Into the Kill Zone

When one of the twenty thousand or so law enforcement agencies that dot our nation wants to hire new police officers, they don’t simply grab whoever applies for the job, give them a gun and a badge, and put them out on patrol. Rather, they choose new officers from a list of citizens who have passed through a selection process that may include a physical exam, written tests, a background check, and a visit to a psychologist—in addition to the interviews mentioned in the last chapter—which are designed to weed out people who are not physically, emotionally, or psychologically fit for the challenges of police work. Departments then train the men and women they select before sending them to work the streets on their own.

In all but some of the smaller departments, a new officer’s training starts at a police academy, which can run from around two months to more than half a year, depending on the agency. There, recruits are taught the basics of policing, including how to shoot guns and when it is appropriate to do so. It is during this training that new police officers begin to shed whatever naive ideas they may have had about shooting people before they came on the job.

Police recruits spend many hours at the firing range learning how to shoot the pistols, shotguns, and rifles they will carry upon graduation and many more hours in classrooms learning the rules about when they may fire these weapons on the street. The broadest ring of instruction that recruits receive regarding when it is appropriate to shoot is the relevant federal law. Federal law has always allowed police officers to use deadly force to defend against attacks that could kill or seriously injure them or others, a standard commonly referred to as the defense of life doctrine. Until about twenty years ago, federal law also permitted the police to shoot citizens who ran from them if they believed the fleeing citizen had committed a felony. Then, in 1985, the United States Supreme Court changed things. In Tennessee v. Garner—a case involving an unarmed burglary suspect who was shot dead while running from the police in Memphis, Tennessee—the justices ruled that it is unconstitutional for police officers to shoot fleeing felony suspects unless the crime of which they are suspected involved violence.1

Tennessee v. Garner had a major impact on the second set of standards to which police recruits are trained: state law governing deadly force by police officers. States can place more restrictions on officers’ use of deadly force than does the federal law, but they cannot be more permissive. Prior to 1985, about half the states had already restricted fatal police power to defense of life and apprehension of violent fleeing felons. After Tennessee v. Garner was handed down, those states that had allowed officers to shoot nonviolent felons tightened their laws.2 For the last two decades, then, police recruits have been taught that they can lawfully shoot people only in defense of life and to stop the flight of violent felony suspects.

Federal and state deadly force standards are quite broad, setting only the outer bounds of when police officers may legally shoot citizens. Many police agencies offer additional guidance regarding firearms use in written directives called shooting policies, which detail the circumstances under which officers may fire their guns. Most shooting policies have some variant of the defense of life–violent felon standard, but some agencies limit the use of deadly force against people to defense of life, forbidding their officers from shooting violent felons who try to flee. And shooting policies often address many other aspects of police firearms use, such as shooting at or from moving vehicles, firing warning shots, and even when officers may draw and exhibit their weapons. Because shooting policies contain the specific guidelines for when officers working for a given police department are permitted to discharge their firearms, this is the final aspect of shooting rules that recruits learn about in the academy.3

Another thing that recruits learn in the academy is that the purpose of deadly force in police work is not to kill, but rather to stop whomever officers are shooting at from accomplishing an illegal act. Whether it is an individual who is threatening the life of the officer, or a third party, or a violent felon who is trying to escape, police officers are trained that they are permitted to shoot only so long as the citizen they take under fire continues to present an imminent threat or attempts to flee. Once the threat has passed or the felon halts, officers must stop shooting. Thus are police recruits disabused of the popular notion that police officers “shoot to kill.”

This misapprehension likely comes from the fact that in being trained to shoot to stop officers are taught that the primary aim point for their weapons is what police trainers call center mass—the center of a suspect’s torso—which reduces the likelihood that their bullets will miss their mark. A shot that is three inches wide of its aim point when the target is a suspect’s sternum will still strike the person. The same off-target shot when the aim point is a suspect’s arm will miss the suspect entirely. Because the center mass area contains the vital organs, when bullets hit there, they can do substantial damage, damage that frequently leads to death. But death is a by-product, not the intended purpose, of police gunfire.

The training that recruits receive on how and when to shoot goes hand in hand with instruction about things besides shooting that officers can do to protect themselves and their fellows. Police recruits are taught how to use nonfatal force (punches, kicks, and baton blows, for example); how to deal with the mental and emotional components of violent encounters; how to approach people, places, and vehicles in ways that reduce their exposure to danger; how to talk with the people they contact; how to work effectively with other officers; and many other tactics designed to lower the odds that citizens who wish to harm them can do so.

Classroom instruction and range instruction are often supplemented by other forms of training that put recruits’ abilities to the test. Most academies conduct role-play training in which recruits handle simulated calls, with academy instructors (and sometimes fellow recruits) playing the role of citizens. Armed with blank guns or guns that fire some sort of projectile that leaves a mark when it hits, recruits must decide whether to shoot or hold their fire in a variety of circumstances. Many academies augment role-play training with video simulators that present recruits with prerecorded scenarios to test their shoot–don’t shoot skill.

