Ed Note: Charles Remsberg is the author of Blood Lessons: What Cops Learn From Life-Or-Death Encounters, available for purchase from Police1 Books by clicking here. Be sure to also check out the P1TV interview in which Chuck gives our own Dave Smith a peek at the making of Blood Lessons.
When was your last roll call teaching moment? That is, a street experience that unexpectedly turns into an object lesson for other officers.
For Mark Dahlsten, a Quay County patrol sergeant in Tucumcari, N.M., such a moment occurred one recent night when he was dispatched to a domestic-abuse complaint at a single-wide trailer house.
At that scene, he was “surprised as hell” at what a suspect was able to do—and his experience is something he thinks would make a good roll call reminder for other street warriors.
At about 21:45 that evening, Dahlsten, 41, a veteran of more than 16 years in law enforcement, was near the end of his shift when he took the call. He knew the family involved on a first-name basis; he’d been there before to help deal with a son who was an EDP.
A city patrolman who’d heard the dispatch, Ofcr. Lorenzo Emillio, volunteered to back him up. “I’d scrap with anybody anytime, with Lorenzo as my partner,” Dahlsten says.
The location was in a thinly-settled subdivision with dirt streets and no streetlights about two miles outside the town limits. Down the street from the trailer, the officers contacted the husband and wife of the family, who were waiting for them in their pickup truck. Their 23-year-old son, a former rodeo bull rider whom we’ll call Rocco, was off his meds and on a rampage, they explained.
His mother had merely asked him if he wanted some pork chops. Something “set him off” and he became mentally “unhinged.” Soon after, he went “completely off his rocker” and physically hurled his adult brother out of the trailer. The parents fled in fear, leaving him inside alone.
Two months back, Dahlsten had made the latest of several visits to the residence. He knew Rocco to be “a strong, chubby individual” — 6 ft., 250 lbs., “a beer keg with legs.” On his stabilizing medication, he was “calm and well-mannered,” Dahlsten says. “To hear his voice, it’s like a shy, bashful 10-year-old’s. To see him, it’s like ‘Wow, he’s a tank!’ ”
That time, Rocco had just been ranting and Dahlsten had been successful in talking him down. This time he’d actually hurt someone. Once before when he was in full “frequent-flyer” mode, it had taken six cops to wrestle him to the ground and get him cuffed.
“While playing out possible scenarios in my head, I was glad I’d recently been issued a Taser,” Dahlsten recalls. “That option made me feel a lot better than depending on a stick or spray, given what we might be getting into.”
When he and Emillio knocked on the trailer, there was no response from inside. With the father’s help, they gained entry through a rear door that had to be pried open. Repeatedly, they called Rocco’s name. Silence. Cautiously, they began searching the home, Dahlsten with his X26 Taser in hand.
“Under the circumstances, it seemed to make more sense to have my Taser out than to risk shooting this kid with my handgun,” says the sergeant, a certified firearms trainer and a long-time instructor with John Farnam’s well-known Defense Training International, Inc. “In the past, this suspect had never attacked anyone without being cornered first. His m.o. wasn’t to hide and ambush officers.”
By the time they approached the last room in the trailer house, a 12x15-ft. bedroom, they were beginning to think Rocco had left after the family fight. Then when Dahlsten pushed the door open, they spotted him — lying on the bed in his underwear, not moving, not responding. “His quiet demeanor and lack of a ‘normal’ response to law enforcement sent a cold feeling up my back,” Dahlsten says.
The officers quickly triangulated as much as the room would allow, Emillio staying at the door, Dahlsten moving to a far corner of the tight room. Persistently alternating between requests for dialog and commands to “Put your hands behind your back,” Dahlsten eventually provoked a few verbal responses: in a “very calm, quiet voice,” Rocco complained that the lawmen were “trespassing” and threatening him with “a deadly weapon.”
“You need to sit up and put your hands behind your back,” Dahlsten told him. When the suspect failed to react, the sergeant removed the cartridge from the Taser just long enough to activate a spark, then replaced it, thinking that might prove intimidating. “If you don’t comply, I’m going to light you up!” he warned.
