We Are the Cops, page 7
It was a piece of vertebra that had actually embedded itself into the asphalt. It was 105 degrees that day and so the asphalt’s a little soft and a sliver about the size of a domino had embedded itself right into the asphalt. It was the craziest thing in the world.
It didn’t bother me a bit though. I guess I looked at it more from a professional standpoint of, ‘Well, someone here needs to fix this problem and I guess that’s me.’
It wasn’t any more graphic than a really serious car wreck where a body has just been shredded apart. I mean, there was a moment of, ‘Ooh! That’s different!’ – but it certainly didn’t affect me in any kind of negative way. You have to learn to really compartmentalise in this job. But at the same time you have to learn that there needs to be an outlet for that somewhere – a healthy outlet – because if you keep all that stuff inside, eventually it’s going to affect you.
****
People think that cops are pretty peculiar, especially as they come by a gruesome traffic accident and the cop’s standing at the side of the road eating a donut, laughing. They must think that we are monsters.
But how else do you deal with it, you know? How else do you deal with it day in, day out? You’ve got to become indifferent to it. You can’t let it get to you every day or you can’t do the job. So you’ve got to ignore it and if somebody tells you a funny story, you’re going to laugh about it. You’re certainly not laughing at the body but you’re like, ‘Hey, you should have seen what I was dealing with last night!’ It’s funny and you laugh and people come by and they see that and they think we’re monsters. But you’ve got to be indifferent to it; you can’t let it get to you.
****
I’ve seen some bad accidents. There’s one where I’d love to get hold of the pictures and show them to my kids and say, ‘Hey! This is why you wear a seatbelt.’
This guy was driving one of those OJ Broncos. Like an older, bigger style Bronco. You remember when OJ Simpson was driving that white Bronco when he got arrested? It was like that, only bigger. He was coming down some winding road up in North Bend, it’s a town out east, in the mountains. It was winter and it was raining and there was maybe some sleet also. It was a pretty steep hill and as he came around the corner he probably went too far into the side of the road and then he must have over-corrected or something because he rolled the Bronco onto its side, although he didn’t roll it completely over. He over-corrected and all it did was slide onto its passenger side. But the road was so steep that it just kept going. And this was like four-thirty, five o’clock in the morning, so he was on his way to work. He wasn’t drunk or anything like that – just over-corrected and it rolled onto its side.
He obviously wasn’t wearing a seatbelt because he got thrown from the driver’s seat into the passenger seat. I don’t know what it’s called but where the top of the door and the roof connect when they’re shut, well, it bent back a little bit somehow and his head got stuck outside of it and then it was like a cheese grater all the way down the side of the road. This car probably skid a couple of hundred feet and you could see where his head first started hitting the road because you could find chunks of hair and skull and stuff like that. But that was the only mark he had on him. He was still alive when I got there but he was making those gurgling sounds – I call it the ‘death gurgle’.
Literally, if the guy had been wearing a seatbelt, when that car stopped sliding he could have hit the button on his seatbelt and fallen down on the side or braced himself before he undid his belt and crawled out. He probably would have had a sore neck at worst. He couldn’t have been going more than twenty-five or thirty miles per hour but since he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt he got thrown onto the other side and it just cheese-grated his head all the way down.
He died. He was dead before the ambulance got there. But it’s one of those where I want to show the pictures to my kids and say, ‘Listen son, listen daughter, this is why you wear a seatbelt.’
If he had been wearing his seatbelt he wouldn’t have had a fucking mark on him. He may have spilt his coffee at most, although he might have been able to hold onto that too.
****
I went to this accident and it was one of those where, even if they had been wearing seatbelts, they wouldn’t have done anything, they wouldn’t have helped. There were four drunk teenagers in a car that came around a corner and hit a giant oak tree that was a foot away from the road – not very far at all. They must have been hauling ass because the oak tree tore the car into several pieces and all four of them went in different directions from the car.
When we got there three of them were dead and one of them was laying there alive – it was a girl. Her guts were hanging out of her and she’s holding onto them; it’s almost as if she’s trying to put them back into her stomach. She’s laying there yelling at us to shoot her because she was in so much pain.
She was screaming, ‘Just shoot me! Just kill me!’
It was disgusting. Just nasty.
The other officer I was with ended up talking to this girl saying, ‘You’re going to be fine.’ Even though we both know that she’s not. She’s going to be dead, hopefully sooner rather than later, for her sake.
And you’re thinking, ‘Why can’t I just put her out of her misery?’ I’m not a doctor but her guts are hanging out. We all know she’s not going to make it. And I hate the fact that she is going to lay here and suffer. I can’t be honest with her and say, ‘You’re fucking dead. Just give up. Just give up.’
But I can remember her very distinctly, screaming, ‘Please, just shoot me.’
The ambulance came and they took her but I don’t think she even made it to the hospital. Then they just put sheets over the other people and we sat at either end of the road and probably played video games on our computers or something, because when we get accidents like that, we don’t even have to write anything. You have to write about a paragraph long sentence that says: I came here, this is what I saw, such-and-such detective took the lead.
