We Are the Cops (20 page)

I lost a marriage to it. I was young. I had just started in this business – this job. My wife was young as well. We had just moved to Las Vegas. Nobody had ever really just sat down and talked to me about family and even if they had, I’m not sure I
would have understood at the time because of the maturity level – I was twenty-three or twenty-four years old and our marriage just dissolved.

I realised when I looked back on it a few years later, it was really kind of my fault and I didn’t realise it at the time but it was because I was bringing all this stuff home, from work. I was used to being the alpha dog everywhere I went at work, because everywhere you go you have to be the alpha dog, not only with bad guys but people you work with, so you get used to your interpersonal relationships being all about competition and contest. If I’m not always asserting myself or showing my manhood – or womanhood, whatever the case may be – over people that I work with, then I’m failing. Well, I got so used to that in my interpersonal connections at work, I brought that home with me and so my wife and I would argue all the time. There were all kinds of problems.

Eventually she just left. I didn’t realise why. Of course I blamed her at the time. I blamed life and everything else and I didn’t realise until about two or three years later that maybe I need to take a serious look at myself to see why that happened. Then I realised it was just me.

I’ve slowly tried to make provisions to fix that and I think I’ve done a pretty good job. Now I’m trying to bring this knowledge into the academy when I’m up there as an instructor. My role at the academy is kind of like a drill instructor, like a troop handler. When I have time with my recruits I emphasise police work but I also try to emphasise the interpersonal things that happen off
duty, that are far more important than your work, and that’s your family. I learnt the hard way.

I’m on my third wife. Part of it is the hours, working holidays, the things you see; you tend to bring it home with you, you don’t mean to but you do. Death. I worked in 9/11. I was there when the second building came down. I was a brand new sergeant and was put on the morgue detail. I was assigned and I was there for two days straight. Never went home. You see that death and you come home – and it’s good to be home – but you tend to take out your emotions on the person that is closest to you all the time, whether you mean to or not.

Also, cops have this stigma of being womanisers. There are women who like the uniform, so I think inevitably my wife’s friends filled her head at the time too, with, you know, ‘What is he doing that late, working all those hours? How come he’s in the bar again?’

We work these very odd hours. I would get off at two o’clock in the morning and when you would get off work you didn’t want to go home; you were so riled up at what happened during the tour. We were doing prostitution units or we were doing drug buys. After that you’re so riled up and now your tour’s over, it’s three o’clock in the morning because you got an hour’s overtime, so you don’t want to go home and sit in the dark alone because your wife’s asleep. You’re just sitting there, wound up, so you walk across the street to the bar with the guys and talk and converse about what happened and everything. So you end up being
in a bar for a couple of hours, ‘til five o’clock in the morning. It’s just something you did to get it out of your system and then when you went home and you try and explain to her, she didn’t want to hear it.

My new wife now is a cop. We understand each other but it also works against me. My wife is surrounded by men 24/7 and you know what cops are like. So what I was just talking about reverts in the other direction. I never thought I would marry a cop. I never thought I would date a cop. Now I have to deal with what my ex-wife was dealing with. She’s beautiful, my wife. She got a great body and like I said, you know what cops are like. Cops are the worst. Firemen too.

We pretty much see the same thing every day: dope dealers killing each other, traffic fatalities and low-income people beating the snot out of their kids.

We try not to remember most of it because if you do it’ll drive you nuts. You take it off when you take your boots off.

When you see the kids, those are the ones that are the worst, you know? Because we all have kids. When I didn’t have kids, it didn’t bother me. I mean, I saw a kid stuck to a telephone pole one time at a traffic wreck – didn’t think anything about it. But then I got one of my own and when you’re standing there looking at this little kid, taking pictures of it, you’re like, ‘Man, that could be my kid.’ But of course it wouldn’t be my kid because we’re intelligent enough to know not to beat the snot out of our kids. But it happens every day.

But somebody has to do this job. Somebody has to. And we’re crazy enough to do it. If we sat down for therapy, it would put the doctor into counselling.

Unfortunately a lot of cops drink too much and they don’t talk about their feelings. I think we as a profession have got better about it now but when I first came on they said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t go see a mental health professional or they’ll put you on the rubber gun squad. You’ll lose your job. They’ll take your gun and put you on a desk. They’ll take your job away from you.’

