Into the Kill Zone: A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force

By David Klinger

What's it like to have the legal sanction to shoot and kill? This compelling and often startling book answers this, and many other questions about the oft-times violent world inhabited by our nation's police officers. Written by a cop-turned university professor who interviewed scores of officers who have shot people in the course of their duties, Into the Kill Zone presents firsthand accounts of the role that deadly force plays in American police work. This brilliantly written book tells how novice officers are trained to think about and use the power they have over life and death, explains how cops live with the awesome responsibility that comes from the barrels of their guns, reports how officers often hold their fire when they clearly could have shot, presents hair-raising accounts of what it's like to be involved in shoot-outs, and details how shooting someone affects officers who pull the trigger. From academy training to post-shooting reactions, this book tells the compelling story of the role that extreme violence plays in the lives of America's cops.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jun 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781118429761

Book preview

Introduction

Edward Randolph was twenty-six years old when I killed him. I was twenty-three.

I first laid eyes on him less than a minute before I shot him, so I didn’t know his name, how old he was, or anything else about him before I ended his life. I didn’t even get a good look at his face before I pulled the trigger, and he died a few minutes after that. I was about fifteen feet away when his heart stopped, watching the paramedics tending to the wounds that I had inflicted moments before. They had all come from a single bullet that slammed into his left side just below his armpit, bored a hole through his left lung, nicked his aorta, and tunneled through his right lung before coming to a stop just under the flesh on the right side of his chest. He died on his back, naked, the paramedics having cut off his clothes to check his body for additional wounds. There were a few scrapes and contusions that he had suffered as my partner, four other officers, and I wrestled from him the butcher’s knife that he frantically grasped in his right hand, rolled him onto his stomach, and handcuffed him. And there were a few more that he got when two of the other officers dragged him from the sidewalk where I had shot him to the shadow of a car that was parked nearby. But his only serious injuries came from the bullet that I had pumped into his chest. As I watched the paramedics fighting a losing battle to save him from these wounds, his bladder released its acrid contents, sending an arc of urine toward his head. I knew that people often void their bladders upon death, so when I saw the stream tail off a few seconds later, I knew that Edward Randolph was dead. And that I had killed him.

When I first saw the man I was about to kill, he was standing across the street from me, by himself, seventy-five feet or so away. It was a few minutes after 10:30 P.M. on July 25, 1981, just four months after I had graduated from the Los Angeles Police Academy. My partner, Dennis Azevedo, and I were on the north side of Vernon Avenue, crouched behind a parked car, our pistols trained on a house where just minutes earlier an armed burglar had shot at the home owner.

That was where we’d deployed after responding to a call for assistance from the officers who’d been assigned the call. We’d been directed to meet a sergeant one block west of the house in question, and when we screeched to a halt there, he told us that the shooter was still inside, that other officers had already taken up positions on the east side of the house, and that we needed to secure its west side to keep the gunman from escaping into the night. He also told us that we needed to clear the south side of Vernon Avenue of the dozens of citizens who had gathered to watch yet another midsummer’s night drama involving the cops and the crooks on the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles. As Dennis and I ran toward the house along the north side of Vernon, we shouted and motioned for the throng on the south side to clear the area, lest they get shot by the gunman whose escape we sought to prevent. As we ran east, the crowd ran west, and when they hit the first corner, they took a quick left out of the danger zone—all but the man who was about to die, that is. He never took a step.

As soon as the citizens started running, I turned my attention to the house that contained the gunman—I just assumed that all the spectators would flee once they understood the danger in the house across from them—so I didn’t notice that one of them hadn’t budged as Dennis and I moved along. We stopped in front of the house next to the one that contained the gunman, ducking down on the safe side of a white Cadillac that was parked in the driveway. After a few seconds, I caught a glimpse of a lone figure across the street in the corner of my right eye. I quickly glanced over my right shoulder. That’s when I first saw him—just standing there, staring in our direction, with a gym bag hanging from his left shoulder. I yelled for him to leave the area. Then Dennis did. Then we both yelled some more. But the man didn’t budge. He just stood there, staring at us.

