Into the Kill Zone

The federal laws, state statutes, and shooting policies that officers work under are quite broad, providing only general directions about firearms use. For the simple reason that no two encounters between cops and citizens are exactly alike, it is not possible for judges, legislators, and police administrators to develop laws and policies that provide specific details about whether officers should shoot in any particular case. Because legal and administrative deadly force standards are so broad and general, young officers must somehow make sense of them as they pass through their apprenticeship and head toward their unsupervised time on the street. As young officers do this, they develop their own personal set of standards about when they will use their firearms—in essence, their own shooting policies.

In developing their personal shooting policies, many officers choose standards for pulling the trigger that are more restrictive than those set forth in law and administrative directives. This is so because the written rules do not mandate that officers shoot whenever they are chasing a violent felon or each time someone’s life is in jeopardy. Rather, legal and departmental standards say only that officers may use deadly force when such circumstances arise. Consequently, officers are free to decide that they will hold their fire in cases in which pulling the trigger would be justified by law and policy. And many officers do just that. Some, for example, will decide that they will not shoot fleeing suspects—the position I took during my academy training. Others will conclude that they will not shoot a gunman unless he points his weapon directly at them or someone else. And so on.1

Largely because the bounds that many officers set in their personal shooting policies are more narrow than those established by legal and administrative directives, the history of American policing is chock-full of cases in which officers did not shoot when they had legal cause to do so. Indeed police insiders have long known that officers hold their fire in the lion’s share of instances in which their life or the life of another is in danger. Police hesitancy to fire even when life is in jeopardy was first formally reported outside of law enforcement circles in the early 1980s, when a study of police shootings in four major cities disclosed that officers in these departments shot in just a fraction of the cases that law and policy would allow.2 This finding has received very little play around the nation in the last two decades, however, so the fact that officers exhibit substantial restraint in the face of deadly threat is not widely known.

I had been in several potential shooting situations during my brief tenure in Los Angeles—all face-to-face confrontations with gun-toting citizens—and I wanted to get some sense of the experiences that other officers who had shot people had in this regard. The first step I took to garner information about police forbearance in shooting situations was to ask the officers I interviewed if they had ever held their fire when they had legal cause to shoot. A dozen of the officers told me that the only situations they’d been in where they believed the use of deadly force would have been justified were the cases in which they fired. Among the other sixty-eight, most reported that they had been involved in fewer than a handful of cases in which they didn’t shoot when they could have, about twenty reported that they held their fire in five to ten cases, and thirteen reported that they’d been in more than ten such situations (including a few who’d been in thirty or more). In total, then, the officers I interviewed held their fire in several hundred interactions in which they had legal cause to pull the trigger.

I asked those officers who had been in at least one situation in which they held their fire to tell me about them (or in the case of those who had been in more than three, to tell me about some of them). I asked them to describe the circumstances of the cases, why they held their fire, and how they felt about their decision afterward. In this way, I was able to gather information about more than 150 cases in which officers held their fire when they could have shot, which allowed me to develop a picture of the sorts of things officers consider during close calls, how they discern the difference between shooting and nonshooting situations, and what they think and feel after situations in which they hold their fire.

The following stories afford the reader a robust look at that picture, the most compelling facet of which is arguably the stark image of police officers showing remarkable restraint in the face of substantial danger. The unveiling begins with stories from the place where most policing is done, where most of the danger lurks, and where most of the near shootings occur: patrol work.

On Patrol

Patrol is the backbone of American policing, the place where nearly all young officers cut their police teeth, the place where the largest number of officers work, and the place where the vast majority of the contacts between the police and the public occur. It is therefore not surprising that patrol officers are involved in more near shootings than are officers assigned to other policing tasks: there are simply more of them, and they are involved in more interactions with people. The following stories offer a glimpse of the sorts of close calls experienced by the officers I interviewed during their time in patrol. From unarmed people who simulate that they are carrying weapons, to knife-wielding madmen apparently bent on their own destruction, to gunmen whose foolish behavior nearly gets them killed, these stories show how patrol officers manage to avoid shooting people during a variety of very tense situations.

We got a call one night out in the Tritopolis area about a suicidal guy with a knife backed up against a fence threatening to kill himself. He was holding the knife against his stomach when we got there. I stayed about twelve to fourteen feet away, just trying to keep some distance between us, and explained to him that cutting himself in the stomach was not gonna kill him, that it was just gonna hurt. He came at me with the knife in front of him about three or four times before we got enough officers there to contain him. He told us, “Shoot me. Kill me. I want to die. Shoot me. Kill me.” I had my gun on him at all times, and each time he came at me, I probably could’ve shot him, but each time I chose to retreat instead. Each time I backed up, he turned around and acted like he was gonna stab himself in the stomach. The last time he actually did stab himself, decided it hurt too bad, and dropped the knife. He was yelling and screaming about the pain. I walked up to him and said, “Told you it was gonna hurt.” It was sheer stupidity on his part.

I didn’t shoot him because I felt pretty comfortable with my gun already out. I know twenty feet is the distance you want to keep from someone with a knife, but I felt I had a comfortable space between us at twelve to fourteen feet. As long as I kept that space, I felt the situation really wasn’t that bad. We’d move back and forth. If he’d have run at me, I probably would’ve shot him, but he would only walk.

I’ve had a few situations where I almost shot someone over the years. One that sticks out in my mind happened when a call dropped about a guy inside this store who was harassing customers and the cashier. They said that he had something in his waistband that might be a weapon. When I pulled up, they had the guy locked out of the store. So he was standing there in front with his T-shirt hanging out, untucked in the front. Sure enough, I could see a bulge up under his T-shirt, so I stopped about twenty-five feet away from the guy, got out, drew my gun, and stood by the side of my car so the engine was between us. I kept my gun at my side and told the guy to put his hands up on the wall. Well, he looked at me and took a couple of steps toward me. I raised my pistol and told him to stop, to get his hands up on the wall. He got this angry look on his face and said, “What are you gonna do? You gonna shoot me with your pistol?” I said, “Yeah, if I have to.” Then he said, “Well, what if I pull out my pistol?” At that point, I remember seeing all the other customers who were inside the store, all these Oriental people lying on the floor, waiting for the shots to go off. Then the guy reached down toward the bulge in his waistband. At that point, things went into slow motion, and I said to myself, “If he reaches under the shirt, I’m gonna shoot him.”

