We Are the Cops (9 page)

I say to my ATL, ‘I think I took one in the nuts, dude. It just bounced off my flap though.’

Later he told me, ‘Dude, you were white as a ghost.’ I don’t know that I’ve been shot but my body does.

So I’m sitting there and we’re looking and the dude doesn’t come out. So we get back to the van. One of our guys is back there. He ended up taking one through his thumb and into his thigh rig, where we carry spare magazines. It hit one of his magazines and goes in. He also took one to the chest but his vest stopped it and the doctors were working on him – we have Tac-Docs. The medic from our search and rescue team is there as well and we also have tactical physicians that work with our teams.

As they’re working on him I could feel moisture dripping down my leg. So I go to one of my guys and pick my flap up and say, ‘Dude, am I bleeding?’

He looks at me and his eyes get big, you know? And he’s like, ‘Oh yes! Sergeant, you’re bleeding!’

I go, ‘Ah, motherfucker!’

One of my biggest fears is a femoral artery bleed. So I go, ‘Doc, when you get done over there, come check me, make sure it’s not a femoral bleed.’

Well, the doc comes over and finally I go, ‘I think I’ve been
hit. I think I’m bleeding.’

He says, ‘Let me cut your pants off and see.’

So, he comes out with this fucking knife and I go, ‘Whoa! Whoa! Doc, hold on.’ I reach into my pants, cup my balls and say, ‘Okay, cut away.’

He cuts the pants off and says, ‘Oh yeah, but it’s not the femoral because it would have been squirting if it were.’

So we’re sitting there and the ambulance comes around and they load the guys up and one of the other officers comes over and says, ‘Hey, you need to go to hospital.’

I go, ‘Dude, no. I’m cool. I’m all right. The Ambulance is full. I’m good.’

He’s like, ‘No, you need to go to the hospital. Doc, tell him!’

And the doc goes, ‘Oh yeah. You need to go to the hospital.’

So I go, ‘Really doc? I’m all right. I feel okay. I’m good to go.’

But he says, ‘No, you need to go to the hospital.’

So I call out, ‘ATL, you’re in fucking charge. I’m out of here.’

They stacked the three of us up like wood, in the ambulance and fucking rolled us out of there and down to the hospital. At the hospital we’re all laughing and joking at each other and making fun of one of the guys for being fat and all this kind of shit.

But I’m stressed about my guys going down – that’s my concern. I’m calling their wives, making sure they don’t hear about it some other way.

I’m saying, ‘Hey, your husband’s been shot but he’s okay.’

You know, ‘blah, blah, blah’. And all of a sudden my phone beeps and it’s my wife calling me. And she goes, ‘Hey, are you okay?’

And I go, ‘What do you mean?’

She says, ‘We heard three SWAT guys were shot.’

And I go, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’re okay. I’ve been shot. I’m okay sweetheart but I’m on the other line, let me call you back.’

And she’s like, ‘What!?’

So anyway, all that stress and all that concern is nothing. But low and behold, now homicide – who normally investigate our ‘officer involved’ shootings – comes out there to investigate this thing, even though we’re the only ones who got shot. We purposefully didn’t fire back because we knew there were kids in there. We restricted our action – didn’t do anything – just rescued our own guys.

A Violent Crime detective comes up to me afterwards and he goes, ‘Hey, did any of you guys fire any rounds?’

And I go, ‘No.’

The guy in the house was shooting with a 40 cal, so we all got hit with 40 cal. The detective says, ‘But we found a 9mm casing at the scene.’

And so I go, ‘Dude the only people that had 9’s would have been me and my ATL. I guess if anybody had fired a sympathetic discharge, it would have been me, because I got shot. But I didn’t know I had been fucking shot. We didn’t fire no 9mm rounds. Everybody else had two-two’s and two-three’s. None of us fired.’

He goes, ‘Okay, cool.’

We come out of hospital. When I went down, the bullet grazed my left leg. It hit my groin flap but it was low enough that it pushed the flap up, grazed my left leg and stuck. I’ve still got
the bullet in here, between my femoral and femur, still in my leg. I finally get released that night – we all got released that night – and I’m at home now.