We didn’t know who he was or why he was standing there. Maybe he didn’t speak English, I thought, so he couldn’t understand what we wanted him to do. Maybe he couldn’t hear what we were saying over the din of the police helicopter orbiting overhead. Or maybe he was deaf. All we knew for sure was that whoever he was, he was in grave danger, standing in the open directly across the street from a house that contained a man who had already tried to kill one citizen. Because the man was in danger, Dennis told me he was going to run across the street, get the guy out of there, then come back to join me. He holstered his weapon and took off.

I refocused my attention on the house, fully expecting the gunman to start shooting at Dennis, and getting ready to shoot back. Then, suddenly, about fifteen seconds after Dennis left my side, I heard an angry voice scream over the racket of the orbiting helicopter, Get your fucking hands off me! Don’t tell me what to do! I immediately peeled my eyes from the house and looked over my right shoulder. There, across the street, stood Dennis and the as-yet-unidentified citizen, no more than two feet apart, facing each other on the sidewalk. Dennis faced west, the citizen east. Their lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. A few seconds later, the man turned away and took a couple of steps west down the sidewalk. I thought Dennis had convinced him to get out of harm’s way.

But I was wrong.

With Dennis trailing a step behind, the man reached across his chest with his right hand, pulled a large butcher’s knife from the bag slung over his left shoulder, and in one fluid motion pivoted back to his right, brought his left hand up to form a two-handed grip on the handle of the knife, and furiously plunged the blade into Dennis’s chest.

I simply could not believe what I had seen—and neither could Dennis. He stared at his assailant as the man released his left hand from his right, drew the knife back to chest level, and for a split second stared back at Dennis. As I began to get up from my crouch to run to my partner’s aid, the man attacked again.

This time, he drew the knife over his head, and like Anthony Perkins in the shower scene in Psycho, he brought it down with blinding speed. As the knife flashed toward him, Dennis stepped back and threw his hands in front of his face, desperately trying to fend off the blow. Somehow he succeeded and took another step back. The assailant took another step toward him, again drew the knife above his own head, and took another hack at Dennis. Dennis somehow managed to block the blow and retreated another step. The madman continued to press his attack as I moved away from the cover of the Cadillac. He hacked at Dennis again and again. And again and again, Dennis threw his hands up to parry the blows as he backpedaled down the sidewalk. Then Dennis tripped and fell flat on his back on the grass strip separating the sidewalk from the street, and the madman immediately moved in to finish him off.

He leaped on top of Dennis, landing with his knees astride my partner’s hips, drew the knife above his head with both hands, and brought it crashing down toward Dennis’s throat. Miraculously, Dennis managed to reach up and grab both of his attacker’s wrists as the blade plunged toward him, stopping it just short of its mark. When I got to my partner’s side a moment later, he was locked in a life-or-death struggle, still lying on his back, the assailant still straddling him on his knees, and the knife flickering between them, inches from Dennis’s throat.

I immediately dropped to one knee and grabbed the assailant’s left wrist with all my might, intending to twist his arm behind him, push him onto his back, and together with Dennis wrest the knife from him. But it didn’t work. More quickly and easily than I ever could have imagined was possible, he jerked his arms away from me and effortlessly broke my desperate grip while maintaining his own on the knife. I then heard Dennis shout, Shoot him! So I did. Still close enough to reach out and touch him, I picked a spot on the left side of the madman’s chest, brought my gun up, and pulled the trigger. As the sound of the gunshot passed into the night, the assailant—in a voice indicating that he realized the jig was up—said, Oh, shit! Dennis pushed his arms up, and I reached back in with my left hand and grabbed the madman’s right wrist. With Dennis pushing and me pulling, we forced the assailant onto his side, and then to his back. As we did this, the attacker released his left hand from the knife, but he still held it firmly in his right. To increase my leverage, I dropped to my right knee and slammed the attacker’s wrist to the turf with my left hand, then pinned it to the ground with my left foot. The assailant continued to fight us, but with my firm grip and full body weight on his wrist, we had the knife under control.