I think the fire service was always more progressive because they realised that seeing people burnt up in a fire is one of the most horrific things you could ever see. If they have a critical incident, they have a critical incident stress debriefing. They bring people in, they sit everybody down and everybody talks about what they saw – their feelings – then they’re debriefed one on one with a mental health professional. They don’t have the burn out that cops do.

But cops have got better about that. It’s still not good but it’s gotten better.

You go into work and you’re hyper-vigilant for eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours. You’re always looking around, sizing people up. Then when you get home, the mind has to reset, so your body will crash. I don’t know what you do when you get home but for the first four hours, I’m watching television and switching channels with the remote.

People that I’m dating are like, ‘How you doing?’

‘Fine.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

You’re like, catatonic. You’re not capable of having an intelligent conversation. You need seven or eight hours to reset. ‘Go into town? Are you insane? I’ve just come from town!’

We don’t explain it to people enough. If your body does this, it needs time to sleep and reset. You need to tell your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend – whatever – that that’s normal. ‘I want to be with you right now and I want to spend time with you, I’m just not capable of it, so give me a few hours and then we can do our thing.’

We’ve all got our little ways to release. I sit down to Razerblade and Death Metal music. I sit down to my Scandinavian Black Metal music and reload bullets. I listen to Enya too. And Sonny and Cher. And Elvis. Beethoven sometimes. Anything except for that rap, although I’m kinda switched because I’ve recently discovered Gangstagrass. It’s bluegrass rap. So I’m kinda into that now.

So yeah, we’re weird. If we weren’t weird we wouldn’t do this for a living.

The thing is, once you leave, once you retire, what are you? Suddenly, overnight, you are no longer anyone of importance. You don’t matter to your community. You no longer know what’s happening, whereas the day before you knew about everything and everyone. It’s a real shock to the system.

O
ne of the final interviews I conducted was with an officer in Boston, Massachusetts. A friend from another force had arranged for me to speak to this cop as he felt that the officer had a good tale to tell. My problem was that I had a flight to catch back to the UK and I had just a couple of hours spare so didn’t believe I had enough time left. And, if I am being completely honest, I was exhausted after a long, demanding trip and simply wanted to get one last lobster roll and a pint before heading to Logan International. But on my friend’s insistence, I met with the officer. He picked me up in his car outside South Station in downtown Boston and as soon as I jumped into the front passenger seat I noticed a large amount of scaring – almost like burn scars – around the lower portion of his face and around his neck. With my schedule so tight, I didn’t feel there was time for the usual pleasantries and ‘getting-to-know-you’ chat, so I took a risk and leapt straight in, asking about the scars. The officer’s story was simply amazing and if I had needed to miss my flight home
to hear how he had survived being shot multiple times, I would have seriously considered it.

Although this courageous Boston cop – and he is still a cop – was happy to tell me about the incident that had come extraordinarily close to taking his life, this chapter was still a challenging one to write. Speaking to officers about their careers and encouraging them to recall their funny stories is one thing, but to bring up so sensitive a subject as one involving the injury or death of police officers was, to say the least, difficult. Officers weren’t always talking about themselves; often they were telling me about their colleagues who had been lost or seriously injured in horrific circumstances. In fact, I found that officers were far more comfortable talking about their own injuries than talking about their fellow officers and friends. Tears were shed. Even after I had returned home – as you will read – tragedy continued to play itself out in devastating ways.

I have received many gifts from officers during my visits to America – department patches and mugs, for example – but I have also acquired a number of t-shirts. These t-shirts are printed with the name of a slain officer. The shirts have become a way for a department or unit to remember and honour officers as well as a way of raising funds for the families left behind. For a long time I felt uncomfortable wearing these tops. It seemed like a strange thing to do, to wear the name of a murdered police officer on your clothing, but I now feel very differently and when I wear one of these t-shirts (I am wearing one as I write this) I realise that the officer is being remembered on the other side of the world, by someone who never knew them. And to me, that seems like a good thing.

The dedication at the start of this book came about because of the accounts I recorded for this chapter and the shirts I continue to be given.

It was the coldest day of the year, six degrees out. It was January 16th. I can remember the date. We were going to serve an arrest warrant in the town of Quincy, which borders the southern part of Boston. It was for a guy wanted on warrant in Boston; he’d shot at his brother-in-law or something like that.