So when we got done, we closed the road and the accident team – a speciality unit – came out and did all their diagrams and all the kind of crap they do for those fatality accidents. All we had to do was close the road, basically. It’s a simple report for us but it usually takes the accident unit several hours to finish their report – especially with four people.
But I’m sure we sat there and made jokes about it over our Nextel phones and stuff like that. Joking is definitely a coping mechanism for it.
But you’ve got things to do when you see those types of things, rather than just think about how nasty it is. I don’t ever really think about it. At that time I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to get some flares out on the road. I’ve got shit to do!’
But it was horrible. It was one of those times when I thought, ‘why can’t we just shoot her?’
I don’t want to shoot somebody, you know, but this girl is not going to make it. We’ll shoot a deer on the side of the road or something like that but this girl wasn’t going to make it so why did she need to lie there and suffer? It wasn’t very long until the ambulance showed up but it’s not like she stops suffering just because they arrived. I’m sure she suffered right up until she finally died.
****
I was in what they call ‘free week’; after you go through the academy you go out to different precincts and ride around to get to know different areas of the county. I was riding with this officer and it was literally my first day. Nothing had happened all day. Nothing was going on. We were up in a ritzy, sleepy part of the county, in a suburb of Seattle. It was a day shift - 6am to 2pm. I don’t even remember if we’d gone on a call that day. It was just dead; it was boring, nothing going on.
As we were driving back to the precinct, the tones came on the radio – the tones beep three or four times. Usually it means that something big has just happened – something important or some kind of major incident. So, the tones go off and in that area, the precinct that I’m working in, it’s literally hundreds of square miles. It’s big. So the call could be fifty miles away from where we’re at or, as it turned out, it could literally be the next block.
So, it’s my very first day, seven-and-a-half hours into it and we’re driving back to the precinct, the tones go off and the dispatcher says, ‘A suicide has just occurred at…’ and then gave the address.
The guy that I’m riding with goes, ‘Oh shit! That’s right around the corner!’
And so I’m like, ‘Finally! Something’s going to happen.’
So then the details start coming in and it’s about a guy who had stuck a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. And his girlfriend saw him do it and she was the one who had called.
My partner hits the lights and sirens and literally, honest to God, it was right around the corner; he made the right and it was the first house on the left. We get out of the car and right before we go through the front door, he puts his hand out and stops me and goes, ‘If you don’t ever learn anything else from me, if you ever go into one of these calls again, the first thing you need to do is look up.’
And I’m like, ‘What the hell does that mean? Why do I have to look up?’
But then we go inside and I look up. There are brains and pieces of this guy’s skull and all that kind of crap hanging from the ceiling; it’s like, dripping down. And because we were there within two or three minutes of this happening, there was still crap falling from the ceiling – his skull and chunks of his brain and stuff like that. So I remembered never to go into a house and not look up!
Then you look down and here’s what’s left of this guy’s face and he was laying there and I can remember looking and you could see through his mouth. He had put the shotgun in his mouth and then blew the top of his head off. So you could look through his mouth and I can remember looking to where the roof of his mouth should have been and into where his head and brain and all that stuff should be, and there was the wadding packing from the shotgun shell in the centre of his head and his eyeball was lying on top of it. I don’t remember a single thing other than that. I don’t remember if I had to write any paperwork, I don’t remember going home. I just remember that eyeball looking at me.
And the smell! There was this odd smell in the air. I don’t know if it was a mixture of gunpowder and brain or whatever, but to me it smelled like a ski-lift ticket. The back of a lift ticket has a sort of glue or something on it and whenever I get a ski-lift ticket it smells exactly the same. Every time I get one of those, I picture that eyeball and the shotgun wadding. That smell makes it come back to me.
But I was thinking, ‘I hope this shit happens every day!’ I’m kind of gory when it comes to that kind of stuff. The weird thing is, if I’m at home and we’ve got the Surgery Channel on the television or I’m flipping through the channels and I see someone operating on somebody’s eye, I can’t watch that shit, that grosses me out. But at work, you’ve got shit you need to do, you know? There’s other stuff to think about besides that eyeball and that shotgun wading looking right back at me.
So yeah, that was day one.
5
SWAT
When listening back to the recordings I made while speaking to officers from SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), I usually had to turn the volume up, close my eyes and really concentrate in order to hear what they were telling me. For some reason – and I’m sure this is just a coincidence – almost all of the interviews I conducted with SWAT officers took place in bars and involved large amounts of beer. The loud music and riotous background hum was an almost constant soundtrack to these SWAT conversations.
When there is something that requires more than just a standard police response or where the circumstances are so dangerous or require specialist skills and equipment, SWAT are called in. These are the men and women whose job it is to go through a door, very often knowing that there is an almost one hundred per cent chance that on the other side is someone who is armed with powerful weapons and is not planning to go quietly, maybe even a lunatic with a death wish. I did wonder if it was the nature of their extreme job that led so many of them to pull me into a bar to talk – a kind of work hard/play hard thing. (And play hard we did, so hard in fact, that on one occasion I missed a very important Thanksgiving event that had been laid on especially for me by an entire precinct. The officer who had arranged it hasn’t spoken to me since, understandably.)