A few seconds later, four of the officers who had been on the east side of the perimeter came charging down the sidewalk toward us. Together, the six of us forced the knife out of the still struggling assailant’s right hand, rolled him onto his stomach, and handcuffed him behind his back. Aware of the danger posed by the gunman in the house across the street, two of the other officers grabbed the suspect and quickly dragged him out of the line of fire to a spot behind a car that was parked on the lawn of the house in front of which the shooting went down. Dennis and I, along with a sergeant who had rushed to the scene moments after we cuffed the suspect, ran up onto the porch of the house in front of which the suspect lay, crouched down behind its rock-and-mortar railing, and again trained our guns on the house across the street. Two paramedics appeared and began to work on the man I had just shot, who was now lying no more than twenty feet from me. For the next few minutes, I focused on the house across the street, still expecting the gunman inside to shoot, but intermittently glanced down at the medical drama that was being played out on the grass nearby. It was during the last of these peeks that I saw the urine flow, and I knew that I had just killed a man.

At some point while we were on the porch, I realized that Dennis wasn’t bleeding at all. This struck me as odd, inasmuch as I’d seen the blade of a large knife slam into his chest and had watched helplessly as the assailant pressed his follow-up attack while I was running across the street. But Dennis was wearing body armor under his uniform shirt that night, and it saved his life. The blade had torn most of the way through the vest on the initial thrust, but the last few layers of Kevlar stopped it just short of its mark. That Dennis had suffered no cuts as he retreated from his attacker could be chalked up only to Providence, because it was truly miraculous that his hands and arms had not been slashed to ribbons.

The sergeant used a phone in the house on whose porch we were crouched to notify headquarters of the situation, then told us to meet another sergeant who was waiting at our patrol car to escort us back to the police station. We ran to our car, met the other sergeant, and caravanned the four miles back to the station, where the watch commander directed the three of us to the captain’s office to wait for the detectives from Robbery-Homicide Division. When they arrived, they interviewed Dennis first, then me. At some point, we learned that SWAT had been called out to deal with the gunman in the house back on Vernon and, consequently, that we would have to wait awhile before we could return to the scene to walk the detectives through what had happened. While we waited, someone informed me that the man I had shot had indeed died, confirming what I had seen from my perch on the porch.

At about 2:30 A.M., after repeated attempts to contact the gunman had yielded no response, the SWAT team entered the house to find it empty. No one ever figured out if the gunman had escaped before Dennis and I arrived on scene or whether he had slipped away during the confusion caused by my shooting, but he was never found.

After SWAT had cleared the house, Dennis and I returned to the scene, reenacted the entire scenario for the investigators, and then returned to the station for more interviews. At some point during this process, one of the detectives told me the name of the man I had killed. I found out later that he was an ex-con from Texas, who had told associates in L.A. that he was tired of being harassed by the police and that he would kill the next cop who bothered him. The detectives from the shooting team finished up and let me go home at about 10:30 A.M. on July 26, 1981, almost exactly twelve hours after I had killed Edward Randolph.

• • •

About a year and a half later, I left the LAPD to take a job as a patrol officer with the city of Redmond, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, the city where I had attended college and received my bachelor’s in history three years earlier. In the summer of 1984, I quit police work, married a wonderful woman, and moved to Washington, D.C., to attend graduate school. After I received a master’s degree in justice from the American University in 1985, my bride and I returned to the Seattle area. I took a year off from graduate school, then started up again at the University of Washington, where I earned a doctorate in sociology. I took a job on the sociology faculty of the University of Houston in 1991, received tenure in 1998, and moved to the University of Missouri-St. Louis a year later.

Over the years, I thought many times about the desperate moments during the summer of 1981 that culminated in Edward Randolph’s death. In fact, during the first several years after the shooting, they were never very far from my mind. I had gone into law enforcement to help people, not kill them, and the shock of having taken a life stayed with me for a long time. It was a major reason why I left police work for full-time graduate studies rather than sticking with my initial career plan to pursue advanced degrees on a part-time basis, then move on to a faculty position when my days as a street cop ended. It also animated the course of study that I initially set for myself in graduate school.