Well, he brought his hand down, stuck it under the shirt, and then, real quick, pulled it up with the first finger extended toward me. When I saw that, I was doing everything I could do to keep from squeezing the trigger, because I had already started to shoot. Fortunately, the gun didn’t go off. I don’t know how it didn’t go off, but it didn’t. I mean, I had already made the decision to shoot, because from my training I knew that the best I could hope for with reaction time once his hand went under the shirt was to tie him, to get a shot off at the same time as he did. So I was trying to at least tie this guy. Then, when I realized he hadn’t come up with a gun, it took everything I had to not squeeze all the way down.

After that, the guy got really verbally belligerent but didn’t come any closer. I just stayed in my barricaded position behind the car with my gun on the guy until another unit arrived because I still didn’t know what was under his shirt. When the other unit got there, we got him to put his hands on the car, and the other officer went up to take the guy into custody. Turns out the bulge was a damn Green Sheet newspaper, but it looked like a weapon when it was tucked in there.

That really pissed me off because I was gonna shoot this guy. It angered me that he did something stupid like that, trying to make me shoot him. It would have hit the news media as “Unarmed Suspect Gunned Down” and all that. So I was pissed, but we started talking to the guy, and he told us that he’d just come in from a B-52 flight and all this other shit. So we realized he was just psycho. Stuff like that happens, and you just have to deal with it.

I’ve worked some real highly active assignments over the years, so I’ve been in maybe thirty or more situations where I came close to shooting people but didn’t. One of the ones that sticks out in my mind happened at dusk one day, when my partner and I spotted three gang members walking down the sidewalk, facing away from us. As we rolled up in the black and white, the subjects’ heads start turning all over the place; it was evident they were looking for a place to run. The two guys on the ends split; one guy ran across the front of the car, and the other one jumped some fences to our right. The guy in the middle didn’t know which way to go, and he just froze there in front of us. We were right on top of him when we stopped—maybe ten feet away. As I was getting out of the passenger door of the car, he started digging in his waistband with his right hand. Then I could see that he was reaching into his crotch area, then that he was trying to reach toward his left thigh area, as if he was trying to grab something that was falling down his pants leg.

He was starting to turn around toward me as he was fishing around in his pants. He was looking right at me and I was telling him not to move: “Stop! Don’t move! Don’t move! Don’t move!” My partner was yelling at him too: “Stop! Stop! Stop!” As I was giving him commands, I drew my revolver. When I got about five feet from the guy, he came up with a chrome .25 auto. Then, as soon as his hand reached his center stomach area, he dropped the gun right on the sidewalk. We took him into custody, and that was that.

I think the only reason I didn’t shoot him was his age. He was fourteen, looked like he was nine. If he was an adult, I think I probably would have shot him. I sure perceived the threat of that gun. I could see it clearly, that it was chrome and that it had pearl grips on it. But I knew that I had the drop on him, and I wanted to give him just a little more benefit of a doubt because he was so young looking. I think the fact that I was an experienced officer had a lot to do with my decision. I could see a lot of fear in his face, which I also perceived in other situations, and that led me to believe that if I would just give him just a little bit more time that he might give me an option to not shoot him. The bottom line was that I was looking at him, looking at what was coming out of his pants leg, identifying it as a gun, seeing where that muzzle was gonna go when it came up. If his hand would’ve come out a little higher from his waistband, if the gun had just cleared his stomach area a little bit more, to where I would have seen that muzzle walk my way, it would’ve been over with. But the barrel never came up, and something in my mind just told me I didn’t have to shoot yet.

Some people do some incredibly stupid stuff that almost gets themselves shot. The first time I ran into one of these deals, I’d been on the street about two, two-and-a-half years. I got a call one afternoon that some guy was walking around the neighborhood pointing weapons at the kids who were playing outside. When I get in the area, I spotted this transient pushing a shopping cart up ahead of me a ways. He turned back to look at me, and when he did, I saw a chrome revolver in his waistband. So I got on the radio, let dispatch know where I was at, that I got a guy with a gun. I stopped about thirty yards behind him, opened the door, got a barricade behind it, and started shouting at him to put his hands up. He did that. Then I told him to turn around and face me. When he turned around, I saw that he had two more guns in his waistband. He was saying something to me, like he was trying to explain something to me. But he kept lowering his hands as he was talking. I couldn’t hear what he had to say because I was too busy yelling at him to keep his hands up. All I could tell is that he was trying to tell me something, like, “Don’t worry.” I was screaming at him to keep his hands up, but he reached down toward the guns. When he grabbed the first one, he just grabbed the grip with his fingertips. Because he didn’t have his finger near the trigger, I figured I still had time to react, so I held my fire. Then he pulled the gun out and dropped it on the ground. He did this four more times. Each time one of ’em hit the ground, it went with a sort of hollow “clink, clink, clink,” and I realized they were all plastic. So he ended up having five guns, plastic guns, on him. Apparently, he found them in a dumpster next to a toy store. I got real angry at him for being so stupid, for almost getting killed over some toy guns. I let him know just how pissed I was.

I had a real similar situation a year or so later. I pulled some kids over, and when I walked up on the car, I spotted a gun on the center console. I told the guys to get out of the car. The driver realized that I had spotted the gun, looked at me, and he said, “But officer, this isn’t a real gun.” Then he reached down for it, I guess to show me it wasn’t real. But I wasn’t going to let him grab it because it looked real to me. I was close to the car, so I just grabbed him by the neck and pulled him out before he could reach to the gun. It turned out to be a toy gun. I could’ve shot him, but I figured that I could yank him out of there before he got to it. A lot of guys would have shot in that situation. Again, I got real angry at this kid, and I told him so, because he didn’t realize how close he came to getting shot for doing something stupid.

I had another idiot I ran into when I was working patrol. I was off duty, heading into work in my uniform, driving a Honda Accord. This guy was next to me pulling a trailer, and he was trying to get in my lane. I honked at him, but then I slowed down and he eventually made it over. We went about another two blocks up and stopped at a traffic light. The guy opened his door up, leaned out, and pointed a revolver at me. I couldn’t go left because the door was right there, so I dove to my right below the dashboard. It took me a couple of seconds to get my gun out because I was sort of lying on my holster. By the time I came up with my gun, he was driving off. Apparently, he saw the uniform. I didn’t have a radio or anything, so there was no way I could call anybody for help. So I followed this guy. We had a little bit of a chase; of course he was pulling this great big trailer, so he wasn’t getting away. He finally got caught up in traffic. I bailed out with my gun, and I called him out of the car. He came out with his hands up, left the gun in the truck. Come to find it was a real gun, but it wasn’t loaded. He claimed to me that he just points it at people when people piss him off; it scares them away. I told him he was lucky to be alive. Again, one of the stupidity things.