Suddenly, Rocco stood up, facing the officers, “as if trying to decide who his biggest threat was.” When he started to move forward, Dahlsten, after a final warning, sent the Taser’s darts flying toward him, the first time the sergeant had fired the device in the field. The darts zinged into Rocco’s torso about 10 inches apart, and the charge surged into him.
To Dahlsten’s amazement, the “tank” didn’t stop and drop but escalated his aggression. “I was surprised as hell that this suspect would be able to charge me while being Tased,” Dahlsten says. “Based on what I’d read and heard, I was expecting he’d immediately drop like a rock and life would be wonderful.”
Instead, grabbing the wires with his left hand “as if he was going to pull them out, he slammed into me like a bulldozer and stampeded me into an open closet while my Taser was connected to him — and running, ” Dahlsten says. “I felt like I’d been hit by a truck.”
The two struggled in a tangle of clothes on the closet floor through the full five-second ride. Rocco appeared undeterred by the sustained electrical jolt. “I was surprised I wasn’t lit up because I thought the wires were compressed between us,” Dahlsten says.
By the time he fired a second blast, the sergeant had managed to clamber to his feet. His attacker was still on the floor and the wires loose from the darts. “He apparently had jerked them free, but he kept hold of them,” Dahlsten recalls. “They had wrapped around him, so he was getting the ride of his life. He was growling and shouting and screaming — but still active.”
As a third zap came to an end, Rocco finally “rolled over, twitching and upset but not fighting any more. Emillio moved in and hooked him up. We pulled the darts out and drove him to the ER, where he refused treatment, then to jail.”
Dahlsten was given a chest X-ray, which confirmed he’d suffered no broken ribs from the attack — “just a few bruises”…and an important survival lesson he feels bears reinforcement for other officers:
“Whatever a suspect is doing when you pull the trigger — on a Taser or even a gun — he will probably continue doing until his mind realizes what is happening and catches up to what his body is experiencing.
“My Taser did exactly what it should do. It fired like it should, it zapped like it should. Tasers work great, far better than most other less-lethal options would have in this situation. But we need to remember that even multiple impacts from handgun bullets often don’t stop committed suspects instantly, either.
“No weapon constitutes a miracle-cure for changing a suspect’s attitude. This guy was not in a training class where someone told him he was supposed to immediately fall to the ground and comply when hit. It took him a while to realize he was supposed to be impressed by the Taser’s sting.
“As an officer, you can’t fire a weapon and just stand flat-footed and expect to be safe. You’ve got to be ready to react to whatever happens next.”
A prominent Southwestern use-of-force trainer, Sgt. Craig Stapp of the Tempe (Ariz.) P.D., agrees. Stapp, a firearms advisor to the Force Science Research Center, told PoliceOne:
“We need to accept that the only thing consistent about the performance of a projectile is that it will sometimes be inconsistent. Good instructors and officers plan for this in relation to firearms performance, but we must train with other weapons systems with the same awareness and conviction.
“We should expect that every tool/tactic/plan we have will fail to match our expectations, and have a backup plan to resort to. We cannot afford to have officers get locked up in several seconds of disbelief when a tool or tactic does not work.
“At my agency, we do not always stop a training scenario just because an officer deploys a Taser, O.C., etc. We usually force them to continue to fight and think their way through the incident. We do not want to encourage them to be ‘tool reliant,’ so that when a tool doesn’t stop a threat immediately they initially are caught up in a period of surprise or indecision, wondering why things did not work out as they did in training.
“If a suspect succumbs to an officer’s first response and gives up, good. If he continues to act aggressively, however, the officer must be prepared to continue — and win.
“I’ve heard some say tools such as the Taser reduce training time needed for physical tactics and firearms. On the contrary, I think anytime we add another weapon to the system, we need to have additional training to integrate that into our other force responses, not expect that it will be so effective that we do not need to be skilled in other options.
“We should also appreciate and encourage those like Sgt. Dahlsten and their agencies who are willing to share their ‘wake-up moments’ so that other officers can benefit from them. Actual events, including those drawn from our daily experiences, can be used as roll call reminders or as the basis for training scenarios to teach critical lessons that can save lives.”