From my own experience, discussions with numerous other officers who had also shot people, and reading law enforcement publications, I was keenly aware that police shootings can have a dramatic impact on officers who pull the trigger. Officers who are involved in shootings can experience a variety of short- and long-term reactions, such as recurrent thoughts about the incident, a sense of numbness, nausea, sadness, crying, and trouble sleeping. Indeed the existence of such responses has led mental health professionals to identify them as symptoms of a type of post-traumatic stress response, commonly called post-shooting trauma in law enforcement circles.¹

A closely related issue that also interested me was officers’ reactions during shooting events themselves. It was common knowledge in the law enforcement community that during shootings officers can experience a variety of unusual reactions, such as a sense of disbelief that the incident is happening, intrusive thoughts about irrelevant matters, and sensory distortions such as a narrowing of the visual field, decreased auditory acuity, and altered perceptions of time.² At the time that I left police work in 1984, however, no thorough research on officers’ reactions during and after shootings had been conducted, so what was known about these topics was quite limited.

I had intended to devote my academic career to developing a deeper understanding of how shootings affect officers who pull the trigger, but during grad school, I became interested in different aspects of policing, so I put deadly force on the back burner. A few years ago, however, my interest in the consequences of shooting people heated back up because very little sound research on the personal impact of shootings had been conducted since I left police work. So with the help of a grant from the United States Department of Justice, I started to interview police officers who, like me, had been involved in shootings. By the time I completed my research, I had interviewed eighty officers from nineteen different police departments spread across four states.

During each interview, I asked the officers about their lives before they became involved in law enforcement, their experiences during academy and field training, instances in which they believed they had cause to shoot someone but held their fire, situations in which they did shoot people, and what took place in the aftermath of these shootings.

The fact that I was a former officer who had been there increased the officers’ willingness to talk candidly about their experiences, as did the fact that under the terms of my grant I was (and still am) forbidden by federal law to divulge their identity to anyone without their express permission. In the end, the interviews I conducted yielded detailed information about 113 incidents in which the officers I interviewed had shot citizens (several of the officers had been in more than one shooting) and thousands of pages of interview transcripts.³ This book draws on this material to present a picture of the role that deadly force plays in police work from the point of view of officers who have used it.

I wrote it to shed light on one of the most intriguing, yet least understood, aspects of the American experience. Americans have been both drawn to and repulsed by deadly force since municipal police officers started carrying firearms in the 1850s. Psychologists would tell us that this is so because at some deep subconscious level humans are both drawn to and repulsed by violence of any sort.⁴ But our schizophrenic posture toward police shootings springs also from a deep cultural well. Our nation has a long-standing tradition of clamoring for government protection from the actions of criminals, while at the same time rebelling against the constraints that those protective activities place on our lives.⁵ So we are drawn to police shootings not just because they are violent acts but also because they are the most dramatic instance of government doing battle with the bad guys that threaten us. And we are repulsed by them not only because of the damage they inflict but also because they are the ultimate form of government intrusion.

In recent years, this sense of disquiet about deadly government power has repeatedly been expressed in the form of social unrest. A good many of the major civil disturbances (and many of the smaller ones) that have erupted in our nation in the last four decades have been spawned by anger over law enforcement activity, often the use of deadly force. Indeed one the first large-scale riots of the tumultuous 1960s occurred in July 1964, after an off-duty New York City police lieutenant fatally shot a black teenager who attacked him with a knife. Two days later, a riot that claimed one life and caused nearly two dozen injuries broke out when a crowd marched on the local police station house to protest the shooting. The rioting spread, and over the next few days the police battled brick-tossing crowds, and firefighters doused flames set by Molotov cocktails in the minority enclaves of Harlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn.

Similar violence broke out following police shootings of minorities in Tampa, Florida, and other cities during the remainder of the decade.⁶ This pattern was repeated in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, as riots broke out in the wake of police shootings in several cities, including Miami and St. Petersburg, Florida, Washington, D.C., the Gotham suburb Teaneck, New Jersey, and New York City itself. The spectacle of community upheaval following police gunfire has carried into the new century. As I write these words in the fall of 2003, Cincinnati, Ohio, is still recovering from a series of disturbances that erupted in the summer of 2001 after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man during a foot chase.