My first close call came when I was fresh out of FTO—I don’t think I’d been on the street but maybe a week or two on my own. I was on second shift, which would start at five o’clock in the evening. I’d just left headquarters when dispatch toned out a man with a gun that had threatened some people and fired off some shots about four blocks from where I was. I made a right turn, went four blocks, and was at the intersection where the call came from. As I drove up, this group of people standing in front of this old beat-up hotel started pointing down the street. I parked, looked down the street, and saw this guy walking down the street carrying a long gun. He was about a block to my east on the north sidewalk, walking away from me. He had the gun over his shoulder like Elmer Fudd going hunting for the wabbit. That’s what I thought when I saw him, that he looked like Elmer Fudd in a cartoon walking with this gun over his shoulder.

He was oblivious to me, so I moved my patrol car down the street to get closer to him. I stopped about thirty yards from the guy, using my patrol car to block traffic and to provide me with some cover next to another vehicle that was parked on the north curb. Then I got out and challenged him: “Police, drop the gun! Police, freeze! Police, don’t move!” Something like that. He just kept walking, so I challenged him again. He stopped for a second or two, like, “What was that?” then started walking away from me again. I challenged him again, then he kind of stopped again, like he could hear something but he wasn’t really sure what he was hearing.

Once I got his attention, I kept challenging him. After I’d told him to drop the gun a couple of times, he took it off his shoulder and started to turn toward me, right shoulder first. As he was turning, he was holding the gun at port arms with his right hand behind the trigger guard and his left hand on the fore-grip. I could see that his index finger was not on the trigger, or even in a ready position. It was just behind the trigger guard. I was thinking that if he even starts to move that barrel toward my direction that I was going to shoot regardless of where his finger was. He kept moving the gun in my direction. Then he stopped, looked at me for a split second, and pitched his gun straight into some bushes next to where he was standing. I tried to order him into a handcuffing position, but he had a hard time following my directions because he was really drunk. So I just covered him until some other officers got there, and we took him into custody.

I didn’t shoot him before he turned because I didn’t perceive a big threat. The biggest thing was his reaction to my challenges. He didn’t seem like he was really comprehending what was going on. I perceived him to be highly intoxicated, and I thought that that was the reason for his inability to follow my directions. I just didn’t perceive him as being aggressive at that point in time. Then, when he turned around, I thought that I could beat him if he tried to point the gun at me. I got some training after the incident on reaction time where I learned that that was a false assumption, so I know better now. But at the time, I had a false belief that I could react quicker than he could, so I held my fire.

Things Ain’t Always What They Seem

Because patrol officers are on the front lines of police work, they often find themselves thrust into situations with only the barest idea of what it is they are getting involved in. When the situation includes people armed with guns or other deadly weapons, patrol officers have to make split-second life-and-death decisions about whether to shoot. But sometimes on patrol, things aren’t what they appear to be, and people who appear to be threatening are not. Sometimes what appears to be a bad guy is a crime victim—or another police officer. Officers know this and have to factor in the possibility that the person in front of them doing something that is about to get them shot means them no harm. The next three stories show just how close officers sometimes come to making a tragic error and how little things can prevent horrible accidents.

The first time I almost shot someone was when I was still on probation. It was early in the morning on a Sunday, and we got a call that there was an auto burglar outside of a McDonald’s restaurant. We got a description of the guy over the radio. A male Hispanic; I don’t remember the height, weight, or clothing info, but when we got about a half a block away from the McDonald’s, we saw a fellow matching the suspect’s description, so we pulled over about fifty feet away to talk to him. As he walked toward our car, I could see that he had a .45 auto in his right hand. He was holding it down at about a forty-five-degree angle. The hammer was back. It was cocked and ready to go. I shouted, “Gun!” to let my partner know what was up, bailed out of the car, and drew down on the guy. I told him two or three times in both English and Spanish to drop the gun. He wouldn’t drop the gun, and I was getting ready to cap him because he kept walking toward us with the gun in his hand. I was ready to rock-and-roll, but I decided to give one more set of commands before I dropped him because something wasn’t adding up. It just made no sense for a car burglar holding a gun at low-ready to walk right at two cops. Plus his demeanor wasn’t at all aggressive or threatening. Anyway, when I shouted at him for the last time, he was about twelve to fifteen feet away. I couldn’t let him get any closer. But just as I was about to shoot, he stopped and dropped the gun.

We cuffed him up and asked him what was going on. He told us that he spotted someone taking his radio out of his car, so he got his gun to chase the guy off. Turns out some other citizen spotted him with the gun and put in the call that we got. That’s why he fit the description so well. He was so distraught and pissed off at this guy who had just burglarized his car that he wasn’t thinking clearly when he walked up on us. He knew he was in the right, so he didn’t see us as a threat, even though we were pointing guns and screaming at him. I clearly could have shot him long before he got to within fifteen feet of us and been within my legal and moral rights. But something just told me not to do it, so I didn’t.

Boy, was I glad I held my fire. Had a sense of relief you wouldn’t believe. We never caught the burglar, but I was just absolutely relieved the whole rest of the day that I hadn’t shot that poor bastard who had had his car stereo stolen.

I was working with my regular partner, another female, and we were just driving down the street when all of a sudden we heard a shot ring out. We looked over to our right, where we thought the sound came from, and saw a guy waving a gun. It looked like he was robbing this other guy. We notified dispatch, opened our doors, and drew down on the guy. By this time, the guy with the gun had wrestled this other guy to the ground and was pointing the gun right at him. We could have shot the guy right then. I mean, he had this gun out, threatening this other guy with it, and we’d already heard one round go off. But from my angle, I saw something shiny on the belt of the guy with the gun. I didn’t quite see what it was, but I know that sometimes cops carry their badge on their belt off duty, so I thought that maybe he was a policeman or a security guard, something like that. So I didn’t shoot. I held back to try to get a better view. My partner on the other side of the car couldn’t see whatever it was on his belt because of the angle she had. I heard her gun go that first click that happens when you start to squeeze the trigger, so I knew she was about to cap this guy. As soon as I realized what was happening, I shouted, “Wait, don’t. Don’t. He’s a cop, he’s a cop.”

Turns out I was right. The guy with the gun was an off-duty transit cop, and the other guy had tried to rob him with a fake gun. They fought over it, and the transit cop pulled his gun and fired off a round that missed the other guy. No one got hurt, and we took the bad guy into custody, but I remember thinking how close we came to shooting the good guy. We sure could have. He was pointing the gun at this other guy, but something just wasn’t right—that object on his belt. Because of that, I wanted to give it an extra second before shooting. You know, he could have shot the other guy, and I’d have been wrong, but sometimes you just have to go with your instincts. And that’s what I did.

