Into the Kill Zone

by David Klinger

  I saw the insulation move a little bit. Then, all of a sudden—like a vampire in an old, cheap B movie coming up out of the coffin—Larry sat straight up. When he sat up, he punched out with his right hand this big stainless steel semiautomatic pistol. The barrel looked as big as a basketball hoop. When he popped up, my vision went “voomp,” focused in on that barrel. I could see the guy behind the gun, but he looked sort of fuzzy, while the gun was in crystal-clear focus. It was like a photo where the foreground is clear and the background is blurry. When I got that focus, it was like a flag dropped in my mind, a green light went on, some signal telling me, “Threat, threat, threat! It’s time to shoot!” I don’t remember making a decision to pull the trigger. I just reacted. I was shooting.

  I didn’t even know that Randy and Paul were shooting until I stopped and heard a couple more rounds go off. The guy fell back into the insulation, then everything stopped, the three of us just looking, waiting, waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened, no movement in the insulation, so we moved up a little bit. Real carefully. When we got closer, I could see him doing the old death rattle. But all I was thinking about was the gun; where’s that gun? I wanted to know where that gun was. I didn’t care that he was death rattling. That doesn’t mean he couldn’t come back up and shoot. When Randy brushed some insulation away, I could see that his rounds had just disintegrated the guy’s right arm. It was laying almost like a snake, with bone sticking out. His torso was peppered. Holes everywhere. I could tell the guy was on his last legs. He did the death twitch and rattle a little bit more. Then, maybe five, ten seconds later, he shut down.

  The shooting part of it went real quick. Before I fired, it seemed like it took a long time for my gun to go off. I knew I needed to shoot when that flag dropped in my mind, but it seemed like that first trigger pull went real slow. My mind was saying, “Hurry, hurry, go, go, go!” I know it takes about a half a second to react to something you see, but it sure felt a lot longer than that for that first round to go off. After that first round though, the rest came real fast: “Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!” and it was over. It happened so fast, in fact, that I didn’t even know I’d fired five rounds. I thought I shot three, maybe four rounds, so I was surprised when I counted the rounds in my gun afterwards and found fifteen in my twenty-round magazine. Another thing that was weird was that the gunfire wasn’t loud at all. Just popping. It sounded pretty soft when I was shooting. Then, when I stopped, I just assumed the other two rounds I heard were from Paul because they didn’t sound like the M-16. I figured Randy wasn’t shooting because that M-16 puts out a good loud sound, and it was just, “Pop, pop.” That’s all I could hear. Plus my ears weren’t ringing at all afterwards. So that was sort of interesting.

  But the thing I remember most is how fast the shooting happened once I got the first round off. I started shooting, then—just like that—it was over.

  • • •

  The closing words of the officer we just heard from—while quite compelling—are somewhat misleading. Shootings aren’t really “over” for officers when they cease firing, for after the smoke clears, officers have to deal with the consequences of their actions. And this, as noted at the outset of the book, can be a difficult process. This is the topic of the final chapter, which completes our trip Into the Kill Zone.

  Notes

  1. The study reporting that 10 percent of police shootings involve troubled individuals seeking to end their own lives is “Suicide by Cop,” by H. Range Hutson and others, Annals of Emergency Medicine 32, no. 6 (1998): 665–669. This article also includes a general discussion of the suicide-by-cop phenomenon. A broader discussion of the phenomenon can be found in “Suicidal Intent in Victim-Precipitated Homicide: Insights from the Study of Suicide-by-Cop,” by David A. Klinger, Homicide Studies 5, no. 3 (2001): 206–226.

  2. Information on distances between officers and suspects, the number of rounds fired per shooting, and the speed at which officers discharge their weapons 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).

  3. The count of officers killed with their own guns comes from the FBI’s “Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted,” 2000, which can be found under the Library and Reference section of the FBI Web page at www.fbi.gov.

  4. The assertion that officers may use force that appears to be necessary even when no actual threat exists is based on the objective reasonableness standard as articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court in Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989). See also The Badge and the Bullet, by Peter Scharf and Arnold Binder (New York: Praeger, 1983); and Deadly Force: What We Know, by William A. Geller and Michael S. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum, 1992).

  Chapter Five

  When the Smoke Clears

  The men and women who shared their stories with me had a variety of responses in the wake of their shootings. Some experienced no problems, a few viewed what happened in a positive light, but most endured at least some sort of psychological, emotional, or physical discomfort at some point, and some suffered extremely severe negative reactions, such as depression and suicidal despair.