So we were going to arrest him on this warrant and seeing how it wasn’t in the city, the plan was that after we surrounded the house we were going to knock on the door and pretty much just call him out. So we set up the perimeter and we knocked on the door and called him out but we got no response for several minutes. Whilst this is going on, we’re waiting outside, waiting to go in, and it is really cold out. In our minds, we just want to go in to get out of the cold.

So finally, we say that we are going to make entry and breach the door but as soon as we are lined up to breach the door, the door opened up – the guy had lived there with his wife and his girlfriend and several of their children – so they all came out and said that he wasn’t there.

Despite what they told us, after we got them out, we went and started to clear the building, to look for him. We cleared the first two floors and the basement. And then we went to clear the crawl space in the attic, and me being the small guy, I volunteered to
go up there. It’s not that it’s dangerous – I’ve done it before, I’ve done it since – but on this one we had cameras up there and we were able to clear a vast majority of the attic by sight. But there was one corner where I couldn’t really see. It was about a fifteen-degree arc that I was concerned about. So I was focusing on that arc and the guy coming up behind me was going to clear the rest.

So I just put my head and shoulders into the attic, clearing that and it turns out that the guy was under the insulation, between two of the joists, so you couldn’t see him. Then he popped up from about ten feet away and fired. I don’t really know how many rounds he fired at me but I was hit twice in my arm, once in my jaw and then one into my neck. I don’t remember any sounds – no sounds at all – but I remember the lights and the flashes and then I remember being at the bottom of the ladder. I was looking back up, clutching my arm, looking at my hand, which is all covered in blood. I was looking in disbelief, thinking this doesn’t happen to me, it’s always the other guy who gets shot. It’s never you, you know? This probably all happened in half a second – time just kind of slows down.

But I was able to tell the guys, ‘He’s not over there, he’s over that way.’

Luckily we had an ambulance waiting for us. One of the other officers helped walk me down and I get into the ambulance. I can feel everything so I’m thinking, ‘Okay, this is good.’ Well, obviously it’s bad but I can walk and I can talk. It hurts really bad but that’s a good thing, because feeling pain means everything is working. But I could feel the bullet in my neck; I could tell that
something was not right. I could feel that there was something in my neck, so I was concerned about that.

My arm hurt the most, though, because it shattered the bone. But also my jaw got shattered and everything was just burning and I could feel the bullet in my neck. So I was just kinda clutching my arm but I was only concerned about the bullet in my neck. I was trying not to move my neck, and I could feel the bullet, it’s hot and it’s sitting in my neck. That was my biggest concern. But again, I was walking, talking, it hurt really bad but I was in the Marine Corps and we were always taught, if that happened, it’s a good thing, it means everything is working.

The EMT was asking which hospital I wanted to go to – because we were in Quincy – and I told him the Boston Medical Center, which was not far away but I had been to that hospital for work numerous times with shooting victims. That’s where most of the shooting victims from the city are sent to, so that’s the place to go, so they took me there. I spent nine days in the hospital, I think. I healed but I’ve still got some nerve damage in my face – it hurts to shave – and I’m missing a little piece of my jaw. My arm has nerve damage and it’s kind of sensitive but it’s normal to me now, so it is what it is.

The guy shot me with 9mm bullets. The EMT’s and paramedics of this city are awesome. And the hospitals are too. I’ve seen so many people get shot and live that I knew that once I got into the ambulance and with the paramedics and the EMTs and the hospitals, I’d be fine. I wasn’t really worried. I knew obviously that there’d be some damage but there was no question that
I wasn’t going to make it. So I just calmed down and once I got to the ambulance – aside from them putting the IV in me – everything else was good. By the time we got to the hospital, they’d given me morphine.

I have a thing – not a phobia – but I hate IVs and stuff. You know, people shooting up heroin and going into your veins or giving blood, I hate doing that. It’s not the needle – it’s just anything going into your veins. So I was in the ambulance and they had to give me an IV and all my attention went to that, like, ‘Whoa! Whoa! What are you doing?’ And then when I was in the hospital I kept lying when they went to put the IV in and I’d say, ‘Oh, they did that this morning.’ So they caught on and started writing the date and stuff onto the IV.

