We Are the Cops (15 page)

As we’re watching, a truck comes around the corner but didn’t see us – and whilst I said that we were trying to be covert, we were in a black and white police car so we’re hiding in plain sight. Anyway, truck comes around the corner, pulls right up to
them and two guys stand up at the back – on the bed of the truck – with guns and just start firing on the crowd; and we’re talking a hundred feet away from us.

And it was like, ‘Okay, well, we’d better go do our job.’

My trainee is actually driving and that can be a very stressful thing because now I’m trying to deal with what’s going on here but at the same time, putting him in a situation that I don’t know if he’s really ready for yet. But you’ve got to trust them.

So I tell him, ‘You just drive and follow them and I’ll take care of the radio traffic.’

So as soon as the truck sees us, it turned into a vehicle pursuit. The first thing I did was call in the shooting at 15th and Linden. I said that I had no idea if anyone was down but to send some medical that way just in case.

Then the truck takes a right on Bonanza and as he’s coming up you can see them standing at the back of the truck, shooting at us as they make the turn. And you could see like… it was kind of like… like sparks flashing on a Bic lighter. You could see it – pop, pop, pop, pop, pop – as they’re turning. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried firing from a moving vehicle but it’s near impossible.

So they’re going around the corner and they just couldn’t get us, thank God. But I told my trainee, ‘Hey, back off a little bit from them.’

That pursuit went through a residential neighbourhood. They must have been going at least eighty miles an hour. In that part of town, there’s these big, huge gutters that cross the road and every time they hit the gutters, the people in the back of the
truck would fly up out of the truck and then land back in the truck.

I had to tell my trainee, ‘Look, you gotta slow down because first of all we’re going to plough into the side of a car that’s not going to see us coming. Second of all there’s no way we’re going to catch up with that truck.’

Our cars aren’t like trucks. If we hit those gutters we’re going to break our car.

What ended up happening was, they take another turn and just throw all the guns out of the side of the truck. The truck makes a left-hand turn about half a mile down and they hit the last bump so hard that the shooter actually fell out of the truck – the truck’s going like fifty miles an hour. And then his partner fell out of the truck too – they both fell out. One of them, he was just road rash, all the way down his body. He was just screwed up. His partner grabbed him and they hid in the back of an abandoned house in this thick grassy area. The only reason we found them was just because there happened to be another truck parked at the side of the road that looked like the original truck but turned out not to be.

So we stopped in that area and said, ‘This might be that truck.’

We start looking around and there’s blood on the ground that turns out to be from the guy they dragged off. We got the air unit and K-9 unit out there, they set up a perimeter and the air unit found them hiding in the back yard. Then the K-9 unit went in and got them out. There was a lot of luck there and some good
police work. That was pretty crazy. It turned out they had actually shot a guy and murdered him right then and there. He was dead right there.

The funniest thing is, the thing that was going through my mind during all this was, ‘What training lesson can we get out of this?’

We’ll have up to a dozen homicides sometimes, on a bad weekend. A dozen homicides! It’s just crazy. In the summer, as soon as it starts getting warm, people just flip out and start shooting each other. Wintertime, it starts to slow down a little bit but summertime it’s crazy.

And here’s the thing, it would be worse – probably twice as bad – if the medicine wasn’t as good as it is today. Our hospitals are busy, they’re level one trauma. They’re the best at fixing guys with gunshots. I actually know the doctor who’s head of ER Trauma. The guy’s amazing and he’s like, ‘If you bring me someone with a heartbeat, nine times out of ten I can keep them alive, whether he’s been shot ten times or once.’

They’re that good because they’ve had so much practice. They’ll have nights when they get five or ten gunshot victims. And now, if you go into a hospital, they’ll save you. We’ll have guys on the street who are gangbangers and they’ve been shot two or three different times, on two or three different occasions. Multiple times. They’ll show you their scars and say, ‘Yeah, I got shot here, I got shot here, I got shot here and I got shot here.’