I had my brother-in-law on a ride-along with me when a broadcast came out that a narco buy-bust had gone bad with one of the street teams. They put out the description of the car and then said the suspects had fired at detectives and that the detectives were chasing the car. I happened to be coming off the freeway at 405 and Spring when I saw the car heading northbound on Spring. I got in behind it—aired that I was behind it—and all of a sudden, a Ford Mustang occupied by two Hispanic males flanked me to the left and passed the car I was chasing. One of the Hispanic males leaned out of the car and started shooting back at the suspect vehicle, back toward us.

So I yelled at my brother-in-law, “Shit, get down on the floorboard!” I was just concerned for him. I wasn’t even thinking that a round could’ve deflected off the car and nailed me right in the forehead. I wouldn’t have even known it. I was just concerned with getting him down on the ground. So he ducked down, the Hispanic male continued to fire, and the suspects’ car came to a stop. All I could see in the car was two suspects like jumping beans inside, like they were trying to hide underneath the seat. So I got out of the car and went into a typical hot stop and then looked over to the Mustang. The Hispanic males were exiting their car, both firing into the suspects’ car. I turned to engage them. I started to pull on the trigger and almost pulled a round off when I looked at the first guy—who was yelling toward the suspects’ car—and I saw braces on his teeth. I said to myself, “Fuck, that guy was a cop at Central when I was a trainee,” so I went off him and back onto the suspect vehicle. I was looking, looking, looking, looking, but I didn’t see a threat. I was thinking, “Why are they still shooting? I don’t see a threat. Am I missing something? Fuck.”

Next thing you know, a bunch of plainclothes guys came up and yanked these two guys out of the suspects’ car. As they were pulling them out, a third kid that I hadn’t seen popped up into the driver’s seat and the car took off. So I holstered up and went from a near shooting to chasing a car down the road that’s full of bullets. After we got that kid into custody, I told the officer with the braces, “Goddamn, I almost shot you. Scared the shit out of me. I almost dropped you.”

IA called me the next day and said, “You know, you would have been totally justified if you shot that officer.” I said, “Yeah, but it would’ve been hell to live with.” Then they said, “Yeah, but we just want you to know your train of thought, your thinking, was exactly right, because there was a threat. You didn’t know that they were cops, and they were moving toward you and toward the suspects, still shooting.” To this day, I don’t know why they didn’t ID themselves or what they were shooting at. It was pretty crazy.

SWAT

SWAT teams became a part of police work in the late 1960s, when a series of deadly events, including the Watts riots in Los Angeles and a sniper attack at the University of Texas at Austin in which more than three dozen people were shot, showed that the police were ill prepared to deal with unusually dangerous incidents. Realizing this, many large law enforcement agencies began to develop specialized units to handle crisis situations. Because these units carried weapons that were not standard police issue—such as assault rifles, submachine guns, and sniper rifles—and utilized tactics that were not typically used in other realms of police work, they came to be known as special weapons and tactics teams, or SWAT teams for short.

Over the years, more and more police agencies of all sizes have developed SWAT teams and have used them in a wide variety of special-threat situations besides riots and sniper attacks. In fact, most SWAT operations today involve the service of search-and-arrest warrants that are deemed to pose some sort of heightened risk to the police (typically called high-risk warrants), armed subjects who have refused to surrender to the officers who were initially handling the incident (typically called barricaded suspects), and situations in which armed subjects are holding someone against that person’s will (hostage incidents).3

Because SWAT teams’ bread and butter is dealing with the most dangerous sorts of policing situations, SWAT officers typically confront more threats than the average police officer. This section contains three of the more instructive close calls that the SWAT officers I interviewed had, including one in which the officer that I spoke with was shot. The other two stories—though not quite as dramatic—also show how experienced, well-trained police officers often avoid shooting suspects, even in the toughest of circumstances.

We got called in to serve a search warrant at this one-story house over in Baldwin on a subject known as 98 Frank, who was a very violent drug offender. One of our snitches had taken an undercover officer over there, and while they were trying to negotiate a deal with him, he had actually placed his .45 into the snitch’s mouth and threatened to blow his brains out if he set him up, so we knew the man was very violent. We also knew he was very active in his own cocaine use.

After we got the warrant, we went up to the door, screamed, “County police!” knocked the door down, and stepped into the front room. I was the number-three man in. Our first guy broke left, second guy broke right, and I came straight into the front room. Straight ahead of me was 98 Frank in his bedroom. It had no door, and he was standing there with drugs in his hands and two pistols stuck in his waistband. I started advancing on him. He dropped the dope, and his hands started to come down. I told him to freeze, and I stopped my advance probably twelve feet from him. I was too far away to take him down physically, but close enough that I could see the guns clearly.

His eyes were glazed over, and the way he was looking—he had a very blank stare on his face—it was like he was looking at us but he didn’t see us. I was yelling at him to freeze. Off to the right, his mother was in the other room screaming, “Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him!” As she was screaming this and I was telling him to freeze, his right hand started to come over near his waistband. I started telling him, “Don’t touch the gun! Don’t touch the gun!” because I knew that if a gun came up, I would have to fire because I had other officers in the room.

Well, he grabbed one of the guns by its handle and pulled it out of his waistband. I could feel the pressure on my trigger as I started to squeeze, and he dropped the first gun. He then immediately, but slowly, went for the second gun. He grabbed it and made a slight motion like he was coming up with it. I was again getting ready to squeeze the trigger; then he dropped the second gun. At that time, we pounced on him and took him to the ground.

After we cleared the rest of the house, I asked him what he doing with the guns. He told us he was so stoned that he didn’t really realize who we were. His brain was just apparently fried from all the cocaine he used, which was a shame because the guy was a vet who had won several medals in the marines. He had used so much cocaine that when he sneezed, he would bleed from the nose. His mind was just frazzled. Maybe he just knew enough that he could realize that we must have been some kind of law enforcement, but he never gave me a very logical answer at all.

I know I could have shot him, but when I was looking at him—looking at his eyes—I just didn’t feel he was a threat. I knew that I had my gun out, a fully automatic weapon shooting .223 rounds. At twelve feet away, I knew that if I had to pull the trigger, it would be over instantly. I just don’t feel that because someone is armed that he’s necessarily a threat. Even when you know ahead of time that someone is violent, you gotta judge the incident on what you’re seeing at that time. Several of the guys there thought for sure I was going to shoot. And by the book, if I’d shot I’d been covered ’cuz the guns were in his hands, but to me he just wasn’t a threat at the time.