The very fact that officers would aspire to take on such a highly skilled yet dangerous job is something that should be admired. They were some of the most friendly, humble, down to earth and welcoming of all the different types of officer I met. And yes, they’re also nuts. Perhaps this combination had something to do with their chosen role and the type of personality required to take on a job where you knew that if you were being called upon, it was because the situation was so dangerous that even regular, fully armed police officers were not able to deal with it. They are the best at what they do and so they have nothing to prove.
After speaking with SWAT officers I was left with the impression that their job was extremely dangerous, full of politics but quite often, great fun. I was also left with a killer hangover.
I’ll go anywhere in this city, but I have a gun.
****
We had an incident where this guy was walking around and the police notice him because he’s wearing a long trench coat and it’s summertime. He gets pulled over by these plain-clothes police officers who were just working the street – you know, they got a little hunch.
They’re like, ‘Let’s talk to him.’
So they turn around to go back and they’re about to get out of their car when he starts shooting at them. He shoots one guy in the foot. They chase him; they’re shooting at him and he’s shooting back at them. They run down the street, down an alley and they chase him into a back yard. He’s shooting a lot of bullets, to the point where the officers thought he had an automatic weapon, because he would lay down fifteen to twenty rounds, stop and reload.
He had hundreds of rounds on him and several magazines. He’d shoot, reload, shoot a bunch more rounds and that way he kept the police away. But they formed a perimeter and they called us – SWAT – and we had just finished a twelve-hour job on some crazy guy who had barricaded himself in a garage with a knife.
I had just gotten home, ready to jump in the shower, when my friend calls me and he’s like, ‘Hey, there’s a job going on right now.’
And I’m like, ‘Get the fuck outta here! You’re kidding me?’
He’s like, ‘No. Turn on the police radio.’
I turn the radio on and could hear the police, with gunshots in the background. I put my clothes back on and start heading down there. I got there and the guy was still shooting. It was half-an-hour, forty-five minutes of him shooting back and forth at the police. And they still thought that he had an automatic rifle simply because of the rapid rate that he was shooting at.
So, we take up the perimeter. We get our ‘Bearcat’, an armoured personnel carrier, to block the alley and we use that as our cover. We probably had fifteen guys there already and he was stuck in the back yard, underneath this rear porch. There were people in the building that we couldn’t get to and they couldn’t get out but we managed to evacuate the people in the houses next to them.
We had just gotten that done and as soon as that happened, the guy comes out of the porch, walks down a gangway, probably a hundred feet and then he turns a corner into the alley. He sees the big Bearcat and then he sees the police who are right around the corner of it and he starts shooting. Luckily we had probably about six guys there and they flared out. One guy got shot in the vest, although he didn’t realise it. The bullet hit a magazine – like an M4 magazine – and got stopped by the vest. About three or four, or maybe five guys were able to flare out and return fire. We don’t know how many times he got shot, because he got shot by one handgun and about four rifles. The coroners said that they stopped counting holes after about forty. Like, forty entrance wounds. The guy literally stood up for about five or ten seconds shooting and he kept taking the rounds until he finally collapsed. Even when he was down, he still had the gun in his hand. But finally he was dead.
He had a bible in one hand, a gun in the other and he still had at least a hundred rounds of nine millimetre and magazines. Just off his rocker. Just walking down the street with a bible in his hand and a gun.
Obviously with the amount of ammunition he had, he was planning to do something, because normally you walk down the street with a handgun in your pocket and maybe one magazine, maybe two at the most. You don’t walk around with three hundred rounds of ammo on you.
****
Dogs are fun but they’re also a pain in the ass. They cause a lot of problems for police on search warrant. A lot of SWAT teams have issues with dogs. They try everything; we’ve had teams use fire extinguishers, pepper spray, some use a taser against them, other places immediately shoot them. But here’s the problem with shooting them – the bullet may not stop inside the dog. They may go right through them and then you’ve got to worry about what’s behind them, what’s below, what’s above, what’s further out, what’s in the back yard. Have you got kids in the back yard or in the next house? You’ve got to worry about shooting your own guys. If you shot this dog in the sternum and the round ricochets and your guys are over there, you could have a problem.
So we’ve tried a lot of different things. What we’ve found is flash-bangs seem to work ninety-five percent of the time. You throw a flash-bang at a dog – even if it’s a vicious dog, a biting dog, a fighting dog – it’ll run. It’ll try to leave this world; it’ll try to go through a wall to get away. Seriously, it just freaks them out. One-hundred-and-fifty pound pit bulls – vicious dogs – you’ll find them cowering under a bed at the other end of the house. For us it’s great, because it allows us to clear the house for bad guys and once we get to that room where that dog is hiding, we’ll contain it or noose it, put it in a cage or walk it out. Sometimes we’ll just lock it in a bathroom.
