We Are the Cops (12 page)

At that point I had to notify my supervisor that shots were fired and I had just had to put down a dog that attempted to attack me after attacking an old man. So my sergeant pulled up maybe thirty seconds later – not even that, probably twenty seconds later – and he said, ‘I heard your blast. I heard you shoot it.’ He said, ‘If you had waited only thirty seconds, I could have shot it and I wouldn’t have to do all the paperwork on you because you shot it!’

So they had to call out the supervisors, the field captain, ID, everybody had to come out and they take photographs. They treated it just like I’d shot a person. They had to make me stand on the porch with my shotgun, directed the same way I was and they had to measure how far I was from the street to the nearest residence. If I’d missed, where the pellets would have gone, they measured everything. They took pictures of everything, drew diagrams of the house – where the dog was, where I was. The sergeant had to stand next to me the whole time, had to follow me from the scene straight to the precinct where I had to take a
urine test, a drug test and take a breath test. They had to take my shotgun and drive it down to the ID office and they had to test fire it, take it apart, get all of the serial numbers off of it – just like I’d shot a person.

Four months later I had to go to the Chief’s ‘shoot and review’ board to justify why I’d fired my weapon on duty in defence of myself or somebody else. I explained it to ‘em – and I was dressed up in my full Class A uniform and tie because you wanna not look like a slouch – and they were like, ‘We’ll get back to you with our findings once we discuss it. It’ll probably be a couple of weeks.’

I walked out and I was talking to another officer when they stepped back out, called my name and called me back in. I’m thinkin’, ‘Oh great!’ Like I’m fixin’ to get fired because I shot a dog!

I walked in and they said, ‘We talked about it. You’re all good.’

But the owners weren’t even home when I shot that dog. And they never even called. Animal control came and scooped up the dead dog on the porch, went around back and noosed the other one and took it because it was a nuisance to the neighbourhood. So they took both dogs – one of them bein’ dead – and left the blood on the porch. And that blood, by the time we got done, it congealed and swelled up to about two inches thick. It just swelled up on the porch. We don’t clean it off – that’s their problem. So we left all the blood there and they never called. Never called to ask what happened to their dogs, what all this blood was on their front porch – nothing. Never asked. Probably not the best pet owners.

I had maybe a year-and-a-half on the street. I’m in Harlem. I’m in Central Harlem – bad place. Really, really, really bad place. I have a 38 revolver. There was a road – there still is a road – from the 145th Street Bridge at Lenox Avenue up into Washington Heights. Used to be called the Ho Chi Min Trail because so much drugs and money was moved between The Bronx and Manhattan. That’s what we called it; we called it the Ho Chi Min Trail. It was an every day occurrence, twenty-four hours a day. Money, drugs and guns were being transported back and forth and they would always use cabs – unmarked livery cabs. They were the only things that operated up there, you know? Yellow cabs wouldn’t go above 96th Street back then, or 100th Street, something like that. It was just too dangerous. If you saw a yellow cab up that high, you would follow it because that guy was getting robbed. So these were cabs that you had to call up for – order-a-cab type thing. Or you’d hail it off the street, which was illegal but it was the only cab service that was operating up there. There were no yellow cabs.

So I’m working with a guy who was not my regular partner and you know, cops have instinct and intuition right? When somebody looks at you, you just know. It’s the way they look at you, the way they move after they look at you. You just know that there’s something wrong. So one of the ways we worked to make arrests would be to follow a cab, because most of the cabs had violations – tail lights were out, drivers would make wacky turns, they wouldn’t signal – so you would get your summons quota and
maybe you’d get lucky on the car stop, right? Because the minute you flicked your lights on, the guys in the back seat of the car would turn around and look at you and they would do what we called ‘The Harlem Dip’. The way that they moved in the back of the cab, you knew that they were stashing something. You just knew. It was such a dramatic movement. You knew that it wasn’t normal.

So, we were going westbound and the cab was going eastbound and as we passed each other the two guys in the back seat looked at me and I just knew. I turned around in the middle of the block and we go to stop them on 7th Avenue and 145th Street.

