In this hard-hitting work of non-fiction, real heroes from across the spectrum of US policing tell their unforgettable stories.
JAKE
Jake works in a sheriff’s office in the South.
It’s day one of SWAT training, which is, without a doubt, the single hardest challenge I’ve ever faced.
The sheriff’s office developed the program in conjunction with the Navy SEALs, whose notoriously physically and mentally grueling BUD/S — Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL — begins with a five-week physical and mental beatdown including “Hell Week.”
Days, we grapple with pain-inducing fitness regimens, as well as extreme heat, cold, and sleep deprivation. Evenings, they let us go home.
That first night, I walk through the front door and start crying.
“What’s the matter?” my girlfriend asks.
I tell her about my day. “And I’ve got to go back tomorrow and do it all over again.”
I wake up the next morning, sore and tired and broken, and go back for my second day of training. One day at a time, I tell myself. That’s the only way I’m going to get through this, take it one day at a time.
But I want this. I always knew I wanted to either be in the military or the police. My father was a thirty-eight-year police officer who’d been a chief for twenty-six years when he retired. A real cop’s cop.
So I’m a proud second-generation cop, but I didn’t want to write tickets. I didn’t want to work accidents. I didn’t want to take reports. I want to do the most dangerous, the coolest, the hardest and most elite job.
Joining SWAT scratches that itch for me.
The next weeks are terrible. Absolutely terrible. Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into? But when I come out on the other side, I feel incredible. I’ve transitioned my role from street cop to full-time member of an elite, mission-focused military unit. I’m training every day with machine guns, rappelling, and fast roping — and getting paid to do it. I’m twenty-five years old.
My baptism by fire occurs when we execute a routine narcotic search warrant at an apartment complex. Our suspect lives in a ground-floor unit, and since we don’t know for sure whether he’s home or out, we go with a dynamic entry — speed, surprise, and violence of action, techniques we learned in SWAT training.
We breach the door with a battering ram. The lock mechanism gives way easily. I’m the first one into the apartment.
I scan the layout. Center hallway. Kitchen to my right opposite a living room area set up with a couch and TV. All three hall doors are closed. My job is to cover my teammates while they perform a “cleanup” — systematically clearing immediate areas where suspects might hide, like behind the TV, underneath a couch, even inside the refrigerator.
The living room and kitchen clear, my teammates burst into a bedroom. From my covering position in the hallway, I hear one of them shout, “Heads up, we’ve got a dog!”
From the corner of my eye, I see what looks like a big, muscular pit bull. I hold my focus on the two unopened doors — the one inches from my face, and the one in the center of the hallway —
Bang-bang-bang, and the doorjamb splinters in three areas. My dumb ass thinks my teammates are shooting at the dog. The thing must be aggressive as hell, but still.
“Watch your sights,” I say.
“That ain’t us, bro,” someone replies.
Then it hits me — hits us. Someone is behind that door, armed with a weapon. Could be one person in there, two, maybe more. We have no way of knowing.
We came here to secure dope, not get cops killed — which is why our team leader immediately orders us to a fallback position.
“Mission has changed,” he tells us. “We’ve got other tools we can deploy.”
Because we have at least one armed suspect, we set up a barricade protocol. The first step is to evacuate the nearest apartments as discreetly as possible. Then we get on the bullhorn, ordering the neighbors outside the evacuation area to stay in their homes.
We start negotiating with the shooter.
He doesn’t respond.
Bystanders do. They film the exchange with their phones.
A remote-controlled robot carries a pair of explosive devices into the apartment and affixes them to the two interior doors that remain closed. After the robot leaves, we detonate the devices. The overpressure of the explosive breach blows the doors open.
More shots are fired from inside the apartment.
The shooter thinks we’re still in there.
A woman carrying a baby leaves the apartment, followed by a second guy. We’re on them quickly. They tell us there’s one more person in there. He’s armed with an AK-47.
Finally, the shooter surrenders. We quickly discover why.
His AK malfunctioned.
The dog ran out of the apartment, unharmed.
Our goal is to always end the situation peacefully, to use whatever methods we can to get the suspect to surrender, and then safely remove him or her from the situation.
“When you’re stopped on the way to the hospital, speeding to say good-bye to your grandmother who’s dying, you don’t want a robot. You want somebody who’s going to identify with your situation emotionally.”