So if they don’t hit a vital organ or artery and they get you
to the hospital, they patch you back up and throw you back on the street. So the amount of homicides is a decent indicator but the amount of shootings – they call them aggravated batteries here – the amount of shootings is a better gauge because it’ll actually tell you when some gangbanger
tried
to kill someone else and not just when they actually succeeded. The only difference between the two is the bullet going just half an inch over and hitting you in the heart or something.

There are different levels of respect. Some gangs respect the police a little bit more than others. Some have no respect at all. Some of them, as a tactic, will act like they respect you to your face. They’ll cooperate a lot of times.

You may come to an agreement, you may talk to their shot caller – their boss – and say, ‘Don’t fuck around any more. Don’t fuck around this weekend. You guys put your guns up. Don’t do it by this school. Whatever you do, don’t do anything by this school.’

And they’ll trade you. They’ll be, like, ‘Okay, we’ll cooperate with you here, but when you leave, we’ll do whatever we want over there.’

They act like they’re cooperating with you, respecting you, but behind your back they don’t care.

There are ‘unsaid’ things. You try to keep them from doing stupid shit but as soon as you leave it’s like the mice when the cat’s away.

There are certain things that are more critical – little kids,
schools, a hospital or whatever. So you try to keep those places as safe as possible.

You’ll say, ‘When school’s out, we don’t even want to see you outside your corner. We don’t want to see you fuckin’ around. We don’t want to see you and your gang. Let all the kids go home, whatever, do something over there. Go play Gameboy, go do something. We don’t want you to be on the corner and then another gang comes and does a drive-by on you guys but hits all these little kids that are going home from school.’

But the department doesn’t want you to trade. They don’t want you to do anything anymore, with gangbangers.

So now you try to outsmart them. You try to make them think you’re giving them something when you’re really not. And the thing is, if you appear weak to them, or you try to trade things with them, then they’ll lose respect for you. So you still have to do what you have to do and they understand. I talk to guys’ everyday but if they run and they get caught with something, they’re going to get locked up. They know.

So I get along with them, mostly. There are only a couple of instances where guys really, really hated me, where I actually thought, ‘Man, this guy is crazy enough or bad enough to do something to me.’

There’ve probably been three of four guys that I’ve had second thoughts about. Everybody else, they’re doing it because either they’re too stupid or they’re doing it to make money or they’re doing it because that’s all they know – they’re gangbangers. That’s their family. So, we understand that it’s a game. They
do what they do and we do what we do. They play and we try to catch them. I get along with most everybody. I respect them and they respect me – at least to my face, they do. But they know.

There have always been stories and rumours about police officers who are gangbangers or used to be gangbangers. You’ve always got to worry about that. I’m not a betting man but if I was to bet my paycheque, I’d say yeah, out of ten thousand police officers, I’d say there’s probably a handful that still have some type of tie or association with gangs.

I think part of the reason they join the police is the intel and the power. They think maybe they can be protected if one of their own is the police.

Some just grew up. They were in a gang, maybe didn’t get locked up for any crimes, and they just decided, ‘Hey, I’ll get this job. It’s a paycheque.’

Their heart’s not into being a cop and they just look at it as a paycheque. But once they’re in the police, unfortunately they can do a lot of bad things.

Like with the military, they have a lot of gangs that send their guys into the military on purpose, to get training. Then they come out and they’re trained killers. They’re trained with rifles, pistols and tactics. So you figure that they’re probably doing the same thing with the police.

There are background checks and investigations but maybe it should be a little more thorough, because some people slip through the cracks and become police when they’re just bad.
Well, you know what? These guys are not the police. They were never really the police. They just became the police to further their crimes.

Maybe once every four or five years you’ll hear about an incident where cops go bad. The problem is, you can try to communicate with gangs, you can try to talk to them, but you can’t become their buddy.

