Hero To Zero 2nd edition (14 page)

Not only was Cope academically gifted, he looked the part as well. Broad shoulders, square jaw, perfect teeth, and steely blue eyes. He stood at 6’1” and weighed about 195 lbs. He was very physically fit, and had a swagger about him when he entered any room. He was a poster-boy state trooper.

Cope decided to try to specialize and distinguish himself further by becoming an SME (Subject Matter Expert). He asked for and was eventually granted a position on the state’s DUI (driving under the influence) enforcement squad.

The squad was a small unit of highly trained and motivated troopers that would be tasked with saturating an area and stopping any driver who could be DUI. The squad would swoop into the area and saturate the streets, stopping everything that moved. Every car, no matter what the occupants were doing, was a target. The tactic was questionably legal, to say the least, but it was very successful, and netted the squad an impressive record of arrest statistics.

Cope excelled in the unit, and was in the top five percent of the performers. He was living his dream, making a difference in lowering the number of drunks on the road, making his home state safe. I know that it sounds a bit corny, but this is what he had dreamed of, and now it was coming true. Cope had aspirations to move up the food chain, to sergeant, maybe, and then lieutenant; if he played his cards right, the sky was the limit.

The beginning of the end for Chris Cope was one night while the DUI squad was patrolling our city. They had arrived and begun the usual saturation of our streets, looking for DUI’s and stopping every vehicle.

They were not entirely welcome in the city. They had no idea who they were stopping and what kind of danger they might have stepped into with this slash-and-burn mentality. One minute you were stopping an elderly couple on their way home from a movie, the next a carload of gang members armed and looking for a fight. That was the reality in our streets. Anyone you stopped could be your next gun battle.

We took it seriously. State troopers did not always recognize the danger of the people they stopped until they were knee-deep in shit. Cope was the exception, however. He was as sharp as any trooper I have ever met.

This particular night, Cope had a ride-along, a college student who had taken a class at the local university and elected to ride with a state trooper for the practical experience, actually seeing the job that they did from the front seat of the car.

Cope had been out on patrol about four hours with the ride-along. They had stopped and assisted two other troopers who had found DUIs, and were looking for their own when they decided to stop a car full of juveniles. The driver was a young woman who had failed to signal as she changed lanes in front of Cope and his decked-out state cruiser.

Cope called out on the radio that he was stopping the car, and gave his location. He was outnumbered, as there were at least four or five occupants, so he decided to call for backup. Cope walked up to the driver and spoke to her, asking her for license and registration. He looked around the interior of the car and later said that he got a bad feeling about the occupants. Cope obtained the documents from the driver and walked back to his car, checking over his shoulder to make sure he was not about to be ambushed.

While he ran the information, another state trooper pulled up; the two troopers talked and watched the occupants fidget inside the car. They decided that they wanted to pull the occupants out one by one from the back seat forward. Once they had most of the occupants removed, they went up to remove the front passenger. He was a Hispanic male and a gang member recently released from prison. In a short ten seconds, Cope’s whole world would begin to change. The gang member had a gun and tried to shoot Cope. He failed.

Cope was highly proficient with his firearm. He was not the average trooper. He saw the weapon, immediately yelled “GUN,” and pulled his own weapon. All of this was done in an instant; Cope’s handgun cleared his holster less than one second after the gang member pulled and pointed his own gun. That is incredibly fast. But like I said before, Cope was no ordinary trooper. He shot several rounds into the gang member, and was able to survive the shooting with no injuries.

To make a long story short, Cope had survived an ambush. His decked-out state patrol cruiser was equipped with a dash camera, and the entire stop was recorded. Cope’s tactics were by-the-numbers perfect. Soon he was well-known to the entire state patrol as one of their own who had survived street combat and done it in an exemplary fashion. Again the sky appeared to be the limit for Trooper Cope.

What no one tells you about shootings is the effect that they have on you down the road. Cop training is about surviving the moment, surviving the battle, doing it by the numbers, and if you live through the actual experience, you become one of a very small group of law enforcement officers in this country. A lot of cops are involved in shootings, and a lot die.

Unfortunately some do something in the heat of the battle that the laws of their state frown on, and that lead them to be looked at as criminals themselves. They lose everything in the brief, furious struggle to survive.

Cope survived physically, and appeared to have come out of the event emotionally stable as well. He was recognized by the governor of the state for his heroism, and given a medal at the state capital. The awards ceremony was publicized and on the evening news as well. Cope was as a recognized hero. The gang member, on the other hand, was found to be criminally responsible for the shooting and sent back to prison, still carrying one of the bullets from Cope’s weapon in his chest.

Things appeared to be rolling along smoothly for Cope. He became the treasurer for the local troopers’ benefit association. It was largely a political position, which was one of the many boxes to check on your way up the food chain, necessary to gain promotion in the agency.

But I think something had changed in Cope that night that he himself was barely aware of. Looking back, I’m not sure where it all started to unravel for him, but the position he took in the benefit association would be his downfall.

Cope was required to manage a pretty sizable sum of money, considering his was a volunteer position. The temptation became too much for him, and he started to skim small amounts from the bank account he managed. When he was finally caught, Cope was found to have taken over $27,000.

