Hanson is sleeping.
The City of Oakland is awake. An undercover narc named Sandler is chasing a fifteen-year-old black juvenile through backyards in District Four. Sandler and his two partners had spent several hours that night trying to set up a drug buy from people in West Oakland but had no luck. As Sandler was about to pull away from the curb in his unmarked car and call it a night, the fifteen-year-old drove past them, pissing Sandler off. The driver’s head was all but hidden by the headrest—a small guy to be driving—so Sandler followed him and ran the license plate on the secret frequency undercover cops used. There were usually twenty or fifteen undercover cops on the street any given night, but the beat cops didn’t know this, and they weren’t aware of several classified Radio frequencies used by them and other special units. The Department, worried that the beat cops might expose the undercover and special unit cops, kept the frequencies a secret.
The license plate came back to a car that had been stolen that morning, so Sandler activated the red flashing lights hidden behind the grille of the bare-bones model dark blue Ford that almost anyone would realize was a police car.
The kid, whose name was Ezekiel, had been driving the car around most of the day, was almost out of gas, and was planning to dump it close enough to where he lived that he could walk home. When he saw the lights behind him, he took off, getting the car up to almost one hundred miles per hour on the Nimitz Freeway, the cop car right behind. It was a rush Ezekiel would never forget. He squealed up High Street, tried and failed to lose the cops near his neighborhood, skidded into a big blue mailbox, and bailed out of the car, running for home.
Sandler was really pissed by now and pumping adrenaline, so he spun his car out to a stop and jumped out, leaving his partners in the car, determined to kill or beat the shit out of Ezekiel.
Sandler realizes he is running parallel to the kid, so he arcs away from him and two blocks later is waiting when the kid, not in good shape, comes huffing out of the dark. Sandler knocks him down and holds the snub-nose .44 he carries to the kid’s head.
Cover units had been dispatched to assist in apprehending a car thief. Two of them, both driven by young cops with less than six months on the street, catch Sandler in their headlights, leaning over a little kid, holding a pistol inches from his head, the kid screaming for mercy.
They’ve never met Sandler and, of course, don’t know about the secret undercover cops, when they jump out of their patrol cars, pointing their service revolvers at Sandler, yelling, “Freeze! Freeze!” just as one of them accidentally pulls the trigger of his pistol, scaring the other new cop, who also starts shooting, and together they shoot Sandler nine times from the middle of the street.
Ezekiel is afraid to move and Sandler is dead.
There was nothing in the media the next day except a brief article that an Oakland police officer had been shot and killed by accident.