I’m at home and the fucking homicide detective calls me. He says, ‘Hey, do you think I can come interview you?’

I go, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? Now? I just got home. Okay, if you need to fucking come here, come, but I’ll tell you what, I’ll meet you outside. I’ll come sit in your car. I don’t want to concern my kids.’

So he comes and he starts interviewing me about the same thing.

He says, ‘Did you guys fire any rounds?’

I say, ‘No, nobody on my team fired any rounds into that structure. We restricted our actions. We fucking could have, but we didn’t.’

So the investigation, instead of investigating this shit-bag who shot three of us, they fucking glossed right over it and their focus of the investigation is on SWAT who they believed fired back and is lying about it. So now Homicide goes on this big fucking investigation about this spent round.

It turns out that what happened was, when the officer took the round in his low-ride holster with the magazine, it hits one of the bullets, put some burning ember in there which then ignites a round, fires it, pops it out of the mag-holder and hits the other officer in the back. So here was a mission where we did the exact right thing, sucked up bullets, did everything that is right and then we’re still fucking being investigated.

Later we end up going to court with a brand new judge who was a thirty-year public defendant. He chastises us on our excessive use of force! Dude, I swear to God! We did everything right! The local news media picks up on it and talks about how excessive we were. They say, ‘Imagine being woken up in the middle of the night! This guy’s a family man; he’s trying to protect his family.’

The truth of the matter was, we had more concern for this guy’s kids than he did. He was a fucking dope dealer who was pimping out his own wife!

That’s when I realised that this job fucking sucks. I only do this job because of these guys – my guys – you know what I mean? And because of the old adage, ‘if not us, than who?’

Right after that, we had a hostage rescue where we rescued a baby. Let me tell you, you come running out with that baby in your arms and it’s then that you realise, ‘this is what it’s about’. It’s not about the bullshit.

A few years ago on Thanksgiving we get called to a barricade situation. There was a party, couple of guys draw guns, they start shooting at each other, one guy runs out, he runs into somebody else’s apartment where a lady lives, locks the door and holds her hostage.

So now the police get called and he starts shooting at them out of the window. A couple of our SWAT guys got called and they get there and he’s still shooting at the police. So they call everybody; they call the whole SWAT team. We start heading to
the south side and set up on this thing. It lasted thirty hours. We spent the whole night there – all of Thanksgiving – everybody on our team. We froze our asses off because we were outside. The negotiators tried to negotiate with him for hours. They were talking for like, twenty hours, trying to convince the guy to let her go. We tried to figure out that maybe, if he falls asleep, maybe we could do an entry, but he’s talking to the negotiators and they seem like they’re getting somewhere, like he might give her up. So they keep negotiating; they don’t allow us to go in.

After like, thirty hours, we set up a plan to make an entry in case we hear gunshots or he says something like, ‘I’m gonna kill her right now.’ We make a plan to use distraction devices and hit both the front door and the back door and break the windows trying to get in. But just then we hear a little ‘pop’.

The guys are like, ‘Did you hear that?’

It might have sounded like a gunshot.

So they try to communicate with the guy. No sound, nothing. No response. So we’re ordered to make our entry. We tried to make an entry but it took probably forty-five seconds to get in there. He had already killed her and killed himself. So there were at least two shots. We thought we heard one of them, the other one we didn’t even hear - it might have been muffled.

It’s hard to say, could you have done something? Maybe you should have gone in there sooner? Then you start second guessing your bosses. Should you go in, instead of negotiating? But there are certain ways things have to go and as long as they feel that they’re open to negotiations, they’ll try to negotiate rather
than try to go in there, assault the building and try to save the hostage.

Well, here’s the thing – and at that time and at this point in time, it’s still the same – we don’t have the benefit of explosive breaching. Our department, it’s good, it’s a big department, a lot of good things about it, but being progressive? We’re not as progressive as let’s say, the West Coast departments or some of the Southern departments in our country but especially the West Coast. The West Coast is very progressive. But this is the Midwest and because of the political atmosphere they never allowed our department to train, obtain and use explosive breaching. But a lot of it had to do with maybe getting lucky with certain situations or maybe not running into that type of situation where you absolutely needed explosive breaching.