You can’t get too close, because the threat of, ‘Well, if you do something for me then I’ll do something for you.’ You know? Like, ‘Ah well, he’s my friend, I know him. I’ve known him for years. Well, not really my friend but I see him every day when I go to work because he’s on the same corner selling drugs.’

You can’t, because that’s where there’s a fine line. You go over the fine line and then it goes bad. It happens, not to a lot, but it happens. Guys start getting involved with gangs for whatever reason – greed, power, whatever, you know? They start going over to the other side. Not good.

Like I say, every four or five years you hear about guys getting arrested for stealing drugs and stealing money from drug dealers or gangs – using their police powers to steal. Who knows, maybe they have friends that they grew up with that are now gangbangers. They became the police but they’re still friends. They get together for whatever reason. Like I said, money drives that a lot; greed drives that a lot. It’s unfortunate, they get together with the gangs – either because they were childhood friends or because they see them every day – and they start getting too close and
start making deals. It’s bad. It’s bad.

We had an incident where one police officer started off protecting a gang’s drug sales. He would work with them in that area a lot, while he was on duty. Then another police officer picked one of his guys up and he was ‘dirty’.

They say, ‘Well, I work for this officer. I’m his informant.’

The officer would say, ‘Yeah, he works for me so give him a break.’

So, protecting them like that. Then he started protecting their shipments. When the big shipment of drugs would come in, he would follow the car. Then he would start delivering the stuff to them. Then he started getting paid for this. He got to the point where he was going down to Florida, protecting the shipments. Then he got to the point where he thought, ‘Why am I gonna work for these guys when I can do the same thing myself?’

So, he started doing that himself, taking most of the profit. But eventually somebody’s going to get locked up for something and the thing is, there’s no honour amongst these guys – it’s very rare.

So, if ‘Joe Blow’ gets locked up for something bad and the cops are like, ‘Well, what can you give us? We want to solve homicides. Do you know any homicide offenders that you have information on? Do you have any robbery offenders? Anything? Burglary? Anybody? What do you have?’

So they’ll say, ‘Well, I know this cop who works with this gang. He does stuff. He deals.’ Whatever.

So they investigated it and it was true. The guy – the officer
– was a piece of shit. After a while he actually started telling the gangs the identity of the undercover police officers – their vehicles, their licence plates, their descriptions. It was just bad.

So that’s the problem, you start having people going to the wrong side and now they could really hurt you. They’re making money but now they could get somebody killed. They could get a lot of people killed, because in narcotics, undercover officers buy dope. So you pull up to a spot – undercover – and they already know you’re the police. And if they think they can get away with it, they’ll kill you.

There are some black guys having a party. They’re all adults, in their early twenties. They’re having a rap contest and one of them didn’t like the way another one rapped and he said, as an insult to the guy, ‘You’re weak-ass alphabet soup.’

So the next thing you know, there’s a fistfight. The victim in this story is actually a pretty big, strong guy – a pretty muscular guy – and he ends up piss-pounding this other guy in a fistfight. The little guy then goes inside his house and comes back out with his cousin and a gun. They walk up to the guy who just piss-pounded him and they shot him right in the neck and severed his carotid artery. I’ve never seen anyone live with a severed carotid artery but he dropped right there and he almost bled out but another guy ran over, put pressure on his wound and saved his life.

He then got to the hospital where they did emergency surgery. The doctor said, ‘You should have been dead. There’s no reason in the world that you should have lived through this.’

But he did live and it was actually the second time that this guy had been shot. He’d been shot once before in the shoulder but this one should have killed him and it didn’t.

He had had a lot of problems in his life and he was not a nice, well-respected kid – he was a hardcore gangster. But I made a connection with him somehow, because I told him over and over, ‘I don’t know why, but God saved your life. He saved it for a purpose. Everybody I talked to – the doctors and everybody else – they all said that you should have been dead.’