In the days that follow, people keep asking me what it was like, getting into a gunfight. “It’s not like the movies,” I say. “It’s sensory overload. All I knew for certain is that bullets were flying everywhere.”
“You should have sprayed that door with your rifle,” some people say.
Everybody’s got an opinion on what law enforcement should be doing. And I’m like, “Man, if they got all the answers, we’re always taking applications.”
What they don’t understand is that we’re accountable for every round we send downrange. That if I haven’t positively identified a target — including the suspect — I can’t shoot. That there’s a potential lawsuit attached to every single bullet.
“Oh, man, you’re a full-time SWAT, that must be terrifying,” people say to me.
My response is always to highlight the strength of my team. “I’m going in with a bunch of guys who are just as highly trained as I am, with the best equipment, with all of our tools and technology and a lot of knowledge about what we’re about to get into,” I tell them. My colleagues who are by themselves and stop a car for a taillight out at 3 a.m., with no clue what they’re getting into and backup is at least a radio call away? All things considered, I think that’s a more dangerous job.
Now I’m working to train other guys in SWAT, and we want thinkers, not just tough guys. We want tough guys who can reason.
People might think they want cops who aren’t influenced emotionally, cops who do their jobs like robots. But when you’re stopped on the way to the hospital, speeding to say good-bye to your grandmother who’s dying, you don’t want a robot. You want somebody who’s going to identify with your situation emotionally.
You want a human.
“We always operate off of safety priorities and priorities of life,” our team leader drills into us. “As for the person you’re dealing with, you’ll never know what he or she is willing to do that day, what their compliance level is, so your situational awareness has always got to be on point.”
As for the sensory overload I experienced, it takes a lot of exposure to those situations and circumstances before you start to develop some clarity and tactical maturity, I learn.
Where are we at in the priorities of life here or the safety priorities? I constantly assess in any situation. Hostages come first, because they’re not free to leave the situation. Next are innocent civilians, people we need to evacuate. Then it’s protecting ourselves, the first responders, from harm. We’re going to do whatever’s safest for us. The suspects are on the list, too, which most people forget. Most people think that we don’t regard their lives. We do. Our goal is always to get them out safely as well if we can.
The shooter on that first mission, I find out, was lying underneath a bed, the AK aimed at the door. He was just waiting for us to knock it down or blow it open. If we did that, he would have easily killed the first four or five guys who came through that choke point.
And I would have been one of the casualties.
Up until this moment, I’d thought all of PT and training was fun and cool. That’s when the sobering realization sinks in, and it chilled me to the bone.
I can get killed doing this.
JOCK CONDON
Jock Condon is originally from Scotland. He was a police officer in the UK and an MP in the Royal Air Force. Jock works for a sheriff’s office in the Midwest.
It’s two o’clock in the morning and pouring rain. I’m sitting alone in my squad car, in the Dollar General parking lot, when a call comes over the radio about an aggravated burglary in progress. Dispatch is currently on the phone with the homeowners, a married couple.
The address is right around the corner from my location. I pull out of the parking lot. I don’t hit the sirens. I don’t want to announce my arrival to the intruder or intruders.
The home’s porch light is off, the windows dark. As I get out of the car —
Bang-bang.
I grab my radio. “Shots fired from inside the house. I’m going in.”
I’m on my own. Even if they run balls to the wall, my nearest backups are probably six minutes away.
I can’t wait that long.
I draw my weapon and try the front door. It’s unlocked.
Did the homeowner shoot the intruder? Or is it the other way around?
All I know is that someone inside the house has a gun.
I open the door. As I step into a dark living room, my thoughts turn to the extremely sticky situations I got into over in Afghanistan, serving with the British Diplomatic Security teams. Somehow, I not only managed to survive but to return home in one piece. Tonight, I’m gripped with the feeling that my luck is about to run out.
I fall back on my military and police training and start “slicing the pie,” a well-tested and essential battle tactic for assessing choke points where a shooter could be lying in wait.
The living room is clear, but I have no idea where the homeowners are, what they look like.
“What if he’s lying? What if the guy lying on the bathroom floor is the homeowner? I could be walking into a trap.”
