By Chuck Remsberg, Police1 Senior Contributor
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When an officer is killed, it’s usually not a single error that seals his fate but a series of lapses in judgment or tactics that sabotage his survival.
Consider a 34-year-old special agent with the Narcotics Bureau of the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation.
Detailed to a federal High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area as an undercover operative for his regular shifts, he volunteered to work overtime a few weeks ago to help a federal agency conduct surveillance on a person of interest.
En route to that assignment at about midnight that fateful Friday, the agent, wearing plain clothes and driving an unmarked “souped-up” Camaro, swung into a Shell service station in a high-crime, violent neighborhood of Milwaukee to grab a bag of chips and a pick-me-up cup of coffee.
Two young men who had been involved with a gang of robbers in up to 15 stickups in the area were watching from a car across the street as he parked his vehicle on the service plaza and walked to the station’s office/store.
His soft body armor was left back in his car.
According to another lawman who later responded to the scene, the two subjects had intended to rob the station but when they cased it they discovered the cashier was behind bulletproof glass. They were discussing what to do when they spotted the agent-white, remarkably adolescent in appearance, and alone-conspicuous in his apparent vulnerability. They didn’t know he was a cop.
Once the agent had walked inside, the two hustled into the shadows around a corner of the office/store not far from the Camaro.
Soon the agent emerged, his hands occupied with the chips and coffee. After he passed the corner of the building where the predators waited and approached his car, they jumped him, demanding money. “Don’t do anything stupid!” one warned.
As one threatened the agent with a 9mm semiautomatic, the other started patting him down. The agent tried to pull away, but the offender searching him held on-and quickly discovered the agent’s sidearm on his hip under his coat.
Almost simultaneously, reports say, the suspect exclaimed, “Dude’s got a gun!” and the agent blurted: “Stop, police! I’m police!”
The gunman turned abruptly and started to run away, then twisted back and fired two rounds. The first missed, although the shooter’s partner in crime said later that he heard and “felt” the slug whiz past his head. The second shot struck the agent in the upper abdomen. Both offenders then fled. They were captured several days later.
Critically wounded, the agent struggled back to his vehicle and gave an emergency call: “Officer shot, need assistance!” His attitude, a friend says, “was, ‘I’m not going to die here. I’m going to fight this!’”
He fought for nearly a week after extensive surgery. On November 4, after cycling through 50 units of blood, he died. “He had just lost too much blood, and was brain dead,” the friend explains.
A volunteer fire lieutenant and certified EMT as well as a cop, the agent was engaged to be married. He leaves behind an extended family that includes a mother who’s a police chaplain and a brother-in-law who’s an officer for a police department in a Milwaukee suburb.
He also leaves behind questions of preparation and practice that officer friends hope will prompt other LEOs to assess their own attitudes and tactics regarding unexpected life-threatening encounters.
Did the agent’s verbal reaction provoke the fatal round?
A cop impulsively announcing his office in response to a sudden confrontation is by no means unique to the agent in this tragic episode. Soon after the agent’s death, an off-duty officer 90 miles away in Chicago was accosted on the street in broad daylight by a man who pointed a handgun at him and demanded money. This officer, too, immediately identified himself and demanded the stickup man drop his gun. As in the Wisconsin case, the thug popped a cap. Luckily, he missed, allowing the officer to draw his sidearm, shoot him in the leg, then chase him down and arrest him.
Depending on the assailant’s proclivities, forcefully asserting that you’re the law and commanding surrender without the horsepower in hand to back it up may not be the best hope for controlling the situation.
If his finger is on the trigger, the offender may be so startled his hand will involuntarily tighten and discharge a round unintentionally. Or he may fire to foster escape or in fear for his own life from what he may now perceive as an unexpected, escalated threat. Or if he’s determined enough and hardened enough, he may blast away as a reflexive, stone-cold response to even the slightest resistance or confusion. Only the meekest will be easily cowed. (The shooter in the agent’s killing told investigators he “panicked” when the agent identified himself.)
If you do opt to depend on words, choose ones that are likely to be calming or distracting. You want to de-escalate the situation, diminish yourself as a threat and hold out at least the illusion that the offender can escape safely, with or without your money and perhaps even with your gun.
Alternatively, with words or otherwise, distracting him even for a couple of seconds may buy you time to draw and defend yourself.
Would DT have been a better option?
Because words are risky and may not even be absorbed by an assailant under stress, fast, decisive physical moves may be better. Sky marshals, whose sole purpose is to win life-threatening close-quarters encounters, are trained never to verbalize, but to act, with lightning-speed tactical intervention.
Surprising gun strips, stuns, deflections or other decisive defensive countermeasures may inflict lag-time on the assailant and let you regain the edge. With at least one of his assailants close enough to be touching him, the Wisconsin agent was clearly within a reactive range. But-physical defensive tactics require frequent practice and reinforcement. If they can’t be executed successfully without thought or hesitation they’ll fail from lack of surprise, accuracy, speed or power-and invite retaliation.
Of course, if you don’t know any practical DT moves you won’t learn them in the midst of real combat conditions, just as you aren’t likely to formulate a winning strategy for handling such situations if you haven’t thought through such a scenario in advance.
Was lack of mental alertness a factor?
Objectively, the setting in which the agent placed himself demanded a mind-set of Condition Yellow-alert, assessing the environment for potential threats, equipped with a “When…Then…" plan of defense. This attitude should shape your demeanor and behavior anytime you are out and about. By making a habit of mentally rehearsing how you would approach and respond to a wide variety of potentially life-threatening situations, both on- and off-duty, you condition yourself to react effectively or, better yet, to avoid being trapped by surprise.
It is not known why the agent was not wearing his vest which, according to some observers, may well have stopped the round that killed him. Another agent says it’s rare for his colleagues to wear soft body armor during surveillance assignments, although the victim in this case, regarded as a “calm, collected, very methodical officer,” had a reputation for doing so “more than others.”
Late at night and heading into an overtime shift, he may have been fatigued, and perhaps was lulled by a false sense of comfort. He was familiar with the neighborhood, having worked there as a Milwaukee cop before joining his state agency. Evidently he did not feel particularly at risk, especially in a public place that for the most part was brightly lighted.
Remember: the offender typically chooses the time and place for an attack. And he or she rarely bothers to send you a save-the-date card. Your challenge is to be ready, whenever, wherever, whatever.
“We always worry about how we’re going to protect our partner, how we’re going to protect the public,” says Officer Gary Monreal of the New Berlin, Wisc. P.D., a long time friend of the dead agent. “We need to think about how we’re going to protect ourselves.”
Given the circumstances of this fatal encounter, what would you have done?
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