Into the Kill Zone

by David Klinger

  So I was standing on one side of the roof, and Vick was on the other, when he called me over. I walked around, and just three floors below us I could see somebody sitting at a table rolling what looked like a marijuana cigarette. Vick said, “Let’s do an investigation,” so we went downstairs, knocked on the door, and somebody opened it.

  We went in and told everybody to turn around, get up against the wall, and put their hands up. I covered them while Vick searched them. They were all unarmed, so he had them sit down and started getting their IDs. I recognized the first guy he talked to, but I didn’t know why. I was thinking, “Where do I know this guy from?” All of a sudden, it was like a mallet hit me over the head: “This is the guy who shot me. This is Oscar Smith, the suspect who shot me. He’s supposed to be in prison. What’s he doing here?” I couldn’t believe it, because after he was convicted, the judge took me into his chambers and told me that this guy was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, that he was never going to see the light of day.

  I was dumbfounded. Then I got very excited. I was in a rage that the suspect was in the same room with me. My face was probably redder than a beet. I was furious. This was somebody who tried to murder me.

  I called Vick over and said, “Listen, I believe that’s the guy that shot me. I’m going to throw him out of the window!”

  He could tell that I wasn’t kidding around, so he said, “Don’t worry. He’s going to jail. He’s under the influence. I’ve already looked at the tracks on his arms. He’s under the influence. Just keep it cool.”

  So there I was, wanting to throw this guy out the window. Then I started thinking about what Vick said, and about my family, my job, what I’d lose if I did throw him out a seventh-story window. I decided that it wasn’t worth it, so I just played along with Vick and didn’t let on that I knew this guy. He didn’t act like he knew who I was, so I don’t think it registered with him at all.

  We hooked the suspects up, got them in the car, and drove to the station. On the way, Vick was prepping the guy with questions: “Do you know this officer?” Stuff like that. The guy kept saying that he didn’t recognize me. Then, all of a sudden, he said, “I know.”

  And Vick asked, “What do you know?”

  The suspect then said, “It’s not something I’m proud of.”

  When we got to the station, Vick took him into the interrogation room while I waited outside. The suspect had a wallet that was taken in a street robbery just around the corner from the hotel where we’d arrested him. The victim couldn’t ID him, but we booked him on the robbery of the wallet anyway. The suspect ended up doing some time for a misdemeanor out of that because he had used one of the victim’s credit cards at a nearby gas station.

  He did three or four months, and when he got out, I ran into him again. I’d responded to a call about a kidnapping at a motel to see what the officers had over there. There were several officers, and they had several suspects over to one side of the motel. One of the suspects was just walking around, so he caught my attention. When I looked at him, I realized it was Oscar Smith, and I drew down on him. All the other officers then drew down on the other suspects, not knowing what was up. After we got them all hooked up and searched, I explained to them who the guy was and that he was potentially very dangerous.

  It turned out that the situation at the motel was a bag of worms, more of a narcotics thing than a kidnapping. The guys had a young female and a bunch of drugs, but it looked like the girl was a willing participant. So all the guy that shot me got booked on was another narcotics charge.

  After he got out from that one, the guy came down to the station and told the officers on duty that he thought that I was after him and that he wanted to talk to me. I didn’t want to talk to this guy, so I didn’t. The captain up at Detective Assistance Division heard about this guy coming to the station and decided that it might be worth it to put a surveillance team on him, to see what he was up to. So they watched him for a while. The captain got back to me and told me that the suspect was nothing more than a penny-ante dope user, dope dealer, who wasn’t worth anything.

  That was good to know, but I was having some problems with the situation because he was supposed to still be in prison, and here I was running into him out on the streets. I was still real angry, so I went to talk with one of the department psychologists about what was going on. He was able to put my mind at ease.

  He went over some of the same stuff I’d thought about when I was thinking about throwing the guy out the window. He asked me if this guy was worth everything that I’d worked for, my family, my job, and everything else. When I thought about that, it was easy to see that I needed to back off. On the one hand, I had this dope dealer who was probably going to be found dead in an alley with a needle hanging out of his arm someday, and on the other, I had my family and my career. That’s what was important to me. Watching my kids play baseball on Saturday afternoon, going to the soccer games, stuff like that. When I looked at it that way, it was easy to put it in perspective and move on with my life.

  Not a Problem

  As hard as shootings are for some officers, they are a breeze for others. Some officers simply experience no notable negative reactions in the wake of shooting someone. They may have been a bit apprehensive about some aspect of their situation, such as how the investigation was going to proceed or how their family might react, but that’s all. Some of the officers told me they had expected to have difficulties because they had received training that proclaimed that officers always experience substantial problems in the wake of shootings, and then they explained to me why they believed they didn’t have any. Others left their lack of negative reactions unremarked upon, so I asked these officers why they supposed they were unaffected.