Such training gives recruits a glimpse of the sorts of situations they may confront on the street and serves as a transition between the academy and the second phase of the police apprenticeship: field training. During field training, academy graduates are paired with experienced officers, whose job it is to show rookies the ropes, evaluate them, and impart the final lessons they will receive before working the streets “untethered.” In the weeks or months that young officers work with their training officers, they begin to apply the various lessons they learned in the academy to the real world and learn many other lessons from the school of hard knocks.

In this chapter, we hear from several officers whose stories about their academy and field training represent the range of what the officers I interviewed experienced during their rookie years. Although the stories focus on deadly force and related matters, they also reveal a good deal about the more general issue of how training prepares men and women for careers in law enforcement. They show, among other things, how young officers learn to deal with people and situations on the streets, the sorts of relationships rookies have with their trainers and their peers, and how their experiences begin to change their expectations about the job—in sum, the process through which novices pass on their way to becoming cops.

The stories are presented in three sets. The first two focus on officers’ academy and field training experiences, respectively; the third one deals with how exposure to violence against fellow officers shapes the experience of some rookies.

The Academy

The teaching that recruits receive in firearms use and related topics has one primary objective: to equip young police officers with the ability to protect themselves and other officers from danger—within the confines of law and policy—as they carry out the rest of the policing tasks for which the academy is preparing them. Thus does academy training bring recruits face-to-face with two realities about their chosen occupation: first, that they may one day have to kill; second, that their own life might one day come to a violent end at the hand of another.

The stories in this section illustrate the sorts of training that recruits receive on shootings and related topics and the sorts of ways that young officers respond to this training. Their academy experiences made some officers nervous about the prospect of using force, gave others confidence, and set down lifelong survival habits for others. Some officers felt that the training they received was sound, others believed that it was wholly inadequate, and still others saw both good and bad in the instruction offered to them. The stories that follow show that whatever an officer’s take on the time spent in the academy might be, the experience plays a pivotal role in the process of moving rookies from their previous lives and into the violent world of police work.

They covered a lot of stuff in firearms training at the academy. They went over when you can shoot: the fleeing-felon rule, to save a life, your life, a citizen’s life. They discussed all that. We did the dry firing, shooting at the academy range, and role-playing. The role-playing was important. They’d give us guns loaded with blanks and put us in different situations, like a family disturbance or a traffic stop, with police officers playing the roles of the citizens. We would have to react to what the guy was doing, and he would force us into a decision to either shoot or don’t shoot. It was up to us to make the right call, and the instructors would evaluate us afterwards.

A lot of time also went into the mental part of preparing you for what you might feel afterwards. They told us that some people react different than other people. Between that and the officer survival books I read while I was going through college, I felt like I got good mental preparation for what I might have to do someday.

The thing that really stands out in my mind about the deadly force issue in the academy was the officer survival part. One sergeant from the physical-training unit put on this class about building the foundation for officer survival. He showed us pictures of officers who were killed in shootings that are still set in my mind thirty years later. He told us the stories of how they got killed and pointed out some of the mistakes they might have made that gave the people who murdered them the chance to kill them. I vividly remember him talking about the stainless steel table that the officers were laying on at the morgue. He told us that we don’t want to put ourselves in that position and asked us if we thought the officers could have done something differently to avoid getting killed. He said that we can’t know for sure because we can’t talk to the officer about what exactly happened but that they probably could have.

Another big thing I remember was weaponless defense. They’d have us wrestle with other recruits to the point where one of us had to render the other one unconscious. I wasn’t about to let anybody put my lights out, so it was some really intense training. What stuck in my mind the most about that is the physical-fitness part. You have to be in shape to prevail. I’m fifty-four years old now. I’ve had three major surgeries in the last year from some complications that came up from getting shot twenty-seven years ago, but I know that I’m physically fit and strong. I probably can’t do a lot of the things I did before, but the physical-fitness thing has stuck in my mind throughout my career. We know it goes hand in hand with survival, so what I learned about it early on in my career never left me.

They spent a lot of time on deadly force in the academy. We got a lot on what the legal guidelines were, but I didn’t find what the instructors that were lawyers or prosecutors had to say was that helpful or informative. One of the things that I found most helpful or informative was listening to experienced officers relate war stories or situations that they had been involved in. Hearing about what they went through, the feelings and thoughts they had, was important. That was probably what I found most interesting about the topic of deadly force. The prosecutors and lawyers would be discussing the topic from a different point of view than what I was going to be doing. I just felt like I was getting a more solid piece of information when an officer was talking because I was getting it from somebody that had been in it.

Looking back on the academy, I’d say we got some good training on deadly force and some that was not so good. The instructors went through state law and what our manual states about when shootings are OK, what’s legal and all that. They also talked about how the penal code in this state allows citizens to shoot a thief at night—but that police officers can’t. They stressed that as police officers we would be held to a higher standard than Joe Citizen, particularly in civil court, where we could be held liable even if we got in a shooting that was justified by state law.

