• • •
Some people do some incredibly stupid stuff that almost gets themselves shot. The first time I ran into one of these deals, I’d been on the street about two, two-and-a-half years. I got a call one afternoon that some guy was walking around the neighborhood pointing weapons at the kids who were playing outside. When I get in the area, I spotted this transient pushing a shopping cart up ahead of me a ways. He turned back to look at me, and when he did, I saw a chrome revolver in his waistband. So I got on the radio, let dispatch know where I was at, that I got a guy with a gun. I stopped about thirty yards behind him, opened the door, got a barricade behind it, and started shouting at him to put his hands up. He did that. Then I told him to turn around and face me. When he turned around, I saw that he had two more guns in his waistband. He was saying something to me, like he was trying to explain something to me. But he kept lowering his hands as he was talking. I couldn’t hear what he had to say because I was too busy yelling at him to keep his hands up. All I could tell is that he was trying to tell me something, like, “Don’t worry.” I was screaming at him to keep his hands up, but he reached down toward the guns. When he grabbed the first one, he just grabbed the grip with his fingertips. Because he didn’t have his finger near the trigger, I figured I still had time to react, so I held my fire. Then he pulled the gun out and dropped it on the ground. He did this four more times. Each time one of ’em hit the ground, it went with a sort of hollow “clink, clink, clink,” and I realized they were all plastic. So he ended up having five guns, plastic guns, on him. Apparently, he found them in a dumpster next to a toy store. I got real angry at him for being so stupid, for almost getting killed over some toy guns. I let him know just how pissed I was.
I had a real similar situation a year or so later. I pulled some kids over, and when I walked up on the car, I spotted a gun on the center console. I told the guys to get out of the car. The driver realized that I had spotted the gun, looked at me, and he said, “But officer, this isn’t a real gun.” Then he reached down for it, I guess to show me it wasn’t real. But I wasn’t going to let him grab it because it looked real to me. I was close to the car, so I just grabbed him by the neck and pulled him out before he could reach to the gun. It turned out to be a toy gun. I could’ve shot him, but I figured that I could yank him out of there before he got to it. A lot of guys would have shot in that situation. Again, I got real angry at this kid, and I told him so, because he didn’t realize how close he came to getting shot for doing something stupid.
I had another idiot I ran into when I was working patrol. I was off duty, heading into work in my uniform, driving a Honda Accord. This guy was next to me pulling a trailer, and he was trying to get in my lane. I honked at him, but then I slowed down and he eventually made it over. We went about another two blocks up and stopped at a traffic light. The guy opened his door up, leaned out, and pointed a revolver at me. I couldn’t go left because the door was right there, so I dove to my right below the dashboard. It took me a couple of seconds to get my gun out because I was sort of lying on my holster. By the time I came up with my gun, he was driving off. Apparently, he saw the uniform. I didn’t have a radio or anything, so there was no way I could call anybody for help. So I followed this guy. We had a little bit of a chase; of course he was pulling this great big trailer, so he wasn’t getting away. He finally got caught up in traffic. I bailed out with my gun, and I called him out of the car. He came out with his hands up, left the gun in the truck. Come to find it was a real gun, but it wasn’t loaded. He claimed to me that he just points it at people when people piss him off; it scares them away. I told him he was lucky to be alive. Again, one of the stupidity things.
• • •
My first close call came when I was fresh out of FTO—I don’t think I’d been on the street but maybe a week or two on my own. I was on second shift, which would start at five o’clock in the evening. I’d just left headquarters when dispatch toned out a man with a gun that had threatened some people and fired off some shots about four blocks from where I was. I made a right turn, went four blocks, and was at the intersection where the call came from. As I drove up, this group of people standing in front of this old beat-up hotel started pointing down the street. I parked, looked down the street, and saw this guy walking down the street carrying a long gun. He was about a block to my east on the north sidewalk, walking away from me. He had the gun over his shoulder like Elmer Fudd going hunting for the wabbit. That’s what I thought when I saw him, that he looked like Elmer Fudd in a cartoon walking with this gun over his shoulder.
He was oblivious to me, so I moved my patrol car down the street to get closer to him. I stopped about thirty yards from the guy, using my patrol car to block traffic and to provide me with some cover next to another vehicle that was parked on the north curb. Then I got out and challenged him: “Police, drop the gun! Police, freeze! Police, don’t move!” Something like that. He just kept walking, so I challenged him again. He stopped for a second or two, like, “What was that?” then started walking away from me again. I challenged him again, then he kind of stopped again, like he could hear something but he wasn’t really sure what he was hearing.
Once I got his attention, I kept challenging him. After I’d told him to drop the gun a couple of times, he took it off his shoulder and started to turn toward me, right shoulder first. As he was turning, he was holding the gun at port arms with his right hand behind the trigger guard and his left hand on the fore-grip. I could see that his index finger was not on the trigger, or even in a ready position. It was just behind the trigger guard. I was thinking that if he even starts to move that barrel toward my direction that I was going to shoot regardless of where his finger was. He kept moving the gun in my direction. Then he stopped, looked at me for a split second, and pitched his gun straight into some bushes next to where he was standing. I tried to order him into a handcuffing position, but he had a hard time following my directions because he was really drunk. So I just covered him until some other officers got there, and we took him into custody.