Besides his eyes, when he grabbed the guns, his fingers never went inside the trigger guard. If a finger had gone inside a trigger guard, I would’ve definitely shot. The other thing that would’ve made me shoot was if a barrel would’ve started in my direction. If that happened, he could easily get the finger in the trigger guard before I could have gotten a shot off. So if either a finger went in a trigger guard or a barrel came toward me, then I’d have pulled the trigger. No doubt.

Since I came over to SWAT, we’ve had several cases where guys have shot at us, but we never returned any fire. Probably the craziest one happened in 1993 when I got shot in the leg. It was a boyfriend-girlfriend deal. He was upset about his girlfriend working at this video store at this strip center on the north side of town. He went over there and started slapping his girlfriend around. Somebody there at the store told him to leave her alone. The boyfriend shot this other guy, in the leg I think. So the guy crawled out and called the police. By the time patrol got there, the boyfriend had beat the poor girl pretty good. I don’t know how much time went by after patrol arrived, but he finally let her go. So by the time we got there, he was inside the video store by himself.

The guy was nonresponsive to all the negotiators’ attempts to contact him, so some of the other guys and I went into a restaurant that shared a common wall to the video store at the strip center to see what we could figure out. I ended up getting on top of the freezer, had a body bunker in front of me so I could get access to the ceiling because nobody knew where he was. He was hiding somewhere, apparently. So I took off some ceiling tiles over the video store and started looking around for him. Couldn’t see him, couldn’t see him. So I got up on my tippy-toes. I was looking, looking, looking, peering over the top of the shield. Finally, I looked just about straight down, and when I did, I spotted him just behind the front counter. Right then, he looked up. I don’t know if I made some noise or what. But he saw me at the same time I saw him, so I got down behind the shield real fast. As I was ducking, I heard, “boom, boom.” Both of his rounds hit the shield and flew off somewhere.

I told the CP what happened and got down from the ceiling. The negotiators got the speakers going, trying to talk to him, saying, “Yes, we know you’re behind the counter, give up,” and stuff like that. He didn’t respond. After a bunch of attempts that got nothing, they finally asked me if I could get to that ceiling again and pump some gas in there. I said sure, went back up with a big tube of pepper mace spray and the shield, and started to fill the store with gas. Well, he shot at me again. Bounced a few more rounds off the shield.

That just got me going even more. I’m an adrenaline junkie; it didn’t bother me any. We’d found the first two rounds he fired. He had a .25 auto. Those rounds can kill you if they hit, but they weren’t going to go through the shield, so I felt pretty safe. Some of the other guys got worried, but I’m like the guy in the cereal commercial, “Let’s get Mikey to do it, he’ll do anything.” Yeah, that’s me, I like that stuff, I live off that adrenaline. I mean, I know it’s dangerous stuff that we do, but I don’t get scared when we’re doing it. I guess maybe I get scared afterwards, but not during.

He shot a couple more times, then the guys in the front saw him scamper into what turned out to be the bathroom. We figured out that the storeroom for this little restaurant we were in shared a common wall with the bathroom in the video store. So we got in there, being real quiet, and set the four-foot big body bunker against the wall. We decided to try to put a hole in the wall and pump some gas into the bathroom. Because I’m the guy that’ll do anything, I moved up behind the shield with a keyhole saw and started cutting a hole in the Sheetrock about five feet off the ground. The only thing that was exposed was my right hand, so I figured the worst-case scenario was that he might get off a lucky shot that hits my hand.

Well, I got all the way through the layer of drywall on the storeroom side of the wall, but on the bathroom side I started hitting something. “Clunk, clunk, clunk.” I was thinking, “What the hell!” Then it hit me, it was the damn mirror over the sink!

I told him, “I’m not getting up over that shield.” You know I’m an adrenaline junkie, but I’m not dumb.

So he said, “Well, just set it up on a chair.” That made good sense. My lower legs would be exposed, but the rest of my body and head, except one hand, would be protected. So we slid a chair up and set the shield up on it. The idiot must have heard me, because when I reached up to start cutting the hole, he fired a shot through the wall about two feet off the ground. The damn round went through the wall and hit me in the left shin bone, right below the knee. It bounced off, hit the wall in front of me, dropped, and went spinning along the floor a little bit.

It didn’t hurt too badly. I was still standing, so I moved away from the wall to get some better cover. My team leader got on the air and put out that an officer had been shot. I stopped him and told him that we shouldn’t get this blown out of proportion. I knew the bullet hadn’t penetrated much because it bounced right off. I reached down and cut my pant leg open. There wasn’t much blood, just a frickin’ groove in my leg. I showed it to him and said it was no big deal.

He asked me if I was sure and I told him, “Yeah.” We were about to get back to work when one of the sergeants showed up. He asked what happened. I told him I got nicked by a bullet and showed him the little cut. He wanted to pull me out of there, but I didn’t want to leave. I told him that I’d scratched my leg on a nail worse than what the bullet did. Apparently, I convinced him, because he let me stay there.

We ended up putting another shield on the floor in front of the one on the chair so that we had cover all the way down. I cut a hole all the way through, and we got the gas in there. The gas pushed him back out to the front part of the store. Then I left the restaurant and took a position outside near the front door of the video shop. After about another hour or so of him not responding, we set a light at the door. I was holding it on a fire pole, so I was out of the way around the corner. He fired a few rounds at it but missed. Then he stopped shooting and started throwing videotapes at the light, trying to knock it down. It got to be a game, where I was holding the light out there, kind of dancing that light around, while he threw videotapes at it. I figured the poor owner of the store was gonna have a heart attack when it was all over ’cuz the guy must’ve thrown three hundred videotapes out the door trying to hit that light.

Well, the idiot finally came out holding his gun to his head and sat down on the curb in front of the store. He was facing right at me. I was behind cover, but I could see him clearly. I could tell he was tired. It had been going on for hours. He was sort of nodding off every now and then, his eyes shutting a little bit, his head drooping, then snapping back up. Well, after a while, his head dropped again and the gun went off. I remember that his eyes opened up for a split second, and he had this surprised look on his face. Then I saw the blood gushing down the right side of his head, and the guy fell over. The react team, which was staged in the doorway of the restaurant, ran up and covered down on him, but he was DOA.

I figured from that surprised look that guy didn’t mean to kill himself, that he shot himself by accident. When I saw him do it, I thought to myself, “Serves him right for shooting me.”