We also had a couple of officers who had been involved in shootings come in to talk to us, but they weren’t real good at teaching. I think that if you’re going to have officers who have been in shootings talk to a bunch of young cadets—the majority of them being twenty-to twenty-five-year-olds who have no clue of what’s going to happen when they get out—you need officers who can open up and tell their stories effectively. The guys who talked to us weren’t good at that, so we didn’t learn that much from them. Probably the best training in the academy was from my tactics instructor. He stressed that when you hit the streets, you always have to be thinking, playing out scenarios in your mind, planning for situations that might occur. Asking questions like, How are we going to stop that car? What’s going to happen if I stop that car? What if he pulls a gun on me? What if he pulls a knife? What am I going to do? The way he put it, you’re not going to know how you’re going to respond in a shooting situation until it happens, so you need to be ready. Be aware, be alert. Keep your mind there, and you’ll be ready for it.

One of the things he talked about was that some officers start to get lax after a while. They get up on a nice side of town where nothing serious ever happens, where they aren’t dealing with drug addicts, banditos, and other guys who are willing to mix it up, so they stop thinking about being alert. They get up there with Joe Q. Citizen, who pays his taxes and most of the time drives the speed limit. Maybe they catch him speeding once in a while, but that’s about it. After a while, their minds go to shit. They aren’t ready for it anymore. He warned us not to let that happen to us, because if you do, you stand to lose your life.

They lectured to us extensively about when to use and when not to use lethal force. Probably not as much as they do now, because when I went through, it was only a four-month academy. Now it’s six months. But they did touch on a lot of stuff about deadly force, and I think a lot of times they touched on it for liability’s sake. They talked about the legal process of it, the department process, how the Homicide section investigates all the department’s officer-involved shootings, but they didn’t go into it from the officer’s standpoint and how it’s going to affect them. They never really sat there and said, “You’ll probably feel something like this,” or “You’ll feel withdrawn,” or “You’ll feel mad, or upset, or glad.” They never really covered anything like that, so I didn’t really know exactly what to expect.

One thing they did talk about was how it feels to get shot. One of the guys that was on our hostage response team at the time came in and talked to us about that. He said that getting shot feels like a hot poker that just goes right through your body. It was sort of hard for me to relate to that because I had never had to deal with anything like that. I’d been cut before to the point where I needed stitches, I’d had broken bones, I’d had sprains, but you can’t sit there and tell somebody, “Hey, this is how it’s gonna feel to get shot. You’re gonna have this tremendous pain” and whatnot. I don’t think you can really relate to somebody how it feels if they haven’t been through it. So I don’t think there’s anything that he could say that could’ve prepared us for how we could feel if we got shot. The only thing that he said that did make sense was that just because you’re shot doesn’t mean you’re gonna die, so you should stay in the fight as long as you possibly can. Don’t just sit there and freak out: “Oh, my God, I got shot.” So he told us to just keep fighting until you just possibly can’t fight anymore.

Our firearms training instructor had been involved in multiple shootings, so I thought he was very qualified to teach that class. He said that the thing that stuck out from his first experience was seeing a dead officer laying in a ditch. That got my undivided attention, so I listened to everything he said. One thing I remember he always said was, “Never give up. No matter how dim it seems—even if you get shot—don’t give up.” That really stood out in my mind, and I think it kept me alive when I got in my shooting.

We had a lot of classes on arrest control/defensive tactics—twenty of those, so we had eighty hours of that. Then we had firearms training simulators that put us in “shoot” or “don’t shoot” situations and a lot of scenario training. We also had a two-week officer survival block that covered shootings, deadly force, and lessons from officers that had been involved in shootings. So force issues were covered pretty well.

From all that, I knew that a shooting could happen to any officer, but I never really believed that it was gonna happen to me. It was something I thought other officers were going to get involved in. I wasn’t naive to the fact that it could happen, but I didn’t think it would. Everybody in my class talked about the prospect of getting in shootings. Even though I didn’t think I’d get in any, I always knew that if it came down to it that I’d be able to react and do what I needed to do. So I never had those doubts that a lot of officers have.

My dad hunted all his life, so I grew up around guns and always felt comfortable that I’d be able to handle myself in a shooting situation. But one thing that happened in the academy showed me that maybe my level of confidence was too strong. It was a training scenario with the FATS machine where I got shot. I had a suspect at gunpoint who was holding a pistol in one of his hands that were raised above his head in a surrender position. Being the good shooter that I was, I was sure that I’d be able to shoot this guy before he could shoot me. He brought the gun down and shot me before I could get a shot off. That frightened me a lot and really illuminated my thinking on how to deal with noncompliant people in a deadly force situation. I thought, “Hmm, this is a good way to get killed. This is something that I never would have expected, and it’s very dangerous, and it’s something I need to be aware of to keep myself from getting killed.”

Since then, I have done a lot of scenario training where I have been the suspect, and I can routinely shoot people who have their guns pointed at me before they shoot me. The first time happened shortly after I got shot in the FATS scenario. We were doing “hot stop” training, and everybody in the class had to have the opportunity to be in each of the positions: the primary officer, the cover officer, and the assistant officer. By doing these rotations, we had to have people acting as the suspect each time. During one of my stints as the suspect, the trainers told me that they wanted me to be aggressive. I decided I was going to go down shooting. When my classmates that were playing the role of officers ordered me out of the car, I had the gun in my waistband. They ordered me to walk backwards toward them, and as I was doing that, I kept bringing my arm down to my face. I was coughing, pretending like I had a cough, and I kept bringing my hand down even though they told me not to. At one point when I did that, I just brought my hand all the way down to my waistband, drew the blank gun, spun around, and started shooting them. I got several shots off before they shot back. I thought, “Wow, this really does work. Even I can do it.”