There would be no rescuing him from this event. He was publicly humiliated, criminally charged for the theft, and decertified as a state trooper. He could never again be a cop, anywhere, ever. His story was an amazing example of what I saw over and over again in the field. He fell in a very public manner.

I have no proof for what I believe happened to Cope, but I saw it over and over again. After a cop has been in a shooting, he or she changes mentally.

Some take more risks, feeling invincible or perhaps seeking thrills, trying to relive the adrenaline rush they experienced in the life-or-death battle. Maybe it’s different for each person; I don’t know. I do know that the change almost always occurs, and almost always ends their careers.

Cope’s story was not over yet. Here’s another example of the change that Cope experienced.

Surprisingly, Cope eventually experienced a change of heart regarding his assailant in the shooting. At the time of the shooting, he very much had an us-and-them mentality. This is very common among cops. Basically it means that we, the cops, are different from them, the criminals. Cope came to realize what any veteran cop already knows: we are all in this together. People make really bad decisions on a particular day and for a particular reason, and may never make those same decisions again. This doesn’t make them bad people, but it does mean, in this context, that they broke the law. Cope got that. He came to feel it in a way he could never have understood before.

He too had broken the law by making a really bad decision regarding the benefit association’s treasury. He empathized with the gang member he had shot, and actually started to petition the state parole board to release the young man. This did not make Cope popular with his former peers, or with the cops in the area. Cope didn’t care. He had a different perception now of what it meant to be a part of the solution.

I WAS AT THE TAIL
end of my career when I ran into Lieutenant Ethan. He was an intense, brooding guy who rarely had anything to say to anyone. Occasionally he would stop and talk to me about the assignment I was on and ask how things were going. Not that he really cared, but it was his job to ask.

Lieutenant Ethan had two very real passions. One was his immaculate black Lexus; the other was handguns. Especially high-end hand guns. If you wanted to see his brooding, moody side disappear, all you had to do was mention either the Lexus or his favorite handgun, the Kimber .45 caliber semi-auto. Lieutenant Ethan would light up, smiling, and begin to tell you his latest account of shooting on the range. Almost every weekend he took the Kimber out to do just that. He loved the gun like a K-9 handler loves his dog: they were inseparable. The only times I saw him happy and smiling were when he was talking about either the gun or the car; the rest of the time, he was surly.

Lieutenant Ethan was the supervisor of two completely different units. One was the incredibly undermanned detective unit, and the other the Community-Oriented Policing (COPS) unit. I was in the COPS unit. He was tasked with overseeing our events, and would provide feedback to the administration on what we had accomplished and future directions in which we would be headed.

The COPS unit was very dynamic and had a lot of public visibility. We did not make arrests or crunch crime in the usual manner; instead, we were proactive, and tried to find problems before they occurred and then squash them. This made our efforts hard to substantiate to the brass. It also made us very unpopular with the rest of the cops. We were warm and fuzzy with the public, while they had to battle every night. Our job was to improve the public perception of the department and of the efforts made to keep the peace, while a patrol officer’s job was to step into the battle that is the streets and hold the line against criminals. So, two very different perspectives on the same community.

Being in charge of detectives can be challenging, to say the least. For the most part, they are extremely strong and driven personalities, and hate anyone to tell them what to do. They already know what to do, and yet still require oversight.

Detectives also have the really unenviable job of investigating other cops. If a cop crossed the line in our department, a detective would be assigned to investigate the situation and then provide feedback to Lieutenant Ethan and the rest of the administration as to what had occurred and what the department’s liability was in the incident.

Cops are constantly being investigated for reports of abuse or misconduct that have not taken place. However occasionally, as you have seen in this book, there are some reports that come in that are so outrageous, they seem impossible. Detectives are tasked with investigating all of them, and sometimes they find that not only are the outrageous things possible, but they actually happened. Here is one example:

Michelle Romero was an outstanding K-9 handler. She had dreamed of being a K-9 handler ever since she had watched her father train police dogs as a child. Being a cop ran in the family, and she was a natural fit for the job. She had no illusions about the requirements of the job—the long hours spent training and caring for the dog, the late-night call-outs to assist with search warrants and building searches after someone had broken into a business. She had finally reached her dream of being a dual-purpose K-9 handler, and applied herself to the demands of the position with a determination that had not been matched by her peers.

She felt that she had a lot to live up to. Her dad was sort of a living legend in the local K-9 community, and she wanted to prove herself more than a match for the old man. Being a dual-purpose handler meant that she and her dog were certified in narcotics detection and apprehension of escaped criminals. This required a talented handler and an even more exceptional K-9. Both the handler and the dog are certified as a team. They must be able to work together as one unit.

Michelle and her K-9 were an incredible team, and they won awards nationwide. They were nationally recognized and certified. Michelle and her K-9 brought home trophy after trophy from police dog competitions, and more important, they never lost a case in court. The team also had the state’s largest narcotics bust on record. The drugs had been located during a traffic stop Michelle had conducted after becoming nationally certified in drug interdiction techniques.