Veterans of Restraint

As noted in this chapter’s introduction, some officers are involved in dozens of close encounters. The man whose words appear in this section’s primary story is one such person. He has spent most of his twenty-five-year police career as a SWAT officer in one of the nation’s biggest cities. He has also worked patrol in some of his city’s busiest beats, spent a short stint assigned to the city’s jail, and nearly four years in Narcotics hunting dope dealers. Over the years, he has shot three people, witnessed partners or teammates shoot at least ten other people, and held his fire in at least two dozen cases in which he could clearly have shot. The cases he talks about in this section are those that were most salient in his mind and therefore those that give the best view into how at least one busy cop handles and thinks about the many close calls that have come his way.

The second officer who speaks in this section has also spent many years on his department’s SWAT team (also one of the nation’s largest and most active). His words are included because they present the single best accounting from the interviews I conducted of why it is that police officers shoot so few of the people that they have legal cause to kill.

I’ve been involved in at least two dozen cases, maybe three, where I could have shot people but held my fire. The first time I came really, really close to shooting somebody was at a disturbance call at a beer joint when I was still on probation. I was working a night shift with my training officer when we got the call. Shots had been fired. We responded, but the suspect was gone. The witnesses gave us a description of the vehicle he’d left in, said he had a gun, was involved in a fight with his girlfriend, and the bouncer threw him out of the bar. He went out and got in his car, started it up, and as he was driving out of the parking lot, he cranked off a couple of rounds into the bar. He didn’t hit anybody, but there was a couple of bullet holes in the walls. So we put out a description and started looking around the area for this vehicle.

A few minutes later, we got a return call that he was back at the bar. When we got back there, he was gone again. He had just done another drive-by shooting on the bar. So we put out another broadcast that he was in the area and started to drive around again when we got another call that he was back at the bar. We go back this third time and saw his car sitting there. He had gone into the bar, grabbed his girlfriend at gunpoint, and taken her back out to his car. He threw her into the front seat of his car and jumped in behind the wheel. It was a bench seat. When we pulled in behind him, he had his right arm around her, over her shoulder in an affectionate-looking way. But he had a pistol, turned out to be a .357 Magnum, in his right hand, hanging down in front of her chest. She was sobbing.

It was summertime, very hot, and all four windows on his car were down. We drew our guns, and my partner told me to approach from the passenger side while he moved up on the driver’s side to a point where he would be in a good position to make verbal contact with the guy. I moved up and stopped just outside his rear passenger-side door, where I could see his right hand with the gun in it. I was about five feet away from him with my front sight focused on the back of his head. I could hear what he was telling her. Very affectionate stuff like, “It’s OK, honey, I still love you. Everything’s gonna be all right.” It was obvious from the way he was slurring his words that he was highly intoxicated. She was sobbing, not responding to him.

My partner was positioned just outside the driver’s-side back door. He had a perfect bead on the back of his head as well. My partner made voice contact with him and told him to drop the gun. For some reason, instead of looking in the direction of my partner’s voice, the suspect turned and looked at me. We made eye contact right over the front sight of my gun. Then he focused on the end of my gun, said, “Oh, my God, don’t kill me,” and dropped his gun. I heard it drop. It hit the seat and bounced onto the floorboard. I started giving him commands, and he very slowly raised his hands. Then my partner opened the driver’s door, yanked the guy out by his hair, and wrestled him to the ground while I reached in and got the gun.

I came very, very close to killing that guy. I was in fear for the girl’s life because he had that gun in his hand. I had a tactical advantage because I was behind him. He was going to have to rotate quite a bit to get a shot at me. So I was basically concerned for her safety, that he might suddenly try to shoot her. But when I realized how intoxicated he was, I felt I had a big advantage over him because he wasn’t going to be able to move real quick. I thought I could get him before he could do it to her because I was real close and I felt very confident of the head shot that I had. I remember thinking that I really might have to kill this guy, but I wasn’t going to unless he made some overt move to hurt her. If he would have made any sudden or aggressive move, I’d have pulled the trigger. He never did, so I didn’t have to shoot.

I had another real close call while I was still on probation. I was working with a different partner, when we were dispatched to a disturbance call at an apartment complex. We went to arrest this one guy, and he took off running. We chased him through the apartment complex. As he went around the first corner, we lost sight of him for just a second. Turns out he threw this gun he was carrying over a redwood fence and onto this lady’s back patio when we lost sight of him. We didn’t even know he had a gun, but this lady saw him throw it. When it was all over, she brought it to us, so we were able to make a case on it with her testimony. Anyway, we finally caught the guy, had to fight him, kinda bloodied him up a little bit, got him handcuffed, and took him back to our patrol car, which was near the apartment where this all started. When we got there, about five of his buddies were there. They asked us where we were taking the guy. We told his buddies we were taking him to jail. They said, “No, you’re not.” We said, “Yes, we are.” We went back and forth like that a few times, when, all of a sudden, they just jumped us.

I had already gotten the prisoner into the back of the patrol car, and as I was in the process of trying to secure him there, one of the other guys came at me with a club. I was partway in the backseat, so I pushed the prisoner down onto the floorboard and started kicking at the guy, trying to kick him off of me. He was swinging this club at me, trying to get my feet, so I pulled my feet into the car. I drew my pistol, thinking that would make him back off, but it didn’t. I was sitting in the backseat with one hand pushing down on the prisoner while I had my pistol pointed at the guy with the club. He was right on top of me, no more than two or three feet away. I was screaming, “Back off! I’m gonna kill you! I’m gonna kill you!” It didn’t make any difference to him. I was thinking, “Oh, man, you’ve made your bluff, now you gonna back it up or what?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my partner on the hood of the patrol car, fighting with two other guys. I had already put out an “assist the officer” call, but I was real worried about my partner. He was getting the crap beaten out of him. I was afraid those two guys were going to get his gun, shoot him, and then come after me. I was pretty safe in the car right then. The guy with the club couldn’t really get to me, but I had to do something to help my partner because I didn’t know how much longer he could hold out. I couldn’t get out without getting hit by the guy with the club, so I decided to shoot the guy, then go help my partner.

Just as I was about to pull the trigger, this bystander, a big guy, grabbed the guy with the club in a headlock and yanked him back. The bystander beat the crap out of the guy with the club while my partner and I finally got the upper hand on the other two guys. Then some other units showed up and it was all over. But I was in the process of pulling the trigger when this other guy grabbed the guy with the club. All I saw at first was this arm come over the guy’s head. My initial thought was that some other officers had arrived. As I came out from the backseat, I saw this guy in regular clothes, and I was wondering if he was an officer working plainclothes, or narcotics, or what? Turns out he was just Joe Blow Citizen who was watching everything and decided he had seen enough, that he was going to get involved. He didn’t know it, but by getting involved he saved that other guy’s life.

