Another close one happened during my first stint at SWAT. We got called up on a highly intoxicated female who had run her family out of their house with a gun. She was extremely erratic. She was on Prozac, Thorazine, all that. She had quit taking her meds and was high on some other drugs and alcohol. When patrol got there, she confronted them. They backed off and called us. It was nighttime when we got there. We were establishing a perimeter, and I was on the front side of the objective, behind a vehicle parked in the street. She didn’t know I was there. Billy Dale was trying to move into position behind a car that was parked in her driveway. Billy was almost at the car when she came out of her house holding her gun and saw him. He made it behind the car, but she spotted him before he got there. She started walking his way and said, “I see you, you son of a bitch.” The car was between her and Billy, but the closer she got, the more dangerous it was for him. She was pointing the gun in his direction, telling him she was going to kill him. She didn’t see me, and I had her in the sights of my M-16. I was thinking that if she pops a cap, it could skip underneath the car and hit Billy, that I was gonna have to shoot her if she got much closer.
Billy was crouched down behind the car, just trying to maintain cover. Now one of the patrol sergeants and one of the other assault team guys had moved around behind the house and were coming around to the side with the driveway. I didn’t know exactly where they were, but they were somewhere behind the woman. I was worried that they were in my line of fire. I was concerned that if I shot the woman, the bullets might go through her and hit them. Well, she kept moving toward the car, then stopped just a few feet away, and said, “I know you’re behind there, you son of a bitch. Come out, come out.” I was thinking, “How much closer am I going to let her get?” She had the gun pointed at the car this whole time, because she knew Billy was behind it. I had a perfect shot on her. She was no more than twenty yards away, and I was lined up right on her, but she had no idea I was there.
Then she started to move around to the side of the car, and Billy started playing ring-around-the-rosy with her, trying to keep the car between himself and the woman. Some other officers were telling Billy to get out of there, but he was scared to run for it. I was sure that if he took off that she’d pop the cap at him. I was thinking, “What if she gets off a lucky shot that kills him? Can I live with that? If he does decide to run, am I going to let her shoot? Do I need to nail her now before she even gets a shot off?” All this was going through my mind, “Do I need to kill her now? Do I want to kill her, this drunk lady waving a gun around?” My safety was off, I had my finger on the trigger, it was no longer indexed. I was there, ready to squeeze. She was at the left front-door panel of the vehicle; Billy was at the right rear. If she moved any closer or fired a round, I was gonna take her right there. I wasn’t going to let her get any closer. I wasn’t going to let her get a second shot off. She started to move, and I was just about to drop her, when she turned around, then walked back inside the house. We eventually talked her out, so it turned out OK.
Looking back on it though, I don’t know if I made the right decision. It turned out for the best, but it would have been really hard to take if she had gotten a shot off and killed Billy. It would have been hard to live with the knowledge that I had the shot but didn’t take it. To this day, I still wonder whether maybe I should have taken that shot.
After three and a half years in SWAT, I went to work a raid team in Narcotics. The narco guys had been in a bunch of shootings where search warrants had gone bad for some reason, and the cops had to shoot it out with the dealers. The administration decided that this had to stop, so they figured the best way to accomplish this was to put together a team that does nothing but run warrants. The thinking was that if that’s all the team does, then they will do things better, fewer things will go wrong, and fewer people will get shot. So all I did for about three-and-a-half years was serve dope warrants and train. We had a team of eight guys. We were all clean-cut. Short hair. They didn’t allow any beards. You could have a mustache, but the bosses didn’t want a bunch of longhaired dudes with beards busting into peoples’ houses, where the folks inside might not believe it’s the cops. So they wanted us all clean-cut looking. We always wore blue jeans, sneakers, and raid jackets that said “POLICE” over full tactical vests. That way, we looked like a bunch of cops when we hit a place.
When we weren’t out serving warrants, we were shooting or doing some other sort of training. We did an occasional buy-bust—maybe one a week—but other than that, all we did was train and run warrants. Other Narcotics guys would make the case, bring the info back to us, we’d go take a look at the location—usually take some pictures—head back to the office, draw up a plan, get in the van, and go out and execute the warrant. We averaged one warrant every working day, about 250 a year, for nearly four years. During this time, our team proved the bosses’ thinking to be correct. After a while, the shootings went to almost nil. But we did get into a few shootings, and we had a lot of close calls.
I remember one incident where we did a raid on this pimp’s place. He was running whores and selling dope. As we pulled up in the van, I saw the guy standing outside. He saw us and took off into the house. I chased after him. He ran down a hallway and made it into a bathroom and slammed the door before I could catch him.
I came up and kicked the door while my guys were coming in behind me. When I kicked the door open, I heard a gunshot. At first, I thought, “Oh, my God, I’m shot.” I backed up, and the door swung back until it was almost closed. I looked around, trying to figure out who shot me. Then I realized I hadn’t been hit. A few seconds later, the door swung back open, and I saw the crook lying back in a half-full bathtub with both his hands in the air. So I figured he hadn’t shot. I started looking around again. Everybody else was stopped, just covering their own areas of responsibility and looking around. Someone said, “Who shot?” I said, “I don’t know, who shot?” This one guy on the team was always a little gun happy, and I always thought if anybody was going to have an accidental discharge, it would be him. So I looked at him and asked, “Did you shoot?” He said that he hadn’t, but he was looking at his gun like he wasn’t sure that he hadn’t shot. It turns out he didn’t. It was the guy in the bathtub who shot.