The two guys jump out of the cab and I tell the guy I’m working with, ‘You grab the guy who’s going towards the bodega and I’ll get the other guy.’

A bodega is like a candy store, right? So one guy is like, going into a store on the corner and the other guy is going down the block. No problem. I start to go after the other guy and the next thing I know is, he’s pulling out the biggest gun I ever saw in my entire life. It just kept coming; he kept pulling and it kept coming. It was like a 45 or something. It was a huge gun. So he’s pulling this gun out and I start to pull my gun out. And I’m a rookie!

What am I thinking? I’m thinking, ‘Motherfucker!’ I’m thinking that we’re going to have a shoot-out right here on the corner, right? So I pull my gun out and I swear to you I was so pumped up and full of adrenalin that I was pulling the trigger before the gun even cleared the holster. I won’t lie to you – I’m lucky I didn’t blow my leg off, I swear to God. As soon as the gun
cleared the holster, I’m sure I was pulling the trigger.

So, clearly I missed with the first shot, right? Because at that point we’re facing each other and the guy is still pulling the gun out. Then he turns and starts running down the block. But immediately after I took that first shot, I see in the background that there was this old black guy standing there, right? Shot goes off, black guy hits the ground like a rock – like, BOOM, BOOM!

I’m like, ‘Holy shit!’

So I’m already thinking I shot that old man, right? Now I’m chasing this guy on foot down the block and for the first time ever in my life I’m catching him; I’m actually catching up to this guy. He was originally twenty feet ahead of me and I’m now within five or six feet of him. I’m actually catching up and this guy realises it. Like, ‘Oh fuck! This short, fat, white cop is going to catch me!’

At that point he had not fired at me. So, I’m within five or six feet of him and all of a sudden he turns around and points the gun at me and I take a second shot at him, which I completely missed and he takes off running again. He’s holding the gun under his arm, still pointing it at me and I’m getting closer to him. I’m thinking, ‘Fuck! This guy’s gonna shoot me. I’ve missed twice. He’s going to shoot me – this fucking guy!’

As we come to a corner, I dip off the sidewalk behind a car and completely lose this guy in a gas station. Gun, perp – gone. Gone! Nobody has a clue where the fuck this guy went.

Next thing I know, over the radio, ‘We have a man shot on 145th Street.’

‘Fuck, I killed that black guy’, that’s what I’m thinking. I’m like, ‘Motherfucker!’

It turns out it wasn’t him, the black man didn’t get shot, he just hit the deck. Out of pure instinct he just hit the deck. Turns out it’s some other guy halfway down the block who was sitting on some steps. He’s sitting on the steps and I shot him in the elbow. I missed the perp and I hit this other guy in the elbow.

So, the whole time I’m thinking to myself, ‘Okay. I took two shots. I missed. I shot this guy in the elbow but it’s okay because my partner caught the other guy’. Nope. The guy I was working with that day – who I had never worked with before – when the shooting started, he jumped back in the car and hid underneath the fucking steering wheel. Left me swinging in the fucking breeze! That’s the God’s honest truth. He left me swinging in the fucking breeze. Gun, perp – gone. Second perp – gone. We got nothing. I don’t even think the fucking cab was still on the scene. Just an innocent man shot.

Alright, I’ve got a year-and-a-half on the job, I don’t have that much time but it’s okay. You know, what’s the worst they can do to me? Go to prison? Whatever.

When the detectives come – because now it’s a major issue – the detectives come and the first thing the guy that got shot said was, ‘I don’t know what happened. That cop was chasing that guy with the gun and I got shot.’

Right there I was cleared – because the old man said the guy I was shooting at had a gun in his hand. Nothing happened to me. This man gets shot in the elbow and nothing happened to me. He
went to hospital and was saying how he had just hit ‘Cop Lotto’, because he could have sued the city and got a lot of money. The city laws are that you have to sue within one year and one day. The guy never sued.

Four years later he gets arrested for selling drugs, by two cops. I see him as they’re walking him into the station house. I walked over to the two cops and I said, ‘Listen, just take the handcuffs off and let him go.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘That’s the guy I shot in the elbow – he did the right thing. Just let the fucking guy go.’