I can hear radio traffic over my earpiece, but I tune out the words and focus on my surroundings. The living room leads into a kitchen. I approach cautiously, certain that I’m about to engage in close-quarters combat.
My priority is the safety of the homeowners. It’s counterintuitive to me personally but from my training, I have to take the risk. I announce myself as loudly as possible.
“Homeowner! Sheriff’s office!”
I move to the gap between where the living room meets the kitchen, certain that a muzzle flash is going to be the last thing I see before I die. I don’t have a choice. It has to be done. This is what cops do.
I round the corner and slice the pie, thinking of my four-year-old son tucked in his bed, asleep; thinking of him waking up tomorrow without a father.
“Don’t let me die!” someone groans. “Please, God, don’t let me die.”
A short hallway leads to a Jack and Jill bathroom. The bathroom door is open about a foot and, lying on the floor, I see a guy who looks like Santa Claus — chubby, with a big, unkempt white beard. Santa has a sucking chest wound.
We’re taught to always look at the hands. Santa is holding something small and shiny. I’m too far away to make out what it is.
“Homeowner! Identify yourself!”
“In here.” A male voice. “I’m in the bedroom.”
A sliver of light shines from beneath what appears to be a half-opened bedroom door on my left. I can’t see who’s talking, not without giving away my position.
“Who else is in there with you?”
“My wife,” the man responds. “She called 911.”
“Anyone else in the house?”
“No, sir,” he replies. “Just that man in the bathroom.”
“Put your gun down on the floor.”
A beat, and then he says, “Okay. I’m no longer armed.”
What if he’s lying? What if the guy lying on the bathroom floor is the homeowner? I could be walking into a trap.
Santa is dying. The guy has seconds to live. If he is, in fact, the homeowner, I have to save him. If he’s the bad guy, I still have to save him. Either way, I don’t have a choice, and I can’t wait. I have to “do it live,” as we say. To move through the choke point.
Going into the unknown, being willing to die and leave everything behind — this is the job.
Using my thumb, I turn on the tactical light attached to my service weapon. I advance slowly, dividing my attention between Santa’s hands and the blind area to my left, the bedroom. I can’t stop thinking about my son. If I’m going to die tonight, my last thoughts will be of him.
A quick look inside the bedroom and I see a couple in their early thirties. They’re cowering in fear. A weapon is lying on top of the bed instead of the floor. The man has a look of sheer horror — the shell-shocked expression of someone who didn’t want to pull the trigger and was forced to do it.
Back to Santa. The shiny object in his hands is a small metal flashlight, the kind that attaches to a key chain. In addition to a sucking chest wound, he’s been shot through the face, throat, neck, and jaw.
My military experience includes treating chest injuries. When I moved through the kitchen, I remembered seeing tea towels hanging on the handle of the oven. I holster my weapon and retrieve the towels. When I return, Santa is in the grips of a “death rattle.” He can’t cough or swallow the saliva that has built up in the back of his throat.
I manage to keep Santa alive until the medics arrive, which includes sticking my finger into the bullet hole in his chest to seal it. Fortunately for him, the medics are located three hundred yards down the road.
The medics need more room to work on him, so they drag him by his boots into the kitchen, leaving a long bloody smear across the floor. As they put chest seals on his entry and exit wounds, more of my team members arrive.
“I booked it over here,” my buddy Jake tells me. “We thought you’d been shot.”
I look at him, confused.
“The wife was on the phone with dispatch,” he says. “She said her husband just shot someone. We tried raising you on the radio, but you didn’t answer so we all drove like maniacs, thinking you’d been hit.”
Santa is whisked away to the hospital. I have to wait for CSI and the detectives. I sit down with the homeowners. They’re literally in shock. They’ve watched us work on the intruder, watched us drag him away. There’s blood everywhere.
“I didn’t want to shoot him,” the husband says. “I kept telling him to get out, get out, but he wouldn’t listen.”
The man is despondent about having pulled the trigger. It’s a big responsibility to bear. I know, from personal experience, what he’s going through.
Later, I learn that the intruder will live. I also find out that Santa is an alcoholic who’d been on the wagon for years. Tonight, he decided to jump off with both feet, got as drunk as a skunk, and simply walked into the wrong house.
Extracted from American Cops by James Patterson, out now.
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