This book is not about police brutality or the response of minority communities to police violence. It does not explore why some officers go bad, nor the complex historical, social, and economic forces that give rise to violent conflict along racial lines when minority citizens perceive that officers have used too much force.⁷ At the same time, however, I am painfully aware that it is commonly asserted by critics of the police that American law enforcement is full of bigoted officers who enjoy expressing their prejudice through the barrels of their guns. In making this argument, the critics point to the fact that although black citizens make up only about 12 percent of the U.S. population, blacks account for about half of all people felled by police bullets—and a much higher percentage in many large jurisdictions that have large black populations.⁸ Although these numbers would at first glance seem to offer clear support for the assertion that officers use deadly force in a race-based fashion, careful consideration of the matter indicates that the issue is not so simple, and that the racial disparity in the likelihood of being shot by the police may be explained by patterns of criminal offending.

Criminological research consistently finds that black Americans—due to historical, economic, and social forces—are more likely than whites to commit serious crimes, and the research on the use of deadly force by police officers indicates that the racial disparity in shooting rates is quite similar to the racial disparity in serious criminal offending (especially in larger jurisdictions).⁹ So a deeper look at the question indicates that it may well be that blacks are more likely to be shot because they are more likely to commit serious crimes, not because the police are quicker on the trigger when facing blacks.

That racial disparities in shooting statistics would seem to be explained by differential involvement in criminal activity does not mean, however, that all officers at all times use their firearms appropriately. Even though all of the available evidence indicates that it very rarely happens, there have in fact been cases in which officers apparently shot citizens with no lawful justification. The most recent notable examples of this come from Los Angeles and Miami, where small groups of officers stand accused of fabricating evidence to cover up illicit shootings. But these incidents do not suggest that racial bias motivated the accused, for many of the officers involved are themselves minorities.¹⁰ So it would appear that the issue of illicit shootings is related more to problem officers, who arise from time to time in police work, than to a systematic bias or some other sort of generalized desire among police officers to abuse citizens.

Unfortunately, police departments are not required to report to any national body when their officers shoot someone, so there are no comprehensive national figures on how frequently officers fire their weapons.¹¹ But scholars who study deadly force have offered guesstimates based on the data that are available. In the late 1980s, for example, the low estimate for fatal shootings per year was six hundred, the high a thousand, and the estimates for nonfatal shootings ranged from twelve hundred to fifteen hundred per year.¹² If these estimates were correct, then American police were shooting between eighteen hundred and twenty-five hundred people each year during the 1980s.

These figures have not been updated, so current estimates of national police-shooting figures are not available. We do know, however, that the annual number of police shootings in many big cities declined substantially during the 1990s (in New York City, for example, from thirty-nine fatal shootings in 1990 to eleven in 1999).¹³ This suggests that the number of people shot by police each year has likely decreased since the 1980s, perhaps to as low as twelve hundred. Whether this figure is correct—or too low by half or more—when one considers that there are more than 750,000 police officers in the United States and that these officers have tens of millions of interactions with citizens each year, it is clear that police shootings are extremely rare events and that few officers—less than one-half of 1 percent each year—ever shoot anyone.

The notion that officers rarely shoot runs counter to popular conceptions about the use of deadly force in police work, which are driven by fictionalized portrayals of police work in movies, TV shows, and other media; press accounts of police shootings; and the pronouncements of antipolice activists and other bloviators who are more concerned with promoting themselves or their cause than they are with an honest accounting of matters.

Incidents in which police officers shoot citizens are dramatic events that fit perfectly with the news media’s if it bleeds, it leads dictum, so police shootings can generate substantial local press coverage. Any hint of controversy can turn a shooting into a cause célèbre that gets massive local, regional, and even national press play. Sensational reports of garden variety shootings and constant updates on the latest developments in controversial ones give the impression that police officers frequently use their firearms in the course of their duties. Popular entertainment reinforces the perception that officers often shoot people, serving up shoot-outs as regular fare in TV shows such as Miami Vice and movies about the police such as the Dirty Harry Callahan series. And people who make careers of complaining about alleged police misconduct have a vested interest in perpetuating the belief that officers shoot people on a regular basis.