I think that job – where the girl died who was a totally innocent victim – I think if we were to have had explosive breaching at that point, we could have set them up on both doors, we could have set them up against the walls in the bedroom that they were in – and you know, they do it all over the place – and as soon as it detonates you put a gun in there; within three or four seconds you have a gun in that room.

But we just forced our way in mechanically – ram, sledgehammer – then basically pushed our way in. He had a hallway and he had a door in this hallway and what he did was, he lodged a chair right in there and it fit perfectly. He had so much time that he stacked it up to the ceiling with furniture. That was one door. The other door, he put a refrigerator and stove and a couple of
other pieces of furniture against it. So literally, once we beached the lock mechanically, we just had to push our way in; push these refrigerators, stove, cabinet and chairs away to get in. We had guys go in towards the bedroom, we had guys going towards the other way and we weren’t a hundred percent sure which room he was in. The guys who went into the bedroom found her, the hostage. She was dead. He was also dead.

The guys that went to the left, went towards the front door and they literally had to pick up a couch and move it for that door to even open. There was no way you could open it without explosive breaching. But it’s political; people are afraid of explosives. They’re like, ‘Explosives! Wow! That’s scary! That’s dangerous. We don’t want to allow that in the city.’

The bosses in the department, they’re along with us. They understand now. Five years ago, they weren’t. Our own department bosses were totally against having explosive breaching. Now, bosses have changed, they understand that there’s a need for explosive breaching but now it’s the politicians. You’ve got to convince the politicians. You’ve got to give a presentation and explain this is what the explosives are used for; you can defeat doors and walls without injuring anybody on the inside, without injuring anybody on the outside and it should only be used for the worst or the extreme emergencies where you have to get in there, like now.

So it’s difficult, bureaucracy. Although now, I think the train is starting to move a little bit but it still takes a lot of work, a lot of convincing and we still don’t have it. We’re working at it; we’re
trying to pressure as many of the people that we have to pressure and convince, to get it. But up until now, we still don’t have it.

So now, if we had the same situation today and I was in charge or I had something to do with the decision-making, I would recommend strongly that we call another team in, like, let’s say, the state police. They use explosives. I would say call them. I would say, let them take over this job. Let them handle it. Let them get in, whatever which way they can or have them come in and let them help us. Because in certain situations, you need explosive breaching and we don’t have it yet.

Do you know the old adage that ‘truth is stranger than fiction’? Well that’s so true. I mean we’ve done things that I would never have imagined. If the department didn’t know who else to call, they would call us – SWAT. If it was risky, we would be the ones to go do it, right? So we did lots of shit, undercover stuff, all kinds of things. And every mission’s a problem; how do I solve it? How do I go about solving it?

There was a triple homicide, an execution-style slaying that was drug related. They killed these kids over drugs.

The department gets a call from a dude, who goes, ‘Hey, that guy who killed those three people, I know where he is.’

So then we get a call from the department, ‘Hey, this guy knows where this triple murder suspect is, says he can take you to him. The trouble is, it’s out in a wooded, overgrown swamp.’

I’ll never forget it because it was the eeriest thing in the world. So we get the word that this dude’s supposed to go out and
pick this guy up. He’s telling us everything about the guy. He tells us, ‘He keeps the gun that he did it with, in his waistband.’ He’s tellin’ us all this kind of shit. He goes, ‘The trouble is, he lives out in the middle of the swamp. He’s expecting me out there tonight, at midnight, to pick him up and take him down to California.’

So we’re like, ‘Fuck it, we’ll do it.’

We roll up and we see this CI – Confidential Informer – and he’s about the same size as one of our officers, so we get the officer to dress up in this dude’s flannel shirt. We’re driving his truck – and he’s a carpet layer so he’s got carpet in the back of his truck – and we have to drive out in the middle of this swamp. He tells us about this special horn signal: beepbeepbeepbeep – beepbeep, you know? It’s split, and that’s the signal for the guy to come running out to the truck.