Zombie CSU (40 page)
This is a topic on which the author is also going to speak out as an expert because when I’m not writing books about monsters I am a chief instructor of COPSafe, Inc., a company that provides cuff and control workshops for law enforcement. Along with my colleagues—former Philadelphia Police Department attorney Jeffrey Scott and martial arts instructors Jim Winterbottom and David Pantano, I’ve given workshops to all levels of police officers, from raw recruits straight out of the academy to chiefs of police, and that includes a number of SWAT and SERT
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officers.
Why Zombies?
“The living dead are low maintenance. They don’t talk back, have simple needs, and have wisely given up the rat race for something much simpler. On the downside, they don’t smell very good, and they want to eat us. But I’d still prefer hanging out with zombies than most of my extended family.”—J. A. Konrath, author of
Whiskey Sour
(Hyperion, 2004) and the zombie short story “In Cold Flesh.”- “There is just something extremely creepy about a creature that moves at a snail’s pace but is still able to catch and eat you. Every piece of logic screams that you should be able to escape the slow-moving critters…but you can’t. I think the ‘creep’ factor is why I like slow moving zombies. BUT, on the other hand, a rapidly-approaching piece of dead flesh that’s coming to rip your head off is equally as terrifying but in a very different way. I think it’s the ‘threat’ factor that makes me like fast moving zombies. So, there ya have it…A non-answer! Why? Because zombies are cool no matter if they’re moving fast of slow. Either way, they’re gonna get ya!”—Jim O’Rear, actor, stuntman, and haunted attraction consultant.
- “Zombies blur the line between here and there, dead and not dead, and take away the finality of things. The walking dead, in any form, haunts the mortal mind, I think.”—L. A. Banks, bestselling author of the Vampire Huntress series.
In our COPSafe workshops we teach officers how to control the most aggressive and violent suspects, including those who are acting irrationally due to mental instability or drug use. The techniques in these workshops is based on martial arts: distancing, deflection, redirection, joint manipulation, and pain compliance. Granted pain compliance won’t work on zombies, so any time one tactic doesn’t work, the officer adjusts and upgrades his or her response.
We teach a technique used to respond to an aggressive rush, and with it even a female officer or small male officer can put a three-hundred pound PCP-cooked man down on his chest and in cuffs. It’s not muscle, and it’s not magic; it’s applications of basic principles of physics and some common sense. Turning the hips creates, torsion which is an incredible power source (just ask any home-run hitter). When an attacker lunges, no matter how much control he exerts, he is still subject to the dynamics of mass in motion. And gravity is always there, and it’s always useful to a smart fighter.
When a zombie lunges, the officer can sidestep or shift, or ideally step into the rush but with his main body mass shifted out of the line of impact. Using a simple parry-and-grab, an extended leg, and hip torsion, the attacker can be yanked into the pull of gravity and down hard on his chest. The effect on the attacker is like lunging hard to open a heavy door with rusted hinges and finding that it’s made of balsa wood and the hinges are well-oiled. Down goes the attacker—human or zombie. It’s a science thing…zombies wouldn’t understand.
As soon as the attacker hits the deck, the officer can use his arm to steer his body mass and control his ability to resist, turn, or bite; and on go the cuffs. The whole thing takes about half a second. Any single officer can do this; a pair can do it more easily.
The Zombie Factor
The biggest danger in an arrest comes once the zombie is cuffed, because in some situations the officer may relax the pinning pressure and try to pull the attacker to his feet. That’s when a bite is most possible. Even so, the officer is expecting trouble, and if the suspect makes a sudden and violent move, the officer—who would be maintaining a grip on the suspect’s arm—could easily trip him, shove him away, or otherwise distance himself from the bite. At that point, the officer would likely resort to more and different methods of control.
Police Arrest and Control Practice
photo by John West
Many police departments bring in specialists to offer additional training for their officers, like this advanced Cuff & Control workshop.
