed, these stories show how patrol officers manage to avoid shooting people during a variety of very tense situations.

  • • •

  We got a call one night out in the Tritopolis area about a suicidal guy with a knife backed up against a fence threatening to kill himself. He was holding the knife against his stomach when we got there. I stayed about twelve to fourteen feet away, just trying to keep some distance between us, and explained to him that cutting himself in the stomach was not gonna kill him, that it was just gonna hurt. He came at me with the knife in front of him about three or four times before we got enough officers there to contain him. He told us, “Shoot me. Kill me. I want to die. Shoot me. Kill me.” I had my gun on him at all times, and each time he came at me, I probably could’ve shot him, but each time I chose to retreat instead. Each time I backed up, he turned around and acted like he was gonna stab himself in the stomach. The last time he actually did stab himself, decided it hurt too bad, and dropped the knife. He was yelling and screaming about the pain. I walked up to him and said, “Told you it was gonna hurt.” It was sheer stupidity on his part.

  I didn’t shoot him because I felt pretty comfortable with my gun already out. I know twenty feet is the distance you want to keep from someone with a knife, but I felt I had a comfortable space between us at twelve to fourteen feet. As long as I kept that space, I felt the situation really wasn’t that bad. We’d move back and forth. If he’d have run at me, I probably would’ve shot him, but he would only walk.

  • • •

  I’ve had a few situations where I almost shot someone over the years. One that sticks out in my mind happened when a call dropped about a guy inside this store who was harassing customers and the cashier. They said that he had something in his waistband that might be a weapon. When I pulled up, they had the guy locked out of the store. So he was standing there in front with his T-shirt hanging out, untucked in the front. Sure enough, I could see a bulge up under his T-shirt, so I stopped about twenty-five feet away from the guy, got out, drew my gun, and stood by the side of my car so the engine was between us. I kept my gun at my side and told the guy to put his hands up on the wall. Well, he looked at me and took a couple of steps toward me. I raised my pistol and told him to stop, to get his hands up on the wall. He got this angry look on his face and said, “What are you gonna do? You gonna shoot me with your pistol?” I said, “Yeah, if I have to.” Then he said, “Well, what if I pull out my pistol?” At that point, I remember seeing all the other customers who were inside the store, all these Oriental people lying on the floor, waiting for the shots to go off. Then the guy reached down toward the bulge in his waistband. At that point, things went into slow motion, and I said to myself, “If he reaches under the shirt, I’m gonna shoot him.”

  Well, he brought his hand down, stuck it under the shirt, and then, real quick, pulled it up with the first finger extended toward me. When I saw that, I was doing everything I could do to keep from squeezing the trigger, because I had already started to shoot. Fortunately, the gun didn’t go off. I don’t know how it didn’t go off, but it didn’t. I mean, I had already made the decision to shoot, because from my training I knew that the best I could hope for with reaction time once his hand went under the shirt was to tie him, to get a shot off at the same time as he did. So I was trying to at least tie this guy. Then, when I realized he hadn’t come up with a gun, it took everything I had to not squeeze all the way down.

  After that, the guy got really verbally belligerent but didn’t come any closer. I just stayed in my barricaded position behind the car with my gun on the guy until another unit arrived because I still didn’t know what was under his shirt. When the other unit got there, we got him to put his hands on the car, and the other officer went up to take the guy into custody. Turns out the bulge was a damn Green Sheet newspaper, but it looked like a weapon when it was tucked in there.

  That really pissed me off because I was gonna shoot this guy. It angered me that he did something stupid like that, trying to make me shoot him. It would have hit the news media as “Unarmed Suspect Gunned Down” and all that. So I was pissed, but we started talking to the guy, and he told us that he’d just come in from a B-52 flight and all this other shit. So we realized he was just psycho. Stuff like that happens, and you just have to deal with it.

  • • •

  I’ve worked some real highly active assignments over the years, so I’ve been in maybe thirty or more situations where I came
close to shooting people but didn’t. One of the ones that sticks out in my mind happened at dusk one day, when my partner and I spotted three gang members walking down the sidewalk, facing away from us. As we rolled up in the black and white, the subjects’ heads start turning all over the place; it was evident they were looking for a place to run. The two guys on the ends split; one guy ran across the front of the car, and the other one jumped some fences to our right. The guy in the middle didn’t know which way to go, and he just froze there in front of us. We were right on top of him when we stopped—maybe ten feet away. As I was getting out of the passenger door of the car, he started digging in his waistband with his right hand. Then I could see that he was reaching into his crotch area, then that he was trying to reach toward his left thigh area, as if he was trying to grab something that was falling down his pants leg.

  He was starting to turn around toward me as he was fishing around in his pants. He was looking right at me and I was telling him not to move: “Stop! Don’t move! Don’t move! Don’t move!” My partner was yelling at him too: “Stop! Stop! Stop!” As I was giving him commands, I drew my revolver. When I got about five feet from the guy, he came up with a chrome .25 auto. Then, as soon as his hand reached his center stomach area, he dropped the gun right on the sidewalk. We took him into custody, and that was that.

  I think the only reason I didn’t shoot him was his age. He was fourteen, looked like he was nine. If he was an adult, I think I probably would have shot him. I sure perceived the threat of that gun. I could see it clearly, that it was chrome and that it had pearl grips on it. But I knew that I had the drop on him, and I wanted to give him just a little more benefit of a doubt because he was so young looking. I think the fact that I was an experienced officer had a lot to do with my decision. I could see a lot of fear in his face, which I also perceived in other situations, and that led me to believe that if I would just give him just a little bit more time that he might give me an option to not shoot him. The bottom line was that I was looking at him, looking at what was coming out of his pants leg, identifying it as a gun, seeing where that muzzle was gonna go when it came up. If his hand would’ve come out a little higher from his waistband, if the gun had just cleared his stomach area a little bit more, to where I would have seen that muzzle walk my way, it would’ve been over with. But the barrel never came up, and something in my mind just told me I didn’t have to shoot yet.