From those scenarios, I recognized that if someone on the street is holding a weapon and they are noncompliant, I am not going to get to the point where they are going to shoot me before I take some sort of protective action. So the scenarios were a big part of my firearms training, and they affected my decision-making process and how I felt about deadly force and shooting people.

When I applied for the job, the testing process focused on English, math, and stuff like that. In the oral interview, they wanted to know what I believed the job entailed, but they didn’t ask me any questions about shooting. That changed a lot once I got to the academy, however. There was a bunch of instruction on officer-involved shootings, what actions to take, what happens if officers get shot, if they die, how you relate to your family and stuff like that if you shoot someone. I remember seeing a lot of videotapes about shootings; the majority of them dealt with officers who lived through them, with a focus on how to mentally prepare yourself, to never give up if you find yourself in a gun battle, the will to survive, stuff like that.

Those tapes really made an impression on me because I remember thinking that if I ever did get into a shooting that I would want to know that I can react so that my partner wouldn’t die due to my inability to act. I didn’t dwell on it. I never thought that shootings were a big part of the job because I had always thought that dealing with people and whatnot were the major parts of police work. But in the back of my mind, I always thought that it could happen and that I had to prepare myself mentally for the possibility. I remember thinking that it’s better to be prepared for it than to be caught off guard. I believed it when the instructors told us that we needed to be ready, even though the odds of getting into a shooting are slim. It probably won’t happen, but if it does, you’re behind the eight ball if you’re not ready.

The two things that really, really stuck out in my mind about all this was the will-to-survive stuff that we saw on the videotapes and the emphasis the instructors put on being prepared, that fighting to the end is what is going to keep you alive and that messing up and getting killed or getting your partner killed may put you and/or your partner’s family through a lot of emotional trauma. That you can screw up and cause your partner to get shot, and then you have to live with knowing that you could have avoided it if you’d been better prepared. I made up my mind in the academy that I didn’t want to have to be one of those officers who ended up with a dead partner because I should have done something different. I decided that if a shooting came my way that I was going to perform right. After I got out of the academy, I came back up to the range about every week or so to practice my shooting. I just wasn’t confident in my own proficiency in firearms. I had passed the minimum standards at the academy, but as far as I was concerned, that wasn’t good enough. I figured that if I ever did get in a shooting, the minimum just wasn’t gonna cut it, so I’d shoot every week. Just shoot, shoot, shoot. That way, I’d have one less thing to worry about if I got into a shooting. I also did a lot of what I call the “what if” games in my mind. What if this happened? What would I do? What if that happened? I figured that if I played things out in my mind that I’d be ready if it did happen in real life.

When I went through the academy, the deadly force training focused on the legal aspects of shootings: civil liability, criminal liability, when you can and when you can’t use deadly force. I paid close attention to that block of instruction, thinking to myself that I really needed to remember the stuff because I could get in trouble later if I made a wrong decision about pulling the trigger, so I really focused on those legal issues in the academy.

I took another class that dealt with shootings after I was out on the street, but the focus was completely different. The instructors talked about mental preparation and rehearsal for situations that could occur. That stuff interested me because rehearsing for things that might happen allows you quicker reaction time when and if they do come your way. The goal was to get us to where we didn’t have to try to figure out a solution at the time of the stress, which is the worst time to be trying to think about stuff like that. You figure out how you are going to react to the situation prior to its happening; then, when it happens, all you have to do is basically draw it from your random-access memory. Then you can quickly respond to the situation, because you have already thought of what you are going to do; all you have to do is react instead of thinking of a reaction first. One of the things they taught us to do for this was to look at incidents that had happened within our department or incidents that realistically could happen to us and run through our minds what we would do in those particular situations. They taught us to condition ourselves to go to cover, to return fire if necessary, to change positions, to reload. They even covered follow-up as far as what to say on the radio—so you don’t sound like an idiot if you do get in a shooting—and some other things you need to do: preserve the scene, render first aid, treat yourself if you’re injured. So all those kinds of things were discussed in the mental-preparation class.

The one thing I didn’t get any training on is how shootings can affect officers. Not in the academy, and even all the way up to my first shooting, I never received any training on that. No one ever mentioned anything to me about the aftermath of shootings. Then, when the first one happened, I wasn’t prepared for it at all.

