Into the Kill Zone Page 7
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 t
his 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.