We Are the Cops (8 page)

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.

W
hen 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.

I work on point and the ballistic shield a lot on search warrants, at the front of the stick. So usually, if the door opens, I’m the first one in. There’ve been times where I’ve had dogs facing me down. I’ll call out for a flash-bang, they drop a flash-bang and the dog goes running. We try to avoid shooting them unless we have no choice. Some dogs may be large in size but you know just by the way they’re acting that they’re not going to bite you. They see the door open and they just want to get out. So we just let them go – just let them run out into the yard.

But some people, for some reason, as soon as they see a dog they’ll want to shoot it. I don’t know if they get something out of it. Maybe they feel like a bigger man or whatever. Me? I like dogs. It’s not the dog’s fault he’s there. If I can avoid shooting it, I will.

We had a hostage rescue, after this guy got into a shootout with the cops. It’s three or four in the morning and we’re getting ready to go in. He’s got a lady held hostage. My buddy’s there and I look at him. It’s a cool night, it’s nice, it’s beautiful, but for some reason he’s sweating.

I asked him, ‘What’s up?’

He goes, ‘I gotta take a shit!’

I’m like, ‘Dude, we’re gettin’ ready to go in!’

He says, ‘I know.’

One of our buddies overhears and says, ‘I’ve got some toilet paper you can have.’

We’re in somebody’s front yard. He took a shit right there, next to our K-9 dog. And I look over at him after he’s finished
and there’s this shit with a lump of toilet paper right in the middle of it in somebody’s front fucking yard!

We go in, we do it – rescue the lady, the whole deal – and I’m laughing because we didn’t clean that up. So somebody would have come home and seen that and said, ‘There must be fucking werewolves in our fucking neighbourhood because look at the size of this shit in my front yard!’

We were doing a raid for the Narcs, our Narcotics Unit. They’ve got this guy, he’s a violent ex-offender. There’s also a potential secondary violent suspect inside this house. The Narcs have been going directly to the guy and buying coke right in front of his house; they roll up, the dude comes out to the car and sells them dope.

So they call us to help and we always try to mitigate or minimise our response because the use of SWAT escalates the force. I talked to the team sergeant, because there was a twelve-year-old, another young kid and the wife or girlfriend in the house. We always try to pull them out so we don’t have to deal with it, you know? Because if you shock-lock a door – which is a compressed copper round from a shotgun – or you put a stun-stick through a window, there’s a chance that you’re going to hurt somebody.

It’s December and so my other concern is that it’s Christmas time, you know what I mean? Dry Christmas trees, decorations and all those things start to come into play. So we’re carefully planning how we’re going to do this thing.

I talk to the Narcs and ask, ‘Is there any way we can call this guy out?’

I already know the answer because the dude never goes anywhere. He doesn’t meet them off campus or anywhere; he always meets them right in front of his fucking house.

They go, ‘No, he never goes nowhere. We’ve got to meet him in front of his house.’

I go, ‘We were thinking maybe we can hide in a bush and when the dude comes out we’ll jump him.’

The problem is, we’ve got a secondary suspect. If we do that and we start taking rounds, then it’s a big problem. So we’re ultimately at the point where we have to do a dynamic entry. Also, the problem with dope cases is that you want to catch them with dope – that’s how you knock ‘em home; solidify the case, you know?

So we plan to use a stun-stick, put it through the window, pop it and go. But I restrict my guys and tell them that they can’t do it unless they can clear the window. You’ve got to break it, clear it and make sure there’s nothing there, because my worse fear is that it catches a tree on fire, burns the fucking house down, kills the kids and everybody else involved, right?

So I’m planning this thing with my ATL, my Assistant Team Leader. We’ve done everything we can to make this the best that we can do. Crossed all the t’s, dotted all the i’s. So we roll up and it was cold as fuck. I’ll never forget it because it was December. I remember riding over there – I was riding the rails on the outside of the van, cold as shit, man. We roll up there, typical breach element up front – you got the entry guy, who’s number one, ATL’s number two, another guy with the shield is three and I’m four. And then you have another four guys up there doing the breach.
You got a guy on shock-lock to pop it and a guy with a hook, to hook the cage on the front door and pull. Then you have a back up shock-lock in case the first guy gets shot.

We have a stun-stick team as well but I remind them, ‘You can’t use it unless you can clear it.’

Lo and behold the house has plantation shutters – our team can’t see in so they can’t clear it. Turns out to be a good thing as there was a twelve-year-old girl sitting there at a computer.

So we minimise our response. We go up there, start working it, can’t fucking blow the door for shit. We fire six rounds, trying to pop it but we can’t get the thing to go. So at that point we realise the ghost is up – we can’t do it – so we call out ‘tactical’ to assist us. One of the things we do when we wait for tactical is, we’d go down on one knee – I don’t know why, minimise our size or whatever the case may be. I don’t do it anymore, I hide behind the shield instead. But back then I called tactical and I’ve already started to go down on my knee and then all of a sudden, POP-POP-POP! Dude starts fucking lighting us up from the inside of the house and I feel this thing on my groin flap – the flap that hangs down from my bullet proof vest – you know what I mean? Didn’t think nothing of it at the time though.

Hear one of my guys say, ‘I’M HIT! I’M DOWN!’

He drops. The other guys start effecting an ‘officer-down’ rescue on him. Didn’t even know it at the time but another officer then got hit in the thigh and also went down. Another guy picked him up and took him out. So me and my ATL are about the only ones left there and I honestly think, ‘This fucking guy’s crazy.
He’s going to come out and shoot us all.’ So we roll over to the garage and we’re sitting there, my ATL and I, waiting this fucking guy out, sweating beads. He’s crazy, he’s shooting at us even though he knows who we are because we’re yellin’ ‘POLICE!’ Doing everything we can to identify ourselves.