After we all calmed down, my sergeant and I stepped into the bathroom and got the pimp out of the bathtub, stuck him against the wall, cuffed him up, and patted him down. Then I get to noticing the smell of gunpowder and a cloud of smoke up near the ceiling. When I looked up, I saw a bullet hole in the ceiling, but there were no guns that I could see in the bathroom. Where’s the gun? After a few seconds, another one of the guys came into the bathroom, reached down into the bathtub water, which was so filthy you couldn’t even see through it, and came up with a gun. What this guy had done was run in the bathroom, slam the door, pull his gun, and point it at the door. He was about to shoot it when I kicked in the door. The door hitting him sent a round into the ceiling, knocked the gun out of his hand and into the bathtub, and knocked him into the tub on top of the gun.
When I realized what had happened, it scared the hell out of me. He totally had me. He could have taken me out right there. I was lucky to be alive. I was also real pissed off at the guy. I wanted to beat the hell out of him right there, but he was handcuffed and you can’t beat handcuffed prisoners. But I wanted to kill him. I looked him right in the eye, thinking, “I could kill you.” But I didn’t do anything, and that was the right thing to do.
A few months later, I came real close to killing this one gal. We were serving a warrant on this place that was supposed to have a whole lot of Mandrix. The main crook wasn’t even home, just his old lady and her girlfriend. My assignment was to go down to the bedrooms and secure them. I had my pistol out, and I was leading the charge down the hallway to the back bedroom. It was kind of a dark hallway, and I was hollering, “Police,” as I moved. I was dressed in my raid jacket and all that. I knew the rest of the team was coming behind
me; I could hear them all coming. I hadn’t seen anybody so far when, all of a sudden, I spotted this woman sitting up on a bed in the bedroom at the end of the hallway. It was a big house, so she was about ten or fifteen yards away, looking directly at me.
I started screaming at her, “Police! Police!” as I continued down the hallway. She leaned over real quick, so her upper body went out of my line of vision. I was figuring she was trying to dump the dope, get rid of it somehow. Then she came back up with a handgun pointed right at me. I just happened to be at this little alcove off the hallway that led to another door, so I jumped in there and barricaded up with my gun pointed right at her. She was holding her gun with both hands, still pointing it at me. She was kind of shaking and nervous looking. I could tell by the way she was holding the damn gun that she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. She was trying to hold it like it was a revolver, but it was an automatic. She was sort of fumbling it between her hands, like she wasn’t sure what hand to put it in. She was very awkward in the way she was holding the weapon. She looked really nervous and scared. That look, and the fact that I could tell that she didn’t know what the shit she was doing with the gun, gave me a little bit of confidence. I felt fairly secure. I was somewhat barricaded up, had my tac vest on with very little of my body exposed, really just my head and arms.
I started screaming at her, “Drop the gun! Drop the gun!” I started to get more peripheral vision on the room, and I could tell there was another female in there. She was just sitting there like she couldn’t believe what was happening. The girl with the gun was just looking at me, and I was going, “Drop the gun! Drop the gun!” over and over.
Finally, she said, “Who are you?”
I said, “I’m a police officer. Drop the goddamn gun!”
Then she said something like, “How do I know you’re a cop?”
Some ideas started running through my mind, like maybe I should take my badge off and throw it into the room or maybe show my ID card. Then I thought, “This is bullshit. I need to kill her.” I mean, I should have already killed her, I should have shot her. She was pointing her gun at me. What if she shot down the hallway and hit one of my buddies behind me? I decided that it had gone far enough, that I was going to ask her one more time to drop the gun, and then I was going to pull the trigger.
I shouted at her, “You’re fixin’ to die! Drop the goddamn gun!”
The girl next to her was pleading with her, saying her name, “Suzy,” or whatever it was, “Suzy, drop the gun.” I was thinking, “This is it, do her.” And I started to pull the trigger. The girl with the gun took her eyes off of me real quick and looked over at her friend. Then she looked back at me and threw the gun down. We rushed into the bedroom and took her and the other girl down and cuffed them up.
I got a chief’s commendation for not shooting that gal. But I don’t think I made the correct tactical decision. I felt confident with my vest on and confident in the position I was in, but looking back on it, I could have easily died that day. Any of the guys behind me could have easily died. If it would have been a guy holding that gun, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have fired. I looked at it differently because she was a woman, took too much for granted in my position and my perception that a woman is less dangerous than a man. I put the lives of the officers behind me at risk. I knew guys would be barricaded up, but they’d be sticking their heads out and looking. If she fired a round, it could have gone past me and hit one of them. I risked their lives without their consent, and I don’t really feel like I had the right to do that. I think I should have fired. If I had handled it the way I’d been trained, I would have shot her. That’s what I should have done. I felt a little guilty about jeopardizing my teammates’ lives. If I want to take chances in my life, that’s fine, but I shouldn’t be taking chances with theirs. That’s the conclusion I came to. The chief’s commendation is all well and good, but it doesn’t stop me from wondering what would have happened if she had gotten a round off. Where would that round have gone?