I didn’t shoot him before he turned because I didn’t perceive a big threat. The biggest thing was his reaction to my challenges. He didn’t seem like he was really comprehending what was going on. I perceived him to be highly intoxicated, and I thought that that was the reason for his inability to follow my directions. I just didn’t perceive him as being aggressive at that point in time. Then, when he turned around, I thought that I could beat him if he tried to point the gun at me. I got some training after the incident on reaction time where I learned that that was a false assumption, so I know better now. But at the time, I had a false belief that I could react quicker than he could, so I held my fire.
Things Ain’t Always What They Seem
Because patrol officers are on the front lines of police work, they often find themselves thrust into situations with only the barest idea of what it is they are getting involved in. When the situation includes people armed with guns or other deadly weapons, patrol officers have to make split-second life-and-death decisions about whether to shoot. But sometimes on patrol, things aren’t what they appear to be, and people who appear to be threatening are not. Sometimes what appears to be a bad guy is a crime victim—or another police officer. Officers know this and have to factor in the possibility that the person in front of them doing something that is about to get them shot means them no harm. The next three stories show just how close officers sometimes come to making a tragic error and how little things can prevent horrible accidents.
• • •
The first time I almost shot someone was when I was still on probation. It was early in the morning on a Sunday, and we got a call that there was an auto burglar outside of a McDonald’s restaurant. We got a description of the guy over the radio. A male Hispanic; I don’t remember the height, weight, or clothing info, but when we got about a half a block away from the McDonald’s, we saw a fellow matching the suspect’s description, so we pu
lled over about fifty feet away to talk to him. As he walked toward our car, I could see that he had a .45 auto in his right hand. He was holding it down at about a forty-five-degree angle. The hammer was back. It was cocked and ready to go. I shouted, “Gun!” to let my partner know what was up, bailed out of the car, and drew down on the guy. I told him two or three times in both English and Spanish to drop the gun. He wouldn’t drop the gun, and I was getting ready to cap him because he kept walking toward us with the gun in his hand. I was ready to rock-and-roll, but I decided to give one more set of commands before I dropped him because something wasn’t adding up. It just made no sense for a car burglar holding a gun at low-ready to walk right at two cops. Plus his demeanor wasn’t at all aggressive or threatening. Anyway, when I shouted at him for the last time, he was about twelve to fifteen feet away. I couldn’t let him get any closer. But just as I was about to shoot, he stopped and dropped the gun.
We cuffed him up and asked him what was going on. He told us that he spotted someone taking his radio out of his car, so he got his gun to chase the guy off. Turns out some other citizen spotted him with the gun and put in the call that we got. That’s why he fit the description so well. He was so distraught and pissed off at this guy who had just burglarized his car that he wasn’t thinking clearly when he walked up on us. He knew he was in the right, so he didn’t see us as a threat, even though we were pointing guns and screaming at him. I clearly could have shot him long before he got to within fifteen feet of us and been within my legal and moral rights. But something just told me not to do it, so I didn’t.
Boy, was I glad I held my fire. Had a sense of relief you wouldn’t believe. We never caught the burglar, but I was just absolutely relieved the whole rest of the day that I hadn’t shot that poor bastard who had had his car stereo stolen.
• • •
I was working with my regular partner, another female, and we were just driving down the street when all of a sudden we heard a shot ring out. We looked over to our right, where we thought the sound came from, and saw a guy waving a gun. It looked like he was robbing this other guy. We notified dispatch, opened our doors, and drew down on the guy. By this time, the guy with the gun had wrestled this other guy to the ground and was pointing the gun right at him. We could have shot the guy right then. I mean, he had this gun out, threatening this other guy with it, and we’d already heard one round go off. But from my angle, I saw something shiny on the belt of the guy with the gun. I didn’t quite see what it was, but I know that sometimes cops carry their badge on their belt off duty, so I thought that maybe he was a policeman or a security guard, something like that. So I didn’t shoot. I held back to try to get a better view. My partner on the other side of the car couldn’t see whatever it was on his belt because of the angle she had. I heard her gun go that first click that happens when you start to squeeze the trigger, so I knew she was about to cap this guy. As soon as I realized what was happening, I shouted, “Wait, don’t. Don’t. He’s a cop, he’s a cop.”
Turns out I was right. The guy with the gun was an off-duty transit cop, and the other guy had tried to rob him with a fake gun. They fought over it, and the transit cop pulled his gun and fired off a round that missed the other guy. No one got hurt, and we took the bad guy into custody, but I remember thinking how close we came to shooting the good guy. We sure could have. He was pointing the gun at this other guy, but something just wasn’t right—that object on his belt. Because of that, I wanted to give it an extra second before shooting. You know, he could have shot the other guy, and I’d have been wrong, but sometimes you just have to go with your instincts. And that’s what I did.