  A common theme runs across what all the officers who did just fine told me: they were doing their job, shooting bad people who were doing bad things and who therefore deserved to be shot, so they had nothing to be concerned about. This section presents the stories of some of the officers who experienced no problems following their shootings, including their variation of the “it’s my job and he deserved it” theme as an explanation for why they did so well.

  • • •

  I don’t look at the shooting as an unpleasant experience. Now that may sound callous. When you kill somebody, how can that not be unpleasant? Well, if this had been an innocent person or somebody that I had accidentally killed, then I’d probably feel bad about it. But this guy was committing robberies, and he was trying to kill me, so I don’t have the slightest bit of regret about shooting him.

  • • •

  I didn’t really have any problems after the shooting. The shooting team came out to my house and interviewed me the next day. They had rolled out the night before and got all their physical evidence from the scene, took all their photos, interviewed all the witnesses, and whatnot. They saved me for last, I guess, just to make sure my story jibed with what everyone else said. I told them exactly what happened, ran them through it as they asked me questions, cleared up one or two points for them, and then they were done. I knew in my mind that what I’d done was right, and the detectives confirmed it just before they left: one of them told me that as shootings go, mine was as clean as a spring chicken.

  I mean, it was pretty much cut-and-dried. He knifed me. I shot him. And that was that. I understood the gravity, and I understood the seriousness of what had happened, but it just didn’t weigh on me any. After the detectives left, I thought everything through real carefully a couple of times. I kind of took myself down different paths. OK, what could I have done differently? What should I have done? There were probably a million other ways I could have handled it, but the bottom line was that I tried to keep some guy from hurting his wife, which I did. I sacrificed part of my arm in the process, but I can live with that. It sure could have been a whole lot worse, so I essentially resolved all that stuff within the first day or two, came to grips with it, and decided that it was OK. />
  • • •

  Neither of the guys I shot died, and that’s fine with me. If either or both of them would’ve died, that would’ve been fine also. When I talk to people about police shootings, I tell them it’s not important to kill the person you shoot. You don’t try to kill when you shoot; you try to stop. So if you stop what he’s doing and you stop it right now, it’s a successful shooting. You’ve done what you were supposed to do. You’ve accomplished your mission. If he dies, well, that’s a consequence of his actions in trying to hurt someone. If he doesn’t die, well, God just smiled on him that day. So to me, the injuries I inflicted are not material.

  • • •

  The guy lived, even though I hit him six times. If he would’ve died, the only difference to me would’ve been that I would have gotten two weeks off instead of one day, because my department keeps officers out of the field for two weeks after a fatal. My intent was to stop the threat, and that’s what I did, so what happened to him is totally immaterial to me. Fortunately for him, he lived. Unfortunately, someday we may have to go back and get him again because he’s now out of prison. I think that’s the bad end of it. If the guy isn’t gonna hesitate to shoot a bunch of heavily armed policemen coming up to his house, he’s sure not gonna hesitate to shoot a guy who pulls him over on traffic. For that reason, I would’ve probably felt better if he had died, because I’d hate to read the paper someday and find out that he was successful in killing either some civilian or another policeman.

  I think he’s definitely a threat. I don’t think he is gonna change. While he was in the hospital, his friends were threatening to kill some police officers, and while he was out on bond awaiting his trial, he was supposedly back in business dealing. If a guy has that kind of mental attitude, then he’s not gonna hesitate to shoot. I think he’s a definite threat and that society needs to worry about the guy. But as far as my decision, once the threat has ended, the shooting stops. Once I stopped the threat, whether he lives or dies is irrelevant to me. So I wouldn’t change a thing I did. Not a thing. But society would be better off if he was dead.

  • • •

  We always do a critical debrief on all our incidents, so there was a lot of discussion among the team the next day. “Hey, what did you see? What did you do? How many rounds did you fire?” The guys who weren’t involved asked, “Hey, what was it like? Did you use the sights? Did you do this? Did you do that?” I think the debrief was a little bit more detailed on this because of all the things that happened. We want to decide whether we used the appropriate tactics. We want to know if we could have done it better. We ended up getting three people wounded, and of course the first thing we said was, “What could we have done to solve that problem? Could we have done it differently?”

  I’ve been on the team for over fifteen years, so during the debrief some of the younger guys asked me, “Have you ever been on one like this before?” I said, “Man, what this reminds me of is Vietnam.” This was the closest thing I’d ever been in to making contact since I was over there. The only thing different was we’d been in a building, and over there we were in a jungle. But it was a regular old Wild West shoot-out. There were bullets zinging everywhere, and that’s the thing that got me reflecting back on what I did thirty-odd years ago. The shoot-out was the only thing that I’ve been involved in in police work that compared to Vietnam. We’ve had some other big shoot-outs here in the unit, but fortunately I haven’t been involved in any of them.

  Once the debrief was over, I thought about what I did. I figured there was nothing I could have done to contribute anything else besides what I did by shooting the guy. So I told myself, “You did a pretty good job,” and left it at that. I’m not one to gnaw on things. I don’t internalize things, so I don’t have any problems with what I did.