So anyway, now I’ve got a metal rod in my arm and there’re some little fragments from the bullets left here and there. There’s a little bit left in my chin but I can’t really feel it. And I think I’ve got nine screws in my arm. I’ve got a little plate to hold in my voice box – it’s tiny, though – it holds my voice box together because when the bullet went in, luckily it didn’t really hit anything although obviously it broke my jaw, went in, landed and cracked my voice box. So they put in a tiny, little metal plate, to hold it together. But I was lucky, it could have gone different.

I can still do push-ups but it’s hard so I have to come up on my knuckles and just once in a while, I’ll hit it the wrong way and it’ll hurt. Like I said, there’s some nerve damage but it’s just normal for me now, but it’s obviously not a hundred percent. But I can still do everything fine, not as good as I could before but
still good enough to pass all the qualifications and all that stuff with no problems.

I probably could have retired from this job and I probably would have made more money because I’d get one hundred percent pay and every raise. But you know, I came back. It was never an issue – I never, ever thought to leave. It’s mainly because of the people I work with. I always wanted to do this job and if I left, I’ve lost. It’s not an ‘us-versus-them’ thing - but me personally, I didn’t want to quit. This is something that I always wanted to do and I’m not gonna let this get in my way. So I came back. There are times when I’m like, you know, ‘I should have just left!’ But a vast majority of the time, I’m glad I came back. I’ve got a lot of friends in the job and I like doing the job. I know it sounds like a cliché to say, ‘oh, you like helping people’, but you do. I like helping people a lot. Even little things like helping people who are locked out of their cars.

I was engaged at the time of the shooting and we got married later on. The good part about this story too, is this: we had got engaged and I had to start working a lot to pay for the wedding. But once I got injured I couldn’t work. I still got paid by the police department but I was planning to work a lot of overtime, road details and things like that, to pay for the wedding. But obviously, once I got shot, I couldn’t do that. So all the guys at work – the whole department – and a lot of people from the community, had a fund-raiser for me. It pretty much paid for my wedding. We had a big wedding, rented out a function hall, everybody showed up. I couldn’t even talk during it because I was so emotional. And
that’s part of the reason you come back – all these people that do this stuff for you.

My wife knew that I wasn’t going to leave. All my friends and everyone who knew me, knew that I wouldn’t leave. Right off the bat they said, ‘He’s not going to leave; he’s going to come back.’ So she knew. She was fine when I went to K-9 and when I made sergeant but she got worried when I went back on the SWAT team. But I think in reality, the most dangerous part of this job is just being out on patrol, because you never know what you’re walking into on that. She also didn’t like me riding the department motorcycle. I’m not the best at it. I’m one of the worst riders the department has and that’s one of the most dangerous jobs. She was more concerned about me riding the bike than getting shot. So I do K-9 and SWAT now. My mother thinks I’m just on the dogs. She doesn’t know that I now do both. She doesn’t know that I went back to SWAT.

We had a dog with us on that warrant but we didn’t use him. You don’t want to send a dog up to their death, either. You’d rather send a dog than a person but you’re not going to just throw them to their death. I found that a lot of the time, if you just get the dog barking, it gets a lot of reaction from people. But we’re not just going to sacrifice a dog. So to get the guy who shot me, they just turned the heat off. It was the coldest day of the year, so they turned the heat off and froze him out.

So anyway, the guy pleaded insanity. It went to trial and it was a hung jury. A couple of the jurors thought that he had mental issues, so we had to go for a retrial. But once they set the date,
he pled out. In the initial trial they found him guilty on the gun and the bullets. But a couple of the jurors couldn’t decide on his mental condition in regards to shooting me. So the judge gave him the maximum he could have given him – four years. Two years for the gun and then two more years for the bullets. Then he ended up taking a plea deal for another twelve to sixteen years on top of that. So it could be anywhere between sixteen to twenty years or twelve to sixteen years, so not as much time as he should have got.

I’ve arrested people who had guns but didn’t shoot at me and they got charged federally, took plea deals and got nineteen years. It’s weird that we have a guy who actually shot me and he gets less time than someone who did have a gun on them but who didn’t use it on me.

Since the incident, I now talk to recruit classes and stuff like that. I tell them that it could happen to any one of us. My biggest thing at the time was just the disbelief – the feeling that this just doesn’t happen; it’s always the other guy. And I tell them, ‘Always wear your vest,’ because a lot of people take their vest off. They think, ‘It’s never going to happen to me’, until it does.