Chapter 3 of Beyond Hope? was actually stolen from my first book, Burden of the Badge. The event which is the subject of this chapter was simply too important in the timeline of my cop career to be left out. Plus, since Burden of the Badge was written more in diary format, re-printing this chapter gave me a chance to expound a bit on the original version.
I believe every new cop thinks about the first time he will face someone in a life-and-death, shoot-don’t shoot situation. I assume every new cop visualizes the scenerio playing out the same way I did -with the bad guy falling in a hail of bullets and the cop is regailed as a hero for taking another bad guy off the mean streets. Real life, however, usually plays out far differently than what happens on the movie screen in our minds.
Like every streets cop in Saginaw, I had been in many dangerous situations prior to this evening, despite having less than 30 months on the job. Crime in the city of Saginaw moves quickly and there is little learning curve for newcomers. With less than 3 years as a cop I had already been chosen to be a Field Training Officer (FTO), a position I had no right holding with such little time on the job. But, for an extra $500 a month in wages, I gladly accepted the spot, inexperience be damned! There was a also such a shortage of FTOs at this time that many guys of my tenure held this position. I made a point of telling my new recruits that I was far from knowing everything . . . just so they knew where they stood in relation to their “trainer.”
The recruit I was training this night was, thank God, a mature, even-tempered guy named Dennis Bunch. Dennis, shortly after this event, moved on to work for the Lansing (MI) Police Department, where he is a successful K-9 officer. We still have lunch whenever I’m in Lansing, and we still re-live this evening from to time.
You get to know the gang houses pretty quickly in the streets and you know where to expect trouble. Having been at this particular house prior to this night for gang-related activity, my guard was up as we approached. I recall the moon reflecting brightly off the snow this night and when the kid came out of the back door of the house pointing a gun at me, I could see his face very clearly. Two things I remember distinctly about this event are that: A.) Time really does slow to a crawl - think of a scene from “The matrix” - during high-stress events and B.) Your training really does take over. I had my gun levelled on this kid without even knowing I had pulled it, but still time crawled and I could see every movement and hear every sound like I was rewinding a scene from a movie and playing it back, frame by frame.
I always felt that when this moment hit I would simply shoot . . . and shoot and shoot and shoot . . . until the “threat was neutralized” (academy talk for “the bad guy is dead.”). But this slowing of time gave me the opportunity to registered how confused this kid was, and how innocent he looked. I knew he was not going to pull the trigger, but yet not shooting him was quite a risk - one I am not sure I would take again.
After the kid threw the gun down and was taken into custody, my mind was racing as I kept questioning my reaction to the situation. Should I have shot? I was even more infuritated when I found out he had had nothing more than a pellet gun (I guess I should have been even more relieved to not have shot him, but that wasn’t the case).
I was fairly distraught the rest of the night as I second-guessed myself. Why hadn’t I shot this kid? Was it compassion? That could be a deadly thing for a cop. Was it confusion? Equally as deadly. Was it a racial issue? Saginaw is a hotbed for racial controversy and maybe the fact that the boy was black and I am white might have played into the equation and caused a delay in my trigger pull as I thought about the potential racial backlash. Whatever the answer, I had a very poor night’s sleep trying to come to grips with this event.
The biggest bright spot of this story came the next day when Jerry Schneider, the weekend duty detective, made the phone call I referenced in this chapter and showed me the understanding and compassion only 20+ years as a cop can bring. Jerry is a court officer at the Saginaw County Governmental Center, so I see him quite often. He is still a common sense guy who provides good advice. His words carried me later in the day when a shift supervisor and several other cops (who were nowhere near the scene and had nothing to do with the previous evening’s events) provided ample Monday morning quarterbacking of my encounter, criticizing me for not killing the teen and telling me how they “would have killed him in a heartbeat.”
As far as the kid with the gun, I have not recalled his name since the day of his pre-trial. I do not know if he still lives in Saginaw, or even if his is alive or dead, for that matter. All I know is that I did not kill him. For this I am thankful.