They were like, ‘It’s eleven-fifteen, we’re just about to make ten hours overtime. We’re not letting him go.’

They would have let him go if it was earlier in the day, but they weren’t giving up the overtime. I was so fucking mad.

These two guys car-jack this girl. Her brother was in the gas station and when he came out they made him get on the ground. He had a CPL – a licence to carry a gun – but they didn’t know he had a gun, so when they jumped in the car and took off, he started firing at them so they started firing back at him.

The police see ‘em and they ditch the car, jump out, start running and start shooting at the police.

Well, me and my partner hear the call come out and we’re like, ‘Damn, we’re supposed to get off early today! They were letting us go at twelve.’ But I was like, ‘Fuck it, let’s go over there.’

We got over there, they had a perimeter, they had them boxed
in and we can still hear them firing at each other.

Then one of them, he came over a fence, pointed his gun at me and I lit his ass up. Knocked him back over the fence. I shot him three times – he didn’t die though. I hit him twice in the chest and one in the leg.

He didn’t shoot at me – he didn’t get a chance to – but he had shot at all these other officers.

Shit, I smoked about two and a half packs of cigarettes after I shot him. But I don’t feel no guilt. I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. He ended up getting twenty-eight years. I wish I’d killed him.

Obviously there is a lot of criticism of police after a shooting. Sure, a person can get shot ten times, but the cops didn’t shoot him once or twice and wait until he fell on the ground before walking over to him and shooting him five more times. He was obviously still standing or still coming forward and you’re trained to shoot until you stop the threat. So, as long as he’s standing and as long as he’s moving towards you, you would continue to fire. It’s a horrible situation; you don’t want to be in it but it happens.

You know, what happens is, especially if there is a gun involved and you know the other guy has a gun, a lot of times, when this thing’s happening, you shoot and then your partner shoots, or somebody else starts shooting. Like, where are the shots coming from? You know? It kind of carries on ‘til something stops.

I think generally, the perception is, when the dust clears, the true story comes out and that kind of calms things until the next time – until the next shooting.

They had a good program years ago where some of the politicians and outspoken community leaders, who were always moaning about the police and the use of guns and everything else, were taken to a police firing range. They don’t understand how split second that decision is to make. They don’t understand how quick and how fast you have to make that decision. So they took them to the firearms training centre and they gave them a little lesson on how to handle weapons and whatnot. And they gave them an opportunity to shoot the guns and then they put them into a simulator. They can control the scenario of the simulator and you have either a gun or a can of mace. So, they give you a scenario, you step up to the front of the screen, the scenario plays out and you talk to the screen. And every single one of them – the news people, the church people, the neighbourhood people, everybody who’s the first one to be critical of how we act in a shooting – every single one of them, killed every civilian in every scenario, period. The end. They made the wrong choice every single time. It was a little bit eye-opening for them, and it kind of quietened them down for a while.

How do you make that decision when to shoot? Like, how quick do you have to make that decision? Because it does happen quick.

The media won’t be on your side. They’ll say things like, ‘The police department murdered an innocent guy today when all he was doing was robbing a bank.’ Or, ‘Another homicide was committed by officers this weekend and all the guy did was cut his
mum’s throat with a knife and they shot him.’

If you are not friends with the media, they will say whatever they want to say.

I’m not a very religious person but I’ll never forget that we had this situation where we had an armed robbery taking place over on Livernois, at this store and the run comes out: ‘Armed robbery in progress’.

Officers respond – a male and female team. The female officer, if she wasn’t the absolute worst shot in the damn police department, she had to be close. She had as many notes saying ‘Does Not Qualify’ on her firearms record or ‘Did Not Qualify’ as she had ‘Barely Qualified’. If she qualified, she barely qualified. And there were several years when she did not qualify.

So anyway, they pull up and the guy jumps out and shoots her partner – drops his ass. He then takes off running. Livernois is an eight-lane street and he’s running across Livernois at top speed. She pulled her firearm, pulled the trigger and beamed his ass right in the fuckin’ head! And I – probably as an expert shot for a majority of my career – could have never made that fuckin’ shot!