I went into the marines in 1965 and served with the Thirty-Third Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam from ’66 through ’68. Our mission wasn’t to seek contact, but I was involved in quite a few firefights. When I got into the academy, the differences between the military and police work surprised me. One of the biggest differences was the lethal-force issue. The difference between the military and the civilian sector is that when I was in the military, there were really no rules of engagement. When I was in Vietnam, we had a basic rule of engagement: you see the enemy, you shoot. In civilian law enforcement, it was a whole different concept. There were a whole lot of parameters assigned to it with the department rules and the state law you have to follow. So you have to make decisions regarding shootings, which was something that I never experienced in the military. In the military, they didn’t encourage us to have a lot of independent thought. It was basically reaction to outside stimulus, so it was pretty easy to make decisions about shooting. There wasn’t a whole lot of thought. In law enforcement, there’s a lot more gray to deal with. I think the term that I remember the most from the academy was discretionary decision making. That was a term that was totally different from anything that I had heard before. And I think that’s what probably translated into the biggest difference between the military and civilian law enforcement: in police work, you have to make decisions that fit the circumstances with the rules.

As a matter of fact, it seemed to me at first that the rules about shooting were a little limiting and restrictive. I thought, “Man, I’ve got to make that decision to shoot.” There was a big difference between not having to really give it a whole lot of thought—that everything’s a threat in the military—to having to evaluate each situation. Especially because you have a very limited period of time to make decisions. At first, I thought that was really confining. I thought, “How am I going to be able to react in such a short period of time?” Once I got through the academy, I realized that experience gives you the ability to evaluate things a lot quicker and react a lot quicker than I first thought was possible. In fact, I think that experience is probably the most important aspect of law enforcement. That and maturity. Together they give you the ability to make good decisions.

The key thing they taught us about deadly force in the academy was to try to avoid being in a shooting. They said you can do that by just practicing officer safety to eliminate a lot of unnecessary risks: watching suspects’ hands, keeping your distance, not charging up on a suspect if you think he has a weapon, giving vocal commands from behind cover. A lot of it involves common sense. They said that our job was to come home after that eight-hour shift. Not to be John Wayne or Audie Murphy and take a bullet or give a bullet, but just to come home.

We were taught a force continuum in the academy that went from the spoken word, to empty-hand techniques, to minimal weapons like mace, to the dog, to impact weapons like the nightstick, and then on up to deadly force. What I really got out of it was that they emphasized that deadly force was the last thing to be used, that we shouldn’t use it unless we absolutely have to. They made it clear to us that deadly force was our very last option, and they went through and taught us a lot of empty-hand techniques like hand-to-hand type combat, how to take people down, and the proper cuffing procedures. So they spent a lot of time showing us that there are other ways to handle things than to just go out and shoot somebody.

Field Training

Just as different police academies have different educational regimens, different law enforcement agencies structure their field training programs in different ways. Some agencies, for example, have formal field training programs, staffed by senior patrol officers who have gone through specialized training in how to train rookies and who have the formal title field training officer, whereas other agencies simply assign rookies to veteran officers, who are tasked with informally showing rookies the ropes. In some agencies, rookies ride with training officers for just a few weeks, and in others they patrol with trainers for several months. In some agencies, rookies ride patrol with several different training officers, whereas in others young officers work with the same one during their entire field training tenure.

Another major difference in how law enforcement agencies approach field training concerns the timing of it. Although the vast majority of agencies send academy graduates directly to the street, some—primarily large sheriff’s departments that run the county lockup in addition to providing general police services—assign their newly minted rookies to work the jail for an extended period of time (up to five years) before sending them on to patrol. Such officers in essence remain rookies during the time they work at the jail before heading to the street. Only after successfully completing their field training do young officers who have spent years working the jail become full-fledged cops.

Most of the officers I interviewed went straight to the street from the academy, and I focused my questions about all of the officers’ rookie experiences on the time they spent with training officers. Consequently, most of the following stories deal with the field training experiences of officers whose time on the street immediately followed graduation from the police academy. We hear from cops whose training officers stressed the importance of being prepared for gunfights and from those whose field trainers essentially ignored the issue. We hear them talk about the lessons they learned from their training officers, the sorts of interactions they had with citizens and how they reacted to these encounters, their thoughts and feelings about what they were going through, and much more about rookies’ initial encounter with the potentially deadly world that lies beyond the protective cocoon of the academy.

Everything about shootings was kind of sugarcoated in the academy. They’d do some stuff to try to scare you, but none of it seemed real. They’d tell you that you may have to shoot and that you have to be ready and so on and so forth, but it wasn’t until well after the academy, when I was getting near the end of the two and a half years at the jail that just about all new deputies have to work before working the street, that I really started to think about deadly force issues. At that point, I knew that in not too long I was going to go out on patrol. That’s when I started thinking about it.

We get to give them a list of stations we’d like to go to, and the stations I chose as my preferences were all very fast urban stations where officer-involved shootings were happening on a regular basis. When some of the supervisors who’d been around for a while found out where I wanted to go, they said, “Those places are crazy. Are you ready for that?” That type of thing.

So I thought about it and I talked about it with the other deputies who were about to get wheeled out. I told myself and the other deputies, “Yeah, I’ll be able to do that. Sure, I could shoot somebody. Sure, no big deal.” That was the talk. In hindsight, that’s not the case. I wasn’t even ready for the everyday stuff. I don’t think anybody’s ready when they first show up in a busy division. I don’t care how prepared you think you are. The minute you show up there for the first time and everything’s real, it’s a whole different ball game. You’re a baby. You start out from scratch. You don’t know anything. So you may think you’re ready, but you’re not.