  The previous chapter provided a glimpse of the sorts of negative reactions that officers can experience in the immediate aftermath of shootings. The remorse of the new mother who shot an unarmed robber, the tears shed by the SWAT officer who shot the gun-toting arms merchant, and the worry about whether he’d done the right thing expressed by the rookie whose shooting led to a riot, all demonstrate the sorts of short-term discomfort that officers can feel. How officers react immediately following shootings is only part of the picture, however, for it can take quite some time for the personal repercussions of these violent events to play themselves out. And officers’ responses following shootings involve more than just reactions to the incident in which they fired.

  Police shootings are social events that engender reactions among various individuals and entities besides the people involved directly in them. Both the agency that employs the officer and other elements of the criminal justice system mobilize to investigate the shooting in order to establish whether the officer’s use of deadly force conformed with law and department policy. Police shootings almost always generate some sort of press coverage because the personal drama of individuals locked in potentially mortal combat and the social drama of the clash between state authority and individual liberty that they involve make them inherently newsworthy. Shootings also generate a good deal of interest among the peers and supervisors of the involved officers, so it is not uncommon for other officers to seek shooters out to hear from the horse’s mouth what happened and to offer commentary on the incident.

  In a similar vein, officers’ parents, spouses, children, other relatives, boyfriends-girlfriends, and other close acquaintances can be curious and concerned about what transpired. On the opposite side of the personal-interest coin, the friends and family of suspects (as well as suspects themselves, if they survive) can become part of the post-shooting landscape through a variety of means, such as seeking officers out, court appearances, or simple chance encounters. Finally, because shootings are public spectacles, members of the public at large sometimes get into the act.

  The ways the justice system, the press, officers’ families, and other third parties react to shooting incidents can exert their own effects on officers following shootings. Support can buoy officers, for example, and a lack of it can leave them floundering. Similarly, positive comments can build officers up, and negative ones can drag them down. And so on. Because the social reactions spawned by shootings can affect officers, it is not possible to understand officers’ experiences in the wake of shootings apart from the reactions that others have to them. Knowing this, I spent a good deal of time talking to the officers I interviewed about their post-shooting reactions, how various third parties responded to their shootings, and the intersection between the two.

  The
officers I interviewed went through a variety of experiences following their shootings and had a broad range of post-shooting reactions—from extreme delight that they had survived a potentially fatal event to abject despair that they had killed someone. Within this range, there was a strong tendency for officers to suffer some notable short-term disruption, which dissipated markedly as time passed. The stories in this chapter present a representative slice of how officers are treated and how they react in the wake of shootings.

  Most of them come from officers we have already heard from, but some are fresh voices. Readers will be able to link some of the stories in this chapter with those in the last, as it is apparent in some cases that a particular story here comes from a particular officer that we heard from there. In order to protect officers’ privacy, however, there is no clear link between most of the stories in this chapter and those in previous ones. Another step that I sometimes took to protect officers’ identity was to break their post-shooting stories into pieces and place them in different sections of the chapter. So the post-shooting experiences of single officers are sometimes spread across multiple sections of the chapter.

  In sum, this chapter is structured to provide maximum insight into what happens to police officers following shootings, while protecting the privacy of the men and women who so graciously shared their experiences with me. The stories begin with a section that focuses on officers’ experiences with the way the justice system deals with officer-involved shootings.

  Lawyers, Guns, and Justice

  One of the first social reactions to officer-involved shootings is an official investigation into the incident, which begins as soon as the scene has been secured. These investigations—conducted by detectives from the officer’s own department, other police agencies, or both—are major undertakings that follow the same basic protocols that are involved in the investigation of major crimes. The detectives collect physical evidence, obtain statements from relevant parties (including the involved officers), and undertake the numerous other investigative steps they would take in any significant case. The information that is developed during these investigations is then used in a pair of formal inquiries that consider the appropriateness of the shots that officers fired.

  First, the police department that employs the officer who fired conducts an inquiry to determine whether the shots were within the scope of department policy on the use of deadly force. Some departments have supervisory or command officers make individual determinations about the shooting, whereas others convene special panels (known generically as shooting review boards) to pass collective judgment on the officers who fired. Whatever protocol an agency employs, nearly all shootings are found to be “within policy,” so officers are rarely disciplined by their departments for shooting someone.

  The second review is a criminal inquiry to determine the legality of officers’ actions vis-à-vis state law regarding the use of deadly force by police officers. These inquiries are generally handled by the prosecutor’s office in the county in which the shooting occurred and often include a grand jury or coroner’s inquest. Whatever procedures a given jurisdiction might employ to review the legality of shootings, criminal inquiries nearly always find that the police acted within the scope of the relevant law, so officers rarely face criminal charges for the actions they take during shooting incidents.