  • • •

  I’ve shot six people, and three of them died. All of them had guns, and most of them fired some rounds at me or other officers. So I’ve been in some shoot-outs. But it never bothered me. In fact, after my fourth shooting I fell asleep on the psychologist’s couch as I was waiting for my mandatory session with her. The shooting happened just before midnight, and after I got released from the investigation around nine the next morning, I went to see her because it’s the policy of the PD for officers to see the psychologist as soon as possible after every shooting. I was so tired because I didn’t sleep all night that I fell asleep on a couch in the waiting room outside her office. She came out, woke me up, and said, “I guess you don’t have any problems sleeping.” I said, “No.” She let me go home, and I came back to work that night.

  Now I’ve heard about officers getting in shootings, and they say, “Oh, my God, that was devastating.” But that doesn’t make sense to me because I look at shootings as something officers come on this job to do. In fact, it’s the most exhilarating part of this job. It’s why policemen rush to get to hot calls when they come out—not to shoot anybody, but to confront the bad guys. It’s our job to go to the danger. Over the years, I confronted many armed suspects that I’ve taken into custody without using deadly force. But when someone shoots at me, I shoot back. If an armed suspect confronts you and you prevail in the shoot-out, you and your partner go home that night. What’s devastating about that? I just don’t understand why officers would have a problem with that. So to me, because the possibility of shooting people is part of the job, I’ve never had a problem after any of my shootings.

  Validation

  As previously noted, many men and women headed for law enforcement jobs wonder if they will be able to shoot someone if the need arises. This concern persists in the minds of some officers once they come on the job and emerges among some of those who had harbored no such doubts during their pre-police days. Similarly, because police officers must often count on one another for protection, many officers harbor the same question about fellow officers—particularly rookies—who have yet to prove themselves capable of shooting someone. An officer’s first shooting, consequently, can have the immensely positive effects of striking the reservations they had harbored about their ability to pull the trigger and demonstrating to their peers that they can be counted on when danger comes a-callin’.

  Some officers have the question about their own ability to take a life answered through situations in which they could have shot—the officer who actually had to stop pulling his trigger during his encounter with the newspaper-armed emotionally disturbed individual, for example. For many others, however, only a shooting can erase the doubts. In a similar vein, sometimes only a shooting can allay any doubts an officer’s peers may have about his or her ability to shoot when the need arises. The three stories in this brief section address the validation issue in greater depth, showing more thoroughly how shootings can both settle the minds of the officers who pulled the trigger and demonstrate to their peers that they possess the ability to do the ultimate police task when called upon to do so. The final story also illuminates the particular burden that female officers often bear when it comes to peers’ opinions.

  • • •

  I was a brand-new rookie when it happened. Some of the veteran guys at the station went and bought a little bottle of Jack Daniels while my partner and I were being interviewed. As we were leaving, they were like, “Here, kid. Have a drink, you did good.” Because I was still in training—with the “Yes sir. No sir.” stuff—I took some. One of the guys took me aside and told me that people were going to look at me different because you never know how someone is going to react in a shooting situation until it happens. He said that people around the station that haven’t been in a shooting will look at me differently now because even if they would like to treat me like a trainee, they won’t because if they haven’t done it, they’ll always have the question in their mind, “Will I be able to do it?” He was right. The veterans started treating me differently. They gave me a little more respect because they knew that when the shit hits the fan out here that I’ll be able to handle myself.
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  What happened also changed the way I looked at myself a little bit. I had a sense of pride, a sense of relief almost, that, “Hey, I did it. I was able to survive. When they threw the worst at me, I survived.” Like a lot of cops, I’d wondered how I’d perform if push came to shove. After the shooting, the doubts I’d had were gone.

  • • •

  My first shooting changed some minds about me and settled my mind about some things. I was one of the few guys on SWAT that didn’t have a military background, and after it happened one of my supervisors, who was a Vietnam vet, told me that he always had doubts about whether I would pull the trigger on somebody. The shooting put his mind to rest. It also reinforced a lot of thinking that I had about shootings. There is a lot of training about police shootings that says, “You’ll feel stress. You won’t be able to see your front sights. You’ll wet your pants. You’ll do this and that afterward.” Before my shooting, I didn’t think any of that would happen to me. I’d say, “No, I won’t,” but I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t challenge any of it. That’s different now. Now I know I won’t because none of that stuff happened to me.

  Another thing that happened with the first shooting is that it put to rest whatever tiny doubt I had in my mind about how I’d do. I don’t care who you are, no matter how good you think you are or how well you trained—until you’ve done it, there’s always gonna be somewhere in the back of your brain, some doubt about how you will perform in a shooting. It might be tiny, tiny, tiny, but it’ll be there. I’ve talked to my dad, who’s a World War II combat veteran, and other guys who’ve been in shootings, and they all say the same thing. But the first one put all that to rest for me, so when the second one happened, my attitude was, “Been there, done that.” I knew exactly what to do, and I knew how I was gonna do it because I’d already done it once before.