In addition to presenting a false front about how often officers shoot, critics of the police typically gloss over or simply ignore an important fact about police work: it is an inherently dangerous job. According to FBI statistics, 644 police officers were murdered during the decade that ended in 2000. Most of these officers were slain with firearms: 452 of them with handguns, 114 with rifles, and 35 with shotguns. The other three-dozen-plus officers who were murdered during the decade were either stabbed or slashed to death with knives, swords, or other cutting instruments; purposely run down by motor vehicles; beaten to death with blunt instruments; punched or kicked to death; or fell victim to some other sort of gruesome fate. Tens of thousands of other officers survived assaults—many of them just barely—during the 1991 to 2000 span, including several thousand who were shot.¹⁴

It is in the context of this climate of ever present danger that officers operate with the power over life and death through their firearms. They have the responsibility to use their power judiciously: to protect themselves, fellow officers, and innocent citizens from harm, on the one hand, and to refrain from shooting if at all possible, on the other. It is hard for those who have not been police officers to understand what it is like to have the awesome responsibility to carry and possibly use firearms in the course of serving society. As we will see as this book unfolds, police officers often have to make their decisions about whether to shoot or hold their fire in split seconds, with limited information, in situations where the wrong choice can lead to needless injury or death and even the right choice can have substantial repercussions.

A major reason why it is hard for people who have not served in law enforcement to understand the immense responsibility that comes from carrying a gun is that there is a dearth of information about how officers actually think and feel about deadly force. This book seeks to at least partially remedy this by presenting a cop’s eye view of the role deadly force plays in the lives of American police officers—from before they come on the job to the aftermath of shootings.

The first chapter deals with officers’ expectations about the use of deadly force before they came on the job. The second chapter addresses officers’ experiences during academy and field training and how these experiences shaped their attitudes about using deadly force. The third chapter focuses on cases in which officers hold their fire when shooting would have been legally permissible. The fourth chapter is devoted to shootings. And the final chapter depicts what occurs in the wake of shootings and how involvement in shootings affects officers who pull the trigger.

Each chapter consists of collections of stories that are presented in the words of the officers who told them to me. The stories, which vary in length from a single paragraph to several pages, were selected because they provide a set of accounts that represent the major themes that emerged during my research. The stories are presented in the officers’ own words, but they do contain some modifications that enhance clarity and narrative structure.

In order to reduce the likelihood that some readers might be able to divine the identity of an officer from a given story, I typically changed the dates, the names of the involved officers, the locations, and other identifying information. The only exceptions are when changing potentially identifying information would substantially alter a major aspect of what occurred and the officers in question explicitly told me that they did not mind if some potentially identifying details remained.

The stories recounted in the pages that follow are as accurate and complete as I could make them. Nonetheless they do not convey everything the officers told me, for written words simply cannot express everything that people say when they talk. As is the case with all human speech, a decent bit of what officers conveyed about their experiences came through other modes of communication. Officers commonly punctuated their presentations with extreme animation: emotions surfaced and sometimes spilled over, as they used posture, gestures, tone of voice, facial expressions, and other means to help convey the anger, hatred, sadness, shock, fear, frustration, and other sentiments they felt before, during, and after their shootings. Tears welled up in—and occasionally spilled out of—some of the officers’ eyes as they recounted particularly horrific aspects of a shooting or some aspect of its aftermath. Other officers visibly seethed with vitriol as they described the disdain they felt for specific individuals, including the suspects they shot, the suspects’ lawyers, and members of the press. And some officers became still, subdued, and quiet as they told certain parts of their stories.

When turning the interviews into written narratives there is, unfortunately, no way to represent all of the various verbal intonations, tears, postures, gesticulations, averted gazes, and so on that framed officers’ words without detracting substantially from the flow of their stories. I did all that I could to capture as much as possible of what officers were thinking and feeling by asking detailed questions and follow-ups that sought to get the officers to express with words as clearly and completely as possible what they were communicating through other means. These efforts yielded rich, detailed narratives that convey a tremendous amount of what the officers expressed.