There have been a bunch of other close calls since I came back to SWAT about ten years ago—none where I wonder if I made the right decision, but several cases where suspects shot at us but we didn’t return fire. Probably somewhere between ten and fifteen of them where people shoot at us, but we just take cover. Sometimes people try to shoot us through walls; sometimes they pop a cap at us when we’re moving around on the perimeter. The bullets come pretty close, but we don’t shoot back because we’ve got cover.
I was behind a big pine tree one time, and the suspect was shooting his deer rifle my way, putting rounds into the tree. But it was a huge pine tree, so he wasn’t going to hit me. I never was in any real danger, but it was a little unnerving having those bullets hitting the other side of the tree. Cases like that where we could kill the guy, but there was really no need. There have also been a few times when we were poking lights fixed to poles around corners or into rooms when the suspect shot the light. It tends to scare the crap out of you, but it’s not real dangerous because you’re behind cover at the other end of the pole. Most of the time, we are able to resolve these situations without using deadly force. We almost always find ways to end them without shooting anybody.
• • •
I could have shot a lot more than one person in my twenty-five-plus years, but I didn’t because I didn’t need to. To me, there’s legal justification for shooting, moral justification for shooting, and then, “Was a shooting necessary?” That’s the most important question and the one that guides my decision making. I think that maybe that’s what makes a good policeman: the ability to make a decision based on that question. After a situation is over, he says, “I could have shot him, but I didn’t, because it didn’t need to be done.” I’ve been in a bunch of those, where I could have legally fired, but for some reason it just wasn’t appropriate. It’s that third criterion, it wasn’t necessary. So I’ve been in a lot of situations where, yeah, I could have shot, but it just wasn’t necessary.
• • •
The words of this last veteran officer sum up what good cops all over the nation know: that the legal sanction they have to shoot is not a license to kill, but rather a power that should be invoked only when they believe they have no other choice. As the next chapter shows, however, deciding when it is absolutely necessary to pull the trigger is not a simple matter.
Notes
1. Discussions of the limitations of law and policy to direct police use of their firearms, the discretionary nature of police firearms usage, and how officers’ personal shooting policies are often more restrictive than law and policy 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); and The Badge and the Bullet, by Peter Scharf and Arnold Binder (New York: Praeger, 1983).
2. The federal study that documented police restraint is Use of Deadly Force by Police Officers: Final Report, by Arnold Binder, Peter Scharf, and Raymond Galvin (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, 1982). The findings of this study are also reported in The Badge and the Bullet, by Peter Scharf and Arnold Binder (New York: Praeger, 1983).
3. A discussion of the advent and development of SWAT teams can be found in The Management of Police Specialized Tactical Units, by Tomas C. Mijares, Ronald M. McCarthy, and David B. Perkins (Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 2000).
Chapter Four
Pulling the Trigger
The line separating close calls from shootings is razor thin. As we saw in the last chapter, police officers hold their fire in the face of all sorts of threatening actions, including gunfire directed at them. So when officers do shoot, it is because something—the way armed individuals stand, the way they hold their weapons, the way they move, the words they speak, the look on their faces, some cue—tells them that this moment is different, that it is for keeps, that they can’t hesitate, that they have to fire. The last chapter illustrated the sorts of things that officers co
nsider as they contemplate pulling the trigger but stop short of the act. This one completes the shooting picture by showing how and why officers cross the line, and what happens when they send police bullets plowing through citizens’ flesh and bone.
In some instances, the decision to shoot is the end point of a deliberative process. In others, it is a split-second reaction that involves no conscious thought at all. Sometimes a shooting is the culmination of a protracted encounter during which officers had plenty of time to consider the possibility that they might need to shoot. Other times, officers are thrown into dangerous situations without warning and fire right away. And shootings happen in any sort of situation: burglary investigations; disputes between family members, friends, or neighbors; traffic stops; noise complaints; and even when officers are minding their own business off duty. Because shootings can (and do) unfold in a variety of ways, during situations of every conceivable stripe, there is no such thing as a typical shooting scenario.
The same is true about the people officers shoot: there is no such thing as a typical police opponent. Although some of the people the police shoot are hardened criminals, many are folks who were not in serious trouble with the law before the incident that brought them to the attention of the police. Some souls are enraged about some real or imagined affront they have suffered, some are high on alcohol or other drugs (or both), some suffer from some type of long-standing emotional or mental problem, and some are suicidal. Indeed the most thorough research to date indicates that some 10 percent of the people struck by police gunfire in recent years were suicides who goaded officers into shooting them. This unorthodox form of self-destruction, commonly called suicide-by-cop in law enforcement circles, is sometimes chosen by troubled individuals (such as the disturbed man who stabbed himself in the stomach from the previous chapter) who wish to end their lives but can’t do it by their own hand.1
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