In my agency, when you come out of the academy, you’re given a field training officer, who you ride with for ten weeks. Mine was a guy by the name of Chris Cooper in the fifth district. We rode Hooker, which was kind of a rough neighborhood. I sometimes worked with other guys, and different FTOs had different policies. Some of ’em would say, “OK, you learned in the academy, but here’s what you really need to know.” The idea of field training was to get young officers involved in as many situations as they can while they have somebody there to help them make the right decisions. What they do is when you first start out, the first couple of weeks, the FTO makes all the decisions, and then gradually, as the weeks go by, you take a more active role. As you show that you can make the right decisions, they let you make ’em, and they sit back and become the observer. I felt it was a good training process. It’s a good process as long as you have good, experienced FTOs.

On deadly force, they told me that at any given time, in any situation, you might be called to use your weapon. The one thing they always emphasized is that when you pull the gun and you’re getting ready to point the gun, it’s not to be used as a bluff. If you’re gonna pull the trigger, it’s because you need to take a life, not to wound the guy, not to shoot the gun out of his hand, but to take a life, so don’t pull it out unless you plan on using it.

I recall on my first day out of the academy, we went to do a warrant, and I remember just shaking and I couldn’t stop. It was cold out, but it wasn’t that cold. I was going, “Damn, I’m really scared.” I’d never been that scared before. I’d jumped out of airplanes in the army, and there was fright there, but not like on that warrant. I was sitting there shaking, going, “Man, I can’t stop myself from shaking.” My training officer and I were standing outside next to this door, and the guys we were assisting told us the guy in there may be dealing narcotics. Well, I knew narcotics and guns go hand in hand, so I was thinking rounds were gonna be coming through the door any second. We were just standing out in front of a wall that based on my military experience I knew was not gonna stop a whole lot of types of rounds. I think that my fear was fear of the unknown: Is this guy just gonna be complacent and come out, or is he gonna just start shooting through the wall? That was probably the main reason for the intenseness at that point.

It was interesting to see myself doing that, and over time I learned to control it by focusing on what I need to do. I think fear is a good thing because fear will keep you alive. If you go into situations with your head up your ass and you have no fear, you can get hurt. I see guys out there that have no fear factor, and they just go in blindly and they sometimes get hurt. Fear to me is something I can control. I can contain it and then I use it to my advantage. If I’m fearing something, that means I’m missing some important information. So when I feel it, I try to pick up what I’m missing. Once I get all the info, it brings me back into a calmer state, a more controlled state, and I can do my job safely.

Some of my training officers were better than others concerning deadly force. Some of them were out there just going through the motions, and you could tell which ones were and which ones weren’t. The lousy ones never brought it up. The really good ones talked about it. Let’s say we were in an alley, and we were gonna contact these two guys. The good ones would say, “If they turn around and start shooting, you need to think about where you’re going to go, where your rounds are gonna go,” things of that nature. That really clicked in: “Holy shit. It could happen.” So that’s what I do with the rookies I train now. I tell them, “Don’t think that because you’re at a slow division that you can’t get in a shooting. It doesn’t matter where you are. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, you can get in a shooting. You should always think of that.” So I’ve always remembered from when I was a rookie that no matter what you’re doing, where you’re at, what call you’re on, it could turn into some kind of shooting situation.

Some of my training officers talked with me about shootings and some didn’t. When they did, most of it involved some sort of a lesson. The one I remember best was that my first FTO took me to Orange Avenue Park, where two officers had been shot—both fatally—a few years before. I had seen a video re-creation of what happened at the academy, but when I went to the park and actually saw where the officers had been shot, I started feeling sort of like, “Wow, this is where it happened.” It felt a little eerie seeing the bench the suspects had been sitting on, the exact places the officers were standing when they were shot, the pond where the suspect hid for several hours before he was caught. It was kind of neat and kind of eerie to see where all this happened and brought it home to me that getting shot is a very real possibility.

I had one FTO who was a SWAT officer, and he would drive to a place, stop, and ask questions like, “OK, if this was happening at this time what would you do?” One time we went to a 7-Eleven, and he asked me if someone had hostages inside and they came out by themselves with a gun, then turned to walk back in, if I would shoot that person in order to make sure they did not go back inside. I was fresh from the academy and was thinking about the legal aspects, but I was also trying to think of what I would do in that split second.

We had dealt with issues like that in the academy, but when you’re sitting at a spot instead of just being told about it on the chalkboard or seeing it on video, I think it hits home more. Even though you think about these things in the academy, you’re also thinking about a million other things, because you’re pretty much overloaded—at least I was, mentally and physically overloaded—so not everything sinks in. But when you’re out here in the field, and it’s three o’clock in the morning, and you’re sitting in front of a 7-Eleven, it makes you really think.

My first answer was, “Yes, I’d shoot him because I don’t want a hostage situation.” But then I thought, “Well, where are the hostages? Exactly where are the people in the store? Are they behind him? Are they within the range of being shot?” So it really makes you visually see a scenario. Even though you can visually see scenarios on tape in the academy, they’re pretty much plotted out for you. But when you’re in the field, you see that there are a lot of things to consider.

