At the IACP annual conference last fall, two separate panels were devoted to debriefing what happened in Detroit that cold and fateful Sunday morning nine months earlier when an offender armed with a 20-ga. pump shotgun walked into the 6th precinct station and opened fire on officers in the front lobby with a staggered load of slugs and 00 buck.
Before he ran dry of ammunition and fell dead from retaliatory rounds, the gunman wounded four precinct personnel—and fashioned a bloody legacy of lessons learned and reinforced about surviving the unexpected.
1.) The worst can happen anywhere. And “anywhere” includes what Detroit Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. called “our sanctuary, a place of refuge where we can’t retreat any further”: the police station. Once, he said, “We may not have had a level of preparedness there compared to the street,” but today that is a luxury of the past.
As the 6th precinct’s commander Brian Davis put it: “The culture in urban and rural areas has changed in the last 15 years. Now if an individual hurts a law enforcement officer, he is respected by his peers. Across the U.S., 11 other officers were shot on the same day as our shooting. In training at the range, in service, at roll call, in the academy, we need to constantly, constantly be telling officers what they’re facing out there.”
And also reminding them that body armor needs to be worn even in seemingly “safe” environments. Point-blank pellets from the attacker’s shotgun were so well absorbed by one sergeant’s vest that she didn’t even realize she’d been shot until after the incident was over. Without the vest hardening her as a target, the outcome would have been much different.
2.) Don’t let convenience trump readiness. During her shift, the precinct’s desk officer shuttled back and forth between the lobby area and nearby holding cells. To avoid having to move her sidearm in and out of its holster, she stuck it in a desk drawer. When the shooting invasion started, she “felt gunpowder hit her from the first blast,” but she couldn’t get to her weapon to fight back.
She experienced much criticism from officers who weren’t at the scene for “hiding under a desk” during the shootout, according to police psychologist LaMaurice Gardner. “She felt shame, guilt, fear, and cowardice. Not shooting in life-threatening situations can cause trauma.” Indeed, Gardner said, “she is still healing from the psychological trauma and has not yet returned to work.”
3.) Practice with all the gear you carry. Cmdr. Davis was behind the reception counter looking for a phone number in connection with an investigation when the shooting started. He said he expected the gunman to turn and run after a volley of rounds. Instead, he leaped over the counter and landed nearly face-to-face with Davis.
The commander had stopped by the station after church and was wearing an ankle holster on his left leg. “I never used it,” Davis said. Instead, he grabbed the gun of a sergeant who had fallen to the floor with a face wound, thus leaving the still-conscious sergeant unarmed.
According to John Bostain of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, who critiqued the incident, Davis “forgot about” the gun in his concealed holster. “He had never gone to the range and practiced drawing and firing” from the ankle rig.
Fortunately, the commander became the hero of the day when he used the sergeant’s gun to kill the suspect.
4.) Stay in the fight. “Too many officers still believe in the one-shot-drop myth,” Bostain lamented. “But many times, shooting someone is not going to incapacitate them immediately. This suspect was still moving and shooting even after he was ‘fatally’ shot.”
At the same time, officers need to comprehend that “your getting shot does not necessarily take you out of the fight. You can usually still function.” The ends of two of Davis’s fingers were blown off, tendons in another finger were ripped through, and he sustained a critical wound in the back as he ducked and weaved in an effort to dodge the suspect’s line of fire. “But he never stopped fighting,” Bostain said. His persistence in delivering fire even though life-threateningly injured undoubtedly saved lives.
5.) Beware the relapse of complacency. This was not the first time a precinct station had been attacked in Detroit. When Gardner arrived at the scene about 30 minutes after the shotgunner had been put down, his mind flashed back to a similar assault in the 9th precinct station several years ago. In that incident too, “officers had their vests off, their guns put away. The thinking was, ‘Who’s going to come into our sanctuary?’ ” Then time passed and people let their guard down again.
A member of one of the IACP panels told Police1 privately about visiting the besieged 6th precinct station less than six months after the 2011 shooting. Among the things he noticed there was an officer sitting at the reception desk with no vest on, right below where one of the suspect’s pellets had torn out a chunk of the wall.