• • •
I had my brother-in-law on a ride-along with me when a broadcast came out that a narco buy-bust had gone bad with one of the street teams. They put out the description of the car and then said the suspects had fired at detectives and that the detectives were chasing the car. I happened to be coming off the freeway at 405 and Spring when I saw the car heading northbound on Spring. I got in behind it—aired that I was behind it—and all of a sudden, a Ford Mustang occupied by two Hispanic males flanked me to the left and passed the car I was chasing. One of the Hispanic males leaned out of the car and started shooting back at the suspect vehicle, back toward us.
So I yelled at my brother-in-law, “Shit, get down on the floorboard!” I was just concerned for him. I wasn’t even thinking that a round could’ve deflected off the car and nailed me right in the forehead. I wouldn’t have even known it. I was just concerned with getting him down on the ground. So he ducked down, the Hispanic male continued to fire, and the suspects’ car came to a stop. All I could see in the car was two suspects like jumping beans inside, like they were trying to hide underneath the seat. So I got out of the car and went into a typical hot stop and then looked over to the Mustang. The Hispanic males were exiting their car, both firing into the suspects’ car. I turned to engage them. I started to pull on the trigger and almost pulled a round off when I looked at the first guy—who was yelling toward the suspects’ car—and I saw braces on his teeth. I said to myself, “Fuck, that guy was a cop at Central when I was a trainee,” so I went off him and back onto the suspect vehicle. I was looking, looking, looking, looking, but I didn’t see a threat. I was thinking, “Why are they still shooting? I don’t see a threat. Am I missing something? Fuck.”
Next thing you know, a bunch of plainclothes guys came up and yanked these two guys out of the suspects’ car. As they were pulling them out, a third kid that I hadn’t seen popped up into the driver’s seat and the car took off. So I holstered up and went from a near shooting to chasing a car down the road that’s full of bullets. After we got that kid into custody, I told the officer with the braces, “Goddamn, I almost shot you. Scared the shit out of me. I almost dropped you.”
IA called me the next day and said, “You know, you would have been totally justified if you shot that officer.” I said, “Yeah, but it would’ve been hell to live with.” Then they said, “Yeah, but we just want you to know your train of thought, your thinking, was exactly right, because there was a threat. You didn’t know that they were cops, and they were moving toward you and toward the suspects, still shooting.” To this day, I don’t know why they didn’t ID themselves or what they were shooting at. It was pretty crazy.
SWAT
SWAT teams became a part of police work in the late 1960s, when a series of deadly events, including the Watts riots in Los Angeles and a sniper attack at the University of Texas at Austin in which more than three dozen people were shot, showed that the police were ill prepared to deal with unusually dangerous incidents. Realizing this, many large law enforcement agencies began to develop specialized units to handle crisis situations. Because these units carried weapons that were not standard police issue—such as assault rifles, submachine guns, and sniper rifles—and utilized tactics that were not typically used in other realms of police work, they came to be known as special weapons and tactics teams, or SWAT teams for short.
Over the years, more and more police agencies of all sizes have developed SWAT teams and have used them in a wide variety of special-threat situations besides riots and sniper attacks. In fact, most SWAT operations today involve the service of search-and-arrest warrants that are deemed to pose some sort of heightened risk to the police (typically called high-risk warrants), armed subjects who have refused to surrender to the officers who were initially handling the incident (typically called barricaded suspects), and situations in which armed subjects are holding someone against that person’s will (hostage incidents).3
Because SWAT teams’ bread and butter is dealing with the most dangerous sorts of policing situations, SWAT officers typically confront more threats than the average police officer. This section contains three of the more instructive close calls that the SWAT officers I interviewed had, including one in which the officer that I spoke with was shot. The other two stories—though not quite as dramatic—also show how e
xperienced, well-trained police officers often avoid shooting suspects, even in the toughest of circumstances.
• • •
We got called in to serve a search warrant at this one-story house over in Baldwin on a subject known as 98 Frank, who was a very violent drug offender. One of our snitches had taken an undercover officer over there, and while they were trying to negotiate a deal with him, he had actually placed his .45 into the snitch’s mouth and threatened to blow his brains out if he set him up, so we knew the man was very violent. We also knew he was very active in his own cocaine use.
After we got the warrant, we went up to the door, screamed, “County police!” knocked the door down, and stepped into the front room. I was the number-three man in. Our first guy broke left, second guy broke right, and I came straight into the front room. Straight ahead of me was 98 Frank in his bedroom. It had no door, and he was standing there with drugs in his hands and two pistols stuck in his waistband. I started advancing on him. He dropped the dope, and his hands started to come down. I told him to freeze, and I stopped my advance probably twelve feet from him. I was too far away to take him down physically, but close enough that I could see the guns clearly.
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