At this point, it is worthwhile to note that a good deal of sociological, psychological, and legal research has established that people who are involved in or witness the same event often have different impressions of what transpired. This phenomenon (often referred to as the Rashomon effect, after Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon, which presents four individuals’ accounts of a rape-murder) indicates that what the officers told me about the shootings in which they were involved does not represent the complete story of the incidents they related, but rather the story from their point of view. Others who experienced the events would have told different stories. A different book might have included these stories, but the purpose of this book is to present officers’ accounts of their shootings: what they saw, what they heard, what they thought, what they did, how they felt. And so it does.

In telling the stories of their shootings and other events, the officers I interviewed sometimes used technical terms and vernacular phrases and otherwise spoke in ways that could render understanding difficult for those lacking a background in law enforcement. Because the book uses officers’ own words to tell their stories, the pages that follow contain a good deal of police talk. To minimize any problem such language might present, I have included in the back of the book a Glossary, containing terms and phrases that readers can turn to for clarification when they encounter police idiom.

The definition of one idiomatic phrase should not wait for the back of the book, however, because it appears in the title. Police officers (and members of the military) use the term kill zone to refer to locations where a person is vulnerable to being killed by hostile action. The term is most often used to describe space into which someone possessing a firearm can shoot—the street in front of a house containing a sniper, for example. But it is also used more generally to describe the space that individuals occupy when they are vulnerable to being killed by any sort of weapon, be it a gun, a knife, or a motor vehicle. In police work, then, officers are in the kill zone when they are in positions where they could be shot, stabbed, run over, or otherwise mortally injured by citizens. Because the stories that make up this book are officers’ accounts of how they prepared for, experienced, and dealt with the aftermath of spending time in the kill zone, they take the reader Into the Kill Zone.

Notes

1. Examples of research on officers’ reactions following shootings include Post-Traumatic Stress: Study of Police Officers Involved in Shootings, by John G. Stratton, David Parker, and John R. Snibbe, Psychological Reports 55 (1984): 127–131; Patterns of PTSD Among Police Officers Following Shooting Incidents: A Two-Dimensional Model and Treatment Implications, by Berthold P. R. Gersons, Journal of Traumatic Stress 2 (1989): 247–257; and A Comparative Analysis of the Effects of Post-Shooting Trauma on the Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, by John Henry Campbell, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Department of Educational Administration, Michigan State University, 1992).

2. Examples of the research on officers’ reactions during shootings include Deadly Force Encounters: What Cops Need to Know to Mentally and Physically Prepare for and Survive a Gunfight, by Alexis Artwohl and Loren W. Christensen (Boulder, Colo.: Paladin Press, 1997); and A Comparative Analysis of the Effects of Post-Shooting Trauma on the Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, by John Henry Campbell, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Department of Educational Administration, Michigan State University, 1992).

It should be noted here that police officers who are involved in shootings are not alone when it comes to experiencing unusual reactions during and after stressful events. Research has established that people involved in a wide variety of traumatic events—including combat, criminal victimization, and mass disasters—can experience the sorts of things that cops deal with during and after shootings. For a good overview of the research on how humans react to traumatic incidents, see Stress and Trauma, by Patricia A. Resick (Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis, 2001).

3. Readers interested in learning more about the research project can do so by reading the final report that I submitted to the Department of Justice. This report can be accessed on the Internet via a link at www.killzonevoices.com.

4. The basis for the psychological claim that humans are naturally both drawn to and repulsed by violence lies in Freud’s work on Eros and Thanatos. See, for example, Civilisation, War, and Death, by Sigmund Freud, edited by John Rickman (London: Hogarth Press, 1968; originally published 1939). A more recent treatment of this line of thinking can be found in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Killing in War and Society, by Dave Grossman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).