Another close one happened during my first stint at SWAT. We got called up on a highly intoxicated female who had run her family out of their house with a gun. She was extremely erratic. She was on Prozac, Thorazine, all that. She had quit taking her meds and was high on some other drugs and alcohol. When patrol got there, she confronted them. They backed off and called us. It was nighttime when we got there. We were establishing a perimeter, and I was on the front side of the objective, behind a vehicle parked in the street. She didn’t know I was there. Billy Dale was trying to move into position behind a car that was parked in her driveway. Billy was almost at the car when she came out of her house holding her gun and saw him. He made it behind the car, but she spotted him before he got there. She started walking his way and said, “I see you, you son of a bitch.” The car was between her and Billy, but the closer she got, the more dangerous it was for him. She was pointing the gun in his direction, telling him she was going to kill him. She didn’t see me, and I had her in the sights of my M-16. I was thinking that if she pops a cap, it could skip underneath the car and hit Billy, that I was gonna have to shoot her if she got much closer.

Billy was crouched down behind the car, just trying to maintain cover. Now one of the patrol sergeants and one of the other assault team guys had moved around behind the house and were coming around to the side with the driveway. I didn’t know exactly where they were, but they were somewhere behind the woman. I was worried that they were in my line of fire. I was concerned that if I shot the woman, the bullets might go through her and hit them. Well, she kept moving toward the car, then stopped just a few feet away, and said, “I know you’re behind there, you son of a bitch. Come out, come out.” I was thinking, “How much closer am I going to let her get?” She had the gun pointed at the car this whole time, because she knew Billy was behind it. I had a perfect shot on her. She was no more than twenty yards away, and I was lined up right on her, but she had no idea I was there.

Then she started to move around to the side of the car, and Billy started playing ring-around-the-rosy with her, trying to keep the car between himself and the woman. Some other officers were telling Billy to get out of there, but he was scared to run for it. I was sure that if he took off that she’d pop the cap at him. I was thinking, “What if she gets off a lucky shot that kills him? Can I live with that? If he does decide to run, am I going to let her shoot? Do I need to nail her now before she even gets a shot off?” All this was going through my mind, “Do I need to kill her now? Do I want to kill her, this drunk lady waving a gun around?” My safety was off, I had my finger on the trigger, it was no longer indexed. I was there, ready to squeeze. She was at the left front-door panel of the vehicle; Billy was at the right rear. If she moved any closer or fired a round, I was gonna take her right there. I wasn’t going to let her get any closer. I wasn’t going to let her get a second shot off. She started to move, and I was just about to drop her, when she turned around, then walked back inside the house. We eventually talked her out, so it turned out OK.

Looking back on it though, I don’t know if I made the right decision. It turned out for the best, but it would have been really hard to take if she had gotten a shot off and killed Billy. It would have been hard to live with the knowledge that I had the shot but didn’t take it. To this day, I still wonder whether maybe I should have taken that shot.

After three and a half years in SWAT, I went to work a raid team in Narcotics. The narco guys had been in a bunch of shootings where search warrants had gone bad for some reason, and the cops had to shoot it out with the dealers. The administration decided that this had to stop, so they figured the best way to accomplish this was to put together a team that does nothing but run warrants. The thinking was that if that’s all the team does, then they will do things better, fewer things will go wrong, and fewer people will get shot. So all I did for about three-and-a-half years was serve dope warrants and train. We had a team of eight guys. We were all clean-cut. Short hair. They didn’t allow any beards. You could have a mustache, but the bosses didn’t want a bunch of longhaired dudes with beards busting into peoples’ houses, where the folks inside might not believe it’s the cops. So they wanted us all clean-cut looking. We always wore blue jeans, sneakers, and raid jackets that said “POLICE” over full tactical vests. That way, we looked like a bunch of cops when we hit a place.

When we weren’t out serving warrants, we were shooting or doing some other sort of training. We did an occasional buy-bust—maybe one a week—but other than that, all we did was train and run warrants. Other Narcotics guys would make the case, bring the info back to us, we’d go take a look at the location—usually take some pictures—head back to the office, draw up a plan, get in the van, and go out and execute the warrant. We averaged one warrant every working day, about 250 a year, for nearly four years. During this time, our team proved the bosses’ thinking to be correct. After a while, the shootings went to almost nil. But we did get into a few shootings, and we had a lot of close calls.

I remember one incident where we did a raid on this pimp’s place. He was running whores and selling dope. As we pulled up in the van, I saw the guy standing outside. He saw us and took off into the house. I chased after him. He ran down a hallway and made it into a bathroom and slammed the door before I could catch him.

I came up and kicked the door while my guys were coming in behind me. When I kicked the door open, I heard a gunshot. At first, I thought, “Oh, my God, I’m shot.” I backed up, and the door swung back until it was almost closed. I looked around, trying to figure out who shot me. Then I realized I hadn’t been hit. A few seconds later, the door swung back open, and I saw the crook lying back in a half-full bathtub with both his hands in the air. So I figured he hadn’t shot. I started looking around again. Everybody else was stopped, just covering their own areas of responsibility and looking around. Someone said, “Who shot?” I said, “I don’t know, who shot?” This one guy on the team was always a little gun happy, and I always thought if anybody was going to have an accidental discharge, it would be him. So I looked at him and asked, “Did you shoot?” He said that he hadn’t, but he was looking at his gun like he wasn’t sure that he hadn’t shot. It turns out he didn’t. It was the guy in the bathtub who shot.

After we all calmed down, my sergeant and I stepped into the bathroom and got the pimp out of the bathtub, stuck him against the wall, cuffed him up, and patted him down. Then I get to noticing the smell of gunpowder and a cloud of smoke up near the ceiling. When I looked up, I saw a bullet hole in the ceiling, but there were no guns that I could see in the bathroom. Where’s the gun? After a few seconds, another one of the guys came into the bathroom, reached down into the bathtub water, which was so filthy you couldn’t even see through it, and came up with a gun. What this guy had done was run in the bathroom, slam the door, pull his gun, and point it at the door. He was about to shoot it when I kicked in the door. The door hitting him sent a round into the ceiling, knocked the gun out of his hand and into the bathtub, and knocked him into the tub on top of the gun.

When I realized what had happened, it scared the hell out of me. He totally had me. He could have taken me out right there. I was lucky to be alive. I was also real pissed off at the guy. I wanted to beat the hell out of him right there, but he was handcuffed and you can’t beat handcuffed prisoners. But I wanted to kill him. I looked him right in the eye, thinking, “I could kill you.” But I didn’t do anything, and that was the right thing to do.