According to San Antonio PD detective Joe McKinney, “Biters and spitters are usually secured with a hood, much like that used by beekeepers. Of course, patrol officers are going to use anything at their disposal to protect themselves, and if a hood isn’t available, then they’re probably going to toss the suspect into the back of a paddy wagon, or transport him in a patrol vehicle equipped with a prisoner transport cage.”
Ultimately the zombie would be brought down, either under restraint or as a true “corpse”, and then transported to jail or a hospital. In the next section we’ll discuss how police can upgrade their response if the threat increases.
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K-9 Cops
Dogs have been used for many years by police departments all over the world. Dogs are smart, reliable, versatile, and they possess sensory abilities far beyond those of humans. Dogs have more than twenty times the number of olfactory (smell) receptors than humans do; and these receptors allow dogs to sense odors at concentrations nearly 100 million times lower than anything a human can smell. They can smell a single drop of blood in a five-quart bucket of water. They can track scents through rain, mud, and snow, and they don’t need footprints to track a suspect over rocky ground and even desert sand.
A dog can also differentiate between thousands of commingled smells, which would be like a human trying to smell a single daffodil in a greenhouse filled with every flowering plant known to science.
This ultrasharp sense of smell allows police to employ dogs for search and rescue, bomb and drug detection, tracking, and even locating human remains.
Training a dog to be a professional sniffer is actually fun for the dog. The trainers and handlers use the promise of a favorite toy or play activity as a reward. When a K-9 officer locates something (drugs, bomb, whatever) it signals its handler using a conditioned response, usually barking, sitting, or pawing the ground.
These dogs are very deeply trained and in most modern departments they become both the partner and the property of their officer handlers, usually living at home with them and becoming part of the family. On the job, though, they are very focused and provide a skill set no human can match.
Expert Witness
According to Detective McKinney, K-9 units are a tremendous help in manhunts, especially if the police need to search a wooded area like the one across the street from our medical research center crime scene. “Best-case scenario would be to have multiple dog teams. The handler walks with them through the search area. The handler employs a variety of search patterns and techniques, depending on the size of the area to be searched. In a large forested area like this, the grid search pattern would probably be used. The area is divided up into grids, and personnel are assigned specific portions of the grid to search exhaustively. It usually takes ten minutes or so for San Antonio PD dog teams to get to a scene, though in this zombie scenario it might take considerably longer because the dog teams would probably be coming from the County or State Police. Response time would also be affected by call load. If this happens on a Friday or Saturday night, the dog teams might be otherwise engaged in non-related search missions.”
“Typically, a K-9 handler will want a cover officer going with him,” says Sgt. Ted Krimmel. “If the suspect has blood on his t-shirt and the K-9 handler has witnesses showing him where the subject went into the woods, the track should be a relatively simple affair. Even if the subject has a good lead on K-9, the dogs will either catch up, or he will eventually run into the perimeter officers. In my experience, the dogs actually have an easier time tracking in woods and over land than in urban/suburban settings. The first step after obtaining initial information on the incident, would to decide how large a perimeter to set (based on how long the suspect has been gone, direction of travel, terrain, etc.), then set it as quickly as possible. I like the use of K-9 and probably would have called to get it rolling even before the first units were on scene. The dogs are brought in from various agencies, usually local PDs. In Bucks, for example, there is no county police agency. The Sheriff’s Office here does not have full police powers or training, thus no need for dogs. The deputies transport prisoners from the jail to court, serve civil papers, and make arrests for failure to appear for court. They always help the PDs if asked though. As far as the state goes, I don’t think PSP has that many dogs, if any. Usually, we would use as many dogs as we can get. Timing is based on how far away the dogs are, are the K-9 officers on duty or home on call, etc.”
The Zombie Factor
The Romero zombies seem to want to eat anything, human or not, and so the police dogs might be at risk during a capture. They are trained to bring a suspect down and maintain bite control over them until their handlers take over. In such a struggle, a zombie, who wouldn’t react in fear of the dog and wouldn’t care about the pain of a bite, might be able to successfully accomplish a bite.