5. For a general discussion of how the tension between order and liberty is manifest in the American criminal justice system, see The Limits of the Criminal Sanction, by Herbert Packer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968). Discussions of the issue where the police in particular are concerned can be found in The Functions of the Police in Modern Society, by Egon Bittner (Rockville, Md.: National Institute of Mental Health, 1970); and Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in a Democratic Society, 3rd ed., by Jerome Skolnick (Old Tappan, N.J.: Macmillan, 1994).

6. A brief history of the riots in the early and mid-1960s can be found in the official report of the federal commission convened to investigate them—commonly called the Kerner Commission (after its chair, Otto Kerner, then governor of Illinois)—The Kerner Commission Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968).

7. A succinct discussion of the historical tension between blacks and the police can be found in The Evolving Strategy of Police: A Minority View, in Perspectives on Policing, no. 13, by Hubert Williams and Patrick V. Murphy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice and Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1990). For a somewhat longer discussion of black-police tensions regarding the use of force in particular, see The Color of Law and the Issue of Color: Race and the Abuse of Police Power, by Hubert G. Locke, in William A. Geller and Hans Toch (eds.) Police Violence: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996).

8. On black involvement in police shootings, see, for example, Policing and Homicide, 1976–1998: Justifiable Homicide by Police, Police Officers Murdered by Felons, by Jody M. Brown and Patrick A. Langdon (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ 180987, 2001); A Balance of Forces, by Kenneth J. Matulia (Gaithersberg, Md.: International Association of Chiefs of Police, 1982); and Deadly Force: What We Know, by William A. Geller and Michael S. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum, 1992).

9. On differential black involvement in crime, including as victims, see, for example, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, by William Julius Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1996) and The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America (3rd ed.), by Samuel Walker, Cassia Sphon, and Miriam DeLone (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2004).

On racial disparities in police shootings being comparable to disparities in serious crime, see Police Use of Deadly Force, by Catherine H. Milton, Jeanne W. Halleck, James Lardner, and Gary L. Albrecht (Washington, D.C.: Police Foundation, 1977); Use of Deadly Force by Police Officers: Final Report, by Arnold Binder, Peter Scharf, and Raymond Galvin (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, 1982); Race and Extreme Police-Citizen Violence, by James J. Fyfe, in R. L. McNeely and Carl E. Pope (eds.) Race, Crime, and Criminal Justice (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1981); and Deadly Force: What We Know, by William A. Geller and Michael S. Scott (Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum, 1992).

10. See Four Miami Police Officers Convicted of Conspiracy in Shootings, New York Times, Apr. 10, 2003, p. A18; and The Rampart Scandal: LAPD Probe Fades into Oblivion, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 11, 2003, main news, part 1, p. 1.

11. The FBI tracks fatal police shootings through a program known as the Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR), but the SHR records of fatal shootings are incomplete because police departments are not required to report to the FBI when their officers kill someone. Nobody keeps any sort of official national count of nonfatal shootings. See Policing and Homicide: 1976–1998: Justifiable Homicide by Police, Police Officers Murdered by Felons, by Jody M. Brown and Patrick A. Langdon (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ 180987, 2001) for an overview of the SHR program as it relates to police shootings. See Too Many Missing Cases: Holes in Our Knowledge About Police Use of Force, by James J. Fyfe, Justice Research and Policy 4 (2002): 87–102, for a critique of the SHR program and a call for better data collection on police shootings.

12. The estimate of a thousand fatal shootings can be found in Police Use of Deadly Force: Research and Reform, by James J. Fyfe, Justice Quarterly 5 (1988): 165–205. The lower estimate comes from Crime File Deadly Force: A Study Guide, by William A. Geller (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, U.S.

Reviews for Into the Kill Zone

[veracruzlynn · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Book is about police shootings--the oral histories chosen by author do little to explore how police feel after killing civilians, although they do explicitly describe how it feels in the moment of the shooting. The author has very racist views--he believes that "Blacks committ more crime" than whites, therefore that explains easily why more blacks are shot by police than whites. He devotes an entire paragraph to this, then dismisses it.If the author's comments are ignored, and only the oral histories are read, and if the fact that the oral histories chosen for the book are slanted towards "police are always right/criminals are always wrong" is ignored, then the book is an interesting read on how police feel when shooting at civilians and being shot at.