A few months later, I came real close to killing this one gal. We were serving a warrant on this place that was supposed to have a whole lot of Mandrix. The main crook wasn’t even home, just his old lady and her girlfriend. My assignment was to go down to the bedrooms and secure them. I had my pistol out, and I was leading the charge down the hallway to the back bedroom. It was kind of a dark hallway, and I was hollering, “Police,” as I moved. I was dressed in my raid jacket and all that. I knew the rest of the team was coming behind me; I could hear them all coming. I hadn’t seen anybody so far when, all of a sudden, I spotted this woman sitting up on a bed in the bedroom at the end of the hallway. It was a big house, so she was about ten or fifteen yards away, looking directly at me.

I started screaming at her, “Police! Police!” as I continued down the hallway. She leaned over real quick, so her upper body went out of my line of vision. I was figuring she was trying to dump the dope, get rid of it somehow. Then she came back up with a handgun pointed right at me. I just happened to be at this little alcove off the hallway that led to another door, so I jumped in there and barricaded up with my gun pointed right at her. She was holding her gun with both hands, still pointing it at me. She was kind of shaking and nervous looking. I could tell by the way she was holding the damn gun that she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. She was trying to hold it like it was a revolver, but it was an automatic. She was sort of fumbling it between her hands, like she wasn’t sure what hand to put it in. She was very awkward in the way she was holding the weapon. She looked really nervous and scared. That look, and the fact that I could tell that she didn’t know what the shit she was doing with the gun, gave me a little bit of confidence. I felt fairly secure. I was somewhat barricaded up, had my tac vest on with very little of my body exposed, really just my head and arms.

I started screaming at her, “Drop the gun! Drop the gun!” I started to get more peripheral vision on the room, and I could tell there was another female in there. She was just sitting there like she couldn’t believe what was happening. The girl with the gun was just looking at me, and I was going, “Drop the gun! Drop the gun!” over and over.

Some ideas started running through my mind, like maybe I should take my badge off and throw it into the room or maybe show my ID card. Then I thought, “This is bullshit. I need to kill her.” I mean, I should have already killed her, I should have shot her. She was pointing her gun at me. What if she shot down the hallway and hit one of my buddies behind me? I decided that it had gone far enough, that I was going to ask her one more time to drop the gun, and then I was going to pull the trigger.

The girl next to her was pleading with her, saying her name, “Suzy,” or whatever it was, “Suzy, drop the gun.” I was thinking, “This is it, do her.” And I started to pull the trigger. The girl with the gun took her eyes off of me real quick and looked over at her friend. Then she looked back at me and threw the gun down. We rushed into the bedroom and took her and the other girl down and cuffed them up.

I got a chief’s commendation for not shooting that gal. But I don’t think I made the correct tactical decision. I felt confident with my vest on and confident in the position I was in, but looking back on it, I could have easily died that day. Any of the guys behind me could have easily died. If it would have been a guy holding that gun, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have fired. I looked at it differently because she was a woman, took too much for granted in my position and my perception that a woman is less dangerous than a man. I put the lives of the officers behind me at risk. I knew guys would be barricaded up, but they’d be sticking their heads out and looking. If she fired a round, it could have gone past me and hit one of them. I risked their lives without their consent, and I don’t really feel like I had the right to do that. I think I should have fired. If I had handled it the way I’d been trained, I would have shot her. That’s what I should have done. I felt a little guilty about jeopardizing my teammates’ lives. If I want to take chances in my life, that’s fine, but I shouldn’t be taking chances with theirs. That’s the conclusion I came to. The chief’s commendation is all well and good, but it doesn’t stop me from wondering what would have happened if she had gotten a round off. Where would that round have gone?

There have been a bunch of other close calls since I came back to SWAT about ten years ago—none where I wonder if I made the right decision, but several cases where suspects shot at us but we didn’t return fire. Probably somewhere between ten and fifteen of them where people shoot at us, but we just take cover. Sometimes people try to shoot us through walls; sometimes they pop a cap at us when we’re moving around on the perimeter. The bullets come pretty close, but we don’t shoot back because we’ve got cover.

I was behind a big pine tree one time, and the suspect was shooting his deer rifle my way, putting rounds into the tree. But it was a huge pine tree, so he wasn’t going to hit me. I never was in any real danger, but it was a little unnerving having those bullets hitting the other side of the tree. Cases like that where we could kill the guy, but there was really no need. There have also been a few times when we were poking lights fixed to poles around corners or into rooms when the suspect shot the light. It tends to scare the crap out of you, but it’s not real dangerous because you’re behind cover at the other end of the pole. Most of the time, we are able to resolve these situations without using deadly force. We almost always find ways to end them without shooting anybody.

I could have shot a lot more than one person in my twenty-five-plus years, but I didn’t because I didn’t need to. To me, there’s legal justification for shooting, moral justification for shooting, and then, “Was a shooting necessary?” That’s the most important question and the one that guides my decision making. I think that maybe that’s what makes a good policeman: the ability to make a decision based on that question. After a situation is over, he says, “I could have shot him, but I didn’t, because it didn’t need to be done.” I’ve been in a bunch of those, where I could have legally fired, but for some reason it just wasn’t appropriate. It’s that third criterion, it wasn’t necessary. So I’ve been in a lot of situations where, yeah, I could have shot, but it just wasn’t necessary.

The words of this last veteran officer sum up what good cops all over the nation know: that the legal sanction they have to shoot is not a license to kill, but rather a power that should be invoked only when they believe they have no other choice. As the next chapter shows, however, deciding when it is absolutely necessary to pull the trigger is not a simple matter.

Notes

1. Discussions of the limitations of law and policy to direct police use of their firearms, the discretionary nature of police firearms usage, and how officers’ personal shooting policies are often more restrictive than law and policy can be found in Deadly Force: What We Know, by William A. Geller and Michael S. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum, 1992); and The Badge and the Bullet, by Peter Scharf and Arnold Binder (New York: Praeger, 1983).

2. The federal study that documented police restraint is Use of Deadly Force by Police Officers: Final Report, by Arnold Binder, Peter Scharf, and Raymond Galvin (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, 1982). The findings of this study are also reported in The Badge and the Bullet, by Peter Scharf and Arnold Binder (New York: Praeger, 1983).

3. A discussion of the advent and development of SWAT teams can be found in The Management of Police Specialized Tactical Units, by Tomas C. Mijares, Ronald M. McCarthy, and David B. Perkins (Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 2000).

Chapter Three

Holding Fire

Notes