  Whatever local legal authorities decide about whether a given shooting was within the bounds of state law, federal authorities have the power to conduct a separate criminal inquiry to examine whether the officers who fired violated federal civil rights laws that govern police conduct. Unlike the legal review of officer-involved shootings that occurs at the local level, however, federal criminal inquiries are not routine. The federal government opens formal probes in just a small fraction of the police shootings that occur in the nation each year. These queries almost always clear the involved officer(s), so federal prosecutions in the wake of police shootings are extremely rare.1

  Even though officers are rarely administratively sanctioned, prosecuted, or punished for shooting someone, the prospect that they might be looms large in many officers’ minds. And there is one other sort of inquiry that makes many officers wary: civil litigation. Suspects who survive their wounds and the estates of dead ones can file civil lawsuits asserting that the shooting was not justified and demanding damages for the injuries they suffered. Such suits can be filed in federal court, state court, or both and can level a variety of allegations against police officers and their departments. There is no national database on these sorts of lawsuits, so it is not possible to say with any precision how frequently suits are filed in the wake of shootings. What is known is that they are filed frequently enough to support a cottage industry of lawyers and expert witnesses who specialize in litigation against police officers and departments.2

  The final piece of the justice system’s response to police shootings pertains only to cases in which suspects survive the incident. When suspects survive their wounds, prosecutors will review the incident to determine what criminal charges should be brought against them. In a case in which the police shoot an armed robber who fired upon officers while fleeing the scene of the crime, for example, the suspect might be charged with both attempted murder for attacking officers and robbery for the initial crime. Unless the suspect pleads guilty (or in the rare case in which the suspect is not charged with any crimes), a criminal trial ensues, during which the shooting officer usually testifies as a witness for the prosecution.

  The previous chapter included a bit of information about the investigations that follow shootings (in the form of officers’ reports about things such as handing their guns over to supervisors and heading to the Homicide office to give their statements to detectives) and the concern that officers can feel about the inquiries that follow (for example, the rookie who was worried that the gun the suspect used to shoot at him and his partner had gone missing). The stories in this section flesh out the picture of shooting investigations, the various inquiries that can follow, and how officers respond as these aspects of the social reaction to their shootings are played out.

  And they do much more. They also show how factors besides post-shooting inquiries can play critical roles in framing officers’ experiences and reactions in the wake of shootings. Most prominent among these factors are race and religion.

  Police officers, like all people everywhere, tend to draw upon what ever religious faith they have during trying times, especially those involving injury or death. Thus do many officers call upon their religious faith to help them deal with their shootings. But religion can cut both ways in the wake of shootings. Because all faiths have some variant of the biblical admonition that we should not harm other humans, religious officers must make peace with what they did in terms of the teachings of their faith about the sanctity of human life.

  Where race goes, the previously discussed historical tensions between the police and minority communities over the use of deadly force can translate into a source of personal difficulty for officers who shoot black suspects because they may be accused of having shot based on racial animus.

  This chapter contains several stories that provide the reader with some notion of how race can become an issue following shootings and the sorts of responses officers can have to it. But the stories do more than that; they also shed light on the role that race plays in deadly force decision making, as well as police perspectives on the role that race plays in law enforcement more generally. Stories that touch on race are interspersed throughout many of the sections of this chapter. They begin in this first one for the simple reason that racial concerns often arise during the investigations and inquiries that follow shootings.

  • • •

  The supervisors took our guns from us at the scene, then put us in a room, and cleaned us up a little bit because we had some blood on us. I think the first thing I did was take my gun belts off, then I took my T-shirt off, and I got some tears in my eyes. I was s
cared. The fear started right after I stopped shooting. I was worried for two reasons. First of all, I’d never killed anybody before, never shot anybody before, and I was thinking, “God, I lost my job.” I wasn’t sure how the administration was going to react because officers in my department hadn’t killed anybody in a long time, and the last one was a bad shooting.

  The other reason I was scared was that this was a black guy. I was worried that all the black people were gonna say was, “White cop kills black man.” That went through my mind. It didn’t matter that he had a gun; just, “White cop kills black man.” So I was worried that there would be some community outcry and that I would be accused of shooting someone who didn’t need to be shot. I was worried that the department would use me as a scapegoat, that I would lose my job for political reasons. I was also scared for my family because I was worried about what people were gonna think of them. I live in this diverse neighborhood, and my kids were going to the elementary school there. I was really worried about a racial issue coming out of the shooting, and I wondered what would happen to my kids in school if it did. I was probably more worried about them than I was me.

  Everything worked out. The department’s review came back that we’d done exactly what we were supposed to do, and there were never any problems on the racial angle. But I was sure worried about that stuff for a while.