Into the Kill Zone Read online

  • • •

  I had a regular job as a lab tech in a clinical laboratory in a hospital when I decided to apply for a job as a police officer. I was teaching music and working as a freelance musician for extra money. My wife was pregnant with my first daughter, and I knew I had to move into something where I was making more money and had a more secure future. I saw a recruitment poster. The PD happened to be hiring at the time. After I looked into the salary and benefits and what have you, it seemed like the thing to do. I didn’t have a major commitment to law enforcement. Now I had thought about it on and off when I was a kid because my granddad was a firefighter. I thought about either becoming a firefighter or a policeman, like probably most all kids do. But I hadn’t really thought about becoming a cop for a good many years before I saw that recruitment poster.

  When I looked into getting on the PD, it crossed my mind a little bit that I could end up shooting someone, but it was never a real big deal to me. I grew up hunting. My dad’s from eastern Kentucky, the good-ole-boy mold, and I grew up with a gun in my hands from the time I was very young, three or four years old. He’d take me out and teach me how to shoot a .22 and stuff, so I grew up with guns. I understood that deadly force was a very real part of the job and the potential was there. I knew what police officers did, and I knew that the possibility of having to shoot somebody was part of it, but I thought about it only in passing. I understood it was a serious part of the job, but it was just never a major issue for me.

  • • •

  The men and women who choose police work bring with them an array of ideas, hopes, dreams, and desires; a variety of backgrounds and motives; and a diversity of perspectives on that most important aspect of policing: the power over life and death. Whatever they have been, done, thought, or felt in the past, once they become cops, they will be counted among that small number of Americans who have legal sanction to take life in a split second. The next chapter deals with how the transformation from ordinary citizen to police officer is accomplished.

  Notes

  1. The argument that humans have an innate aversion to killing their fellows has been most prominently made in recent years in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Killing in War and Society, by Dave Grossman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).

  Chapter Two

  Basic Training

  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 suppl
emented 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 h
e 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.