Baptism by Fire

Some officers don’t make it very far into their apprenticeship before being hit in the face with the stark reality of the dangers involved in their new line of work. Some rookies see colleagues shoot people, others have colleagues who are shot or otherwise severely injured, and some experience both phenomena. Being witness to extreme violence by or against fellow officers can have a profound effect on how rookies view the job they are learning to do. As the following stories indicate, this was certainly the case for some of the officers I interviewed. From a recruit who is sent out to help search for a man who murdered a police officer and ends up witnessing other officers kill the suspect, to a young officer who had completed the academy but not yet started his field training who finds himself on the business end of a gang-banger’s rifle, the stories show how exposure to police-involved violence fits into the overall picture of rookies learning the ropes.

I applied to the PD when I was still on active duty, but I didn’t get out on time because Desert Storm had everybody locked in. I had to turn down an academy start date, so the general I was bodyguarding for said, “As soon as the war is over, I’ll get you out. I’ll get you an early out, and we’ll get you in the next academy.” In fact, I was actually still active duty for thirty days when I started the academy. I came in with a lot of high expectations even though one of the guys who interviewed me said, “I’m gonna tell you this off the record ’cuz I don’t want to see you dismayed by this job, but don’t expect out of your peers what you expect out of yourself.” At the time, I didn’t really fully understand what he meant, but then once I got in the academy, I saw that there were people in my class who didn’t really have a grasp on reality, who had no idea what they were getting themselves into. Then we also had people who got into it for paychecks. I got into it because it was something I always wanted to do, not just a paycheck. It was something I always wanted to do, and something I took pride in doing once I got in. So when I saw what some of the other people were all about, I understood what the interviewer meant.

Some of the differences between me and those other cadets became evident during what they called Hell Week, where the instructors went through all the officers from the PD who had been killed in the line of duty. They showed the autopsy photos and really delved into how they were killed. When I saw the photos, I thought, “I don’t want to be in one of those pictures,” so I focused on what the instructors said about mistakes the officers made. I tried to learn from it. There were several other people who thought the way I did, so there was a group of us that were really serious, really intense. Every day we went to the range, we focused on what we did. Our attitude was, “We’re not gonna let what happened to those other guys happen to us.” The other people didn’t take the firearms training days seriously. Their attitude was, “Hey, it’s just another day at work. Its just a job that’s gonna pay the bills.” Most of those people ended up quitting over the years. Once they saw the ugliness of the job, they quit and moved on to other things.

Besides the regular Hell Week, we had some other stuff happen during the academy. Not too long before we got out, a patrol officer was shot and killed in Northwest Division, and we got called out of the academy to do a quote “evidence search” while the scene was still hot. We had been out at the range, just about to start shooting class, when the instructors told us to put our guns away and meet at this CP. When we got there, they tried to feed us the line that they thought the suspect had already fled the area and that we were just going to be searching for the weapon. But I could tell—I knew from my military experience—that they were doing a grid search, not an evidence sweep.

Plus the SWAT guys were out there with Benellis and MP-5s, and they were searching some houses. We were probably about a hundred feet away when they found the suspect, shot and killed him. We could hear the rounds being fired. It was pretty wild.

When it was all over, there was a lot of anger in the class. Anger toward the suspect for killing the officer and anger toward the department for throwing us out there unarmed. It shocked a lot of the people who weren’t really squared away. Probably about five of them. They started going, “You really can get killed doing this job.” And we were like, “No kidding.” Those of us in that group that was highly intense, we said, “You know what? You should have known this going in. It could happen. You may even have to kill somebody yourself.”

The academy taught us the normal procedures—patrol, how to handle certain situations, a lot of role-playing. We did a little red-handle training, where we’d have a nonworking gun and run scenarios, shooting scenarios. The emphasis was on instruction in the law, the state and federal laws about deadly force. Then we also did firearms training on the range. The state has a six-hundred-hour requirement, so I was at the academy eight hours a day, five days a week, for four months. Then I was out on the street.

None of my family members had ever been in any shootings, and I don’t believe that I ever talked to any of the family friends who were officers about being in shootings, so I didn’t really think much about shootings before I became a cop. That changed pretty early on in my career. Not too long after I started on the street, my sergeant was killed. I was working the desk on the midnight shift when an alarm came out at a women’s clothing store in the Westpark Shopping Center. My sergeant responded; then the other units couldn’t raise him on the radio. They kept calling for him, but there was no response. Then, when they arrived at the store, they found him lying in front of his car. He’d been murdered and his gun was missing. It turns out that he had interrupted a burglary and had the drop on two suspects. Unknown to him, there was a third one that was hiding behind a parked car. He came up from behind and jumped my sergeant. The guys ended up taking his gun. Then they pistol-whipped him and took his life; shot him with his own gun. The case went unresolved for about three years; then we finally caught two of the guys. They both stood trial, and one was acquitted and one was found guilty.

About a month and a half after my sergeant got murdered, we had an officer shot after he pulled over a vehicle. He had stopped a car with two occupants that was reported stolen. The passenger wouldn’t show his hands at first, then he whipped out a gun, and shot. One round hit the officer in the lower abdomen and he went down. The suspects were gone by the time the first backup officers got there, but later on they found the guy hiding down in the business section of the city.

