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“It was like a horror movie. The power was out. The lightning flashes were lighting up the house and my step-dad was walking from room to room with a rifle in his hands. He said nothing and his eyes looked dead. I thought this was going to be the night I was going to die.”
These were the words of a potential victim after she survived a night of horror with a step-father that promised death. When he spoke on the phone with a negotiator he asked that the negotiator come in and finish it for him. “I want to die tonight, but I can’t do it myself.”
The suspect had been the reason for two prior SWAT call-outs. The responding team was familiar with him and the layout of his property. The man’s house was at the end of a long wooded driveway through the woods, funneling anyone approaching right into the sights of the many rifles owned by this troubled dangerous man.
The SWAT Team Leader formulated a plan. The night was as dark as night could be and the power was out in this rural area. The team had just trained with their night vision equipment, which they had received after two years of wrangling through a homeland security grant.
They would execute a flanking move and avoid the fatal funnel of the driveway. The team entered the property through a rough patch of woods that would have them approaching the house from a heavily wooded ridge over looking the house. The perimeter was set and communications had been cut off by the suspect.
The entry team made its way through the woods and held at the military crest of the ridge. They scanned the area and using their newly acquired optics discovered the suspect did not want to die tonight. He wanted to kill tonight. He had set up a snipers nest above the house over looking the fatal funnel of the driveway. Anyone driving down the driveway would have been at his mercy.
The suspect’s location was so lit up by the night visions equipment’s greenish yellow hue it seemed inconceivable to anyone wearing the equipment that they were invisible to the suspect, but they most certainly were. The team made a stealth approach with out being detected and without ever losing sight of the suspect. The suspect was so startled when the team challenged him from the total darkness of the woods that he surrendered without incident.
The tactical advantage of being able to see and yet remain unseen is available to every police agency in the nation. The technology allowing officers to enhance available light, or alternatively to literally see heat is amazing. This technology has been used to save officers lives, rescue hostages, thwart homicidal intentions of bad guys, and find lost puppies and children. Okay, maybe not lost puppies — this is merely literary license — but you get the idea.
SWAT commanders and patrol commanders have seen tight budgets that can afford the continual updating of computers and programs that are not even as old as some hair-cuts. They have sat back and watched departments refurnished to accommodate everything from the dire and impending looming threat of global warning to the devastating heartbreak of carpal tunnel syndrome.
It is time to realize that because technology exists that allows us to see and yet remain unseen, the “cover of darkness” has new, tactically significant meaning.
Let’s look at it very simply: If you were blind and the technology existed to give you sight, how much would that be worth to you? The fact is that we need to find ways to prevent agencies from sending our officers into the night — effectively blind — when the technology exists to give them sight and the tactical edge. How much do you think that’s worth?
I’d say it’s priceless.