I didn’t take the possibility of getting into a shooting too seriously when I first came on the job. I’d been an MP in the army, worked on the DMZ in Korea, spent a few years as a guard in military prisons, and worked in the federal correctional system before becoming a cop. In all those experiences, though, the threats were pretty distant. Sure, it was tense sometimes in Korea, but when we weren’t up in the trenches, it was really one big party. Back in the states, there wasn’t much so far as crime on the bases I worked because the military community is pretty squared away. It was the same way in the military prisons. It’s not like a state prison, where the inmates can grow their hair long and have mustaches and beards. These guys had to keep a military appearance, the whole business; even some of the lifers were real squared away. There was some inmate-on-inmate violence, but nothing really against the guards. When I was with the federal corrections system, I worked mostly a roaming patrol they had on the outside of the facility, so I didn’t see much violence there. I mean, I knew that shootings could happen, but I never actually thought about it. Same thing in the academy and during my FTO phase. I got all the deadly force training and my training officers talked to me about shooting situations, but I never really gave it much thought.

That all changed not too long after I got done with the FTO phase of my training. I was still on probation when I got a call of a family disturbance where the son, who had just gotten out of prison, was supposedly threatening his mother and brothers. He was upset with them because they had some hand in getting him sent away about two years prior. He was over at their place threatening to kill them for what they did. There were no other patrol units available to cover me on the call, so my sergeant came over the air and said he’d back me up. When we were a few blocks away, the dispatcher gave us some more information. She told us that the mother had called back and reported that her son was standing outside with a gun. This didn’t bother me much because citizens in that area regularly report that people have guns even when they don’t in order to get us to respond quicker. Well, my sergeant got to the location just before I did. As I was pulling up and he was getting out of his car, a guy who matched the suspect’s description to a tee ran out through a gate between some apartments just in front of my sergeant’s car. My sergeant started to chase the suspect, and I got out of my car to help out. As I was running toward them, I couldn’t see what was happening real well because the head-and spotlights of my sergeant’s car were shining in my eyes. Just as I was breaking through the glare of the lights, the suspect pulled out a big chrome .357 revolver—I guess he had it in his pants. I was about one car length away when my sergeant dropped to his knees, brought his gun up, and fired a round that killed the guy.

That was a real wake-up call for me. It was when reality set in for me with this job. I mean, up until then I was really just a happy-go-lucky kid. The criminals I’d dealt with in the army and federal corrections were in a secured environment, and their weapons are limited to daggers and stuff. Then, when I first came on the job, I was just a young cop driving around in a police car, chasing bad guys and having a blast. But reality hit when my sergeant killed that guy. I realized that I was going to run into people like the guys I’d worked with in the pen, but they were going to have better weapons, and they weren’t always going to do what I told them to. They weren’t confined, so they could choose to fight to try to get away. The shooting made me realize that being a cop was different, that it’s life and death.

I worked for the sheriff’s office for about two years before coming to work for the city. The agencies are different in a lot of ways, and that started in the academy. The sheriff’s academy taught me more about how to be a better officer in the sense of contacting people, that you always need to be in command of any situation you come in contact with. The city academy expounded more on the officer survival mindset, basically the notion that you gotta be able to take care of yourself and your partner and the people that you’re gonna be working for.

There were also some big differences in field training. I worked with the same partner for four months at the sheriff’s department, and he basically was in charge of me. He would tell me what to do, and I was expected to do it. Where officer safety goes, he really stressed that if you get into a shooting, it will probably be when you’re not expecting it, so he made sure I was aware of that and stressed that I had to be ready all the time. He told me to make sure that all the people we talk to have been patted down before we have any conversation with them, just for our safety. He basically told me, “Damn everybody else, damn who you’re talking to, just make sure that they’re not packing when you talk to ’em. Anybody who comes up asking information of you, you gotta go ahead and pat them down for your own safety because they know who you are and you don’t know who they are.” He made it very, very clear that he expected me to search everybody.

When I got to the city, I worked with several different training officers. There was more give-and-take with them compared to my first partner at the sheriff’s department, because once they found out that I had prior police experience, they felt comfortable with me. They were more into just teaching policies and procedures, how things should be done. They would offer a couple of suggestions here and there on tactics and explain why they did things in particular ways. So it was more of a give-and-take situation, where I could make suggestions about things and we would agree on a solution.

One thing that was the same about being a young cop in both agencies is that I worked in places where there was a lot of violence going on. I saw officers die in the street in both places. When I was in the sheriff’s department, a classmate of mine was shot and killed. I responded to the help call. It made me sit back and reevaluate the situation I was in: seeing a classmate lying on the sidewalk, shot in the head, blood running down the driveway into the gutter while the paramedics were trying to work on him. He died three days later. I stuck with law enforcement, but his death hit me with the reality that it could happen to me. Then, when I got to the city, one of the guys on my shift was deliberately run over by a suspect during a pursuit. I watched him die right there in the street. It’s tough, seeing officers at roll call, and then a few hours later they’re gone.

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 Two

Basic Training

Notes