Cops, Robbers, and Sabre-Toothed Tigers

By Ted Schnack

Cops grapple with life at its grittiest and most interesting into the stripped-down world of the human beast. I was a street cop for about 8 years, SWAT, Firearms Instructor, Defensive Tactics Field Training Officer, etc.  Then I did a 12-year stint in garden spots like Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kosovo, and Jordan teaching tactical police techniques and such while trying to keep all my fingers, toes and sanity intact.   Still got all my finger and toes but I guess the last part is always subjective. 

In Police work you regularly deal with dead or dying people.  I got a call a guy was flatlined at some sort of prayer meeting.  Maybe a good time to go or a bad sign I'm not sure which.    In my haste I didn't bring the CPR mouth guard shield and didn’t have time to go back to the car and get it.  Went lip to lip and brought the guy back.  When the paramedics arrived, they said if I hadn’t acted said for sure the guy would be dead.     And as God is my witness, we sometimes have civilian riders (most PD's have such a program...sign up and go for a shift), and the rider I had was a woman I really liked a Smoking hot Latina Penelope Cruz look alike I met after she locked her keys in her car.  Not every day you get to save someone’s life to impress a “date.”  I had this weird feeling I was a giver of life.  So about a week later I got another call of no pulse no breathing.   I was running fast and hot, lights and siren there, thinking "Yep I'm going to do what I do, I’m going to save this guy, I'm the giver of life."  It was like 3 in the morning and a really old man had died hours before.  He was naked jammed next to the toilet twisted in a bizarre way, his bald head, beaklike nose and no dentures left his jaw gaping upwards and open like some sort of giant dead baby condor.  That was a moment I realized I wasn't God.  I'm not bringing this guy back.  DRT - Dead Right There.

There is this thing inside of me as with most Alpha Males on their journey through life that instinctively needs testing.  Be it solo with a backpack strapped on deep in a wilderness area trying to kill a bull elk with a sharp stick, following bloody tracks through a thorny thicket left by a Cape Buffalo that refused to die, traversing the face of a high altitude cliff after a Bighorn Ram, finding yourself in a Warzone, under heavy iron looking for more reps, or not backing down from a fist fight with a formidable opponent.    The most interesting tests are the ones there the chance somebody including you ends up dead.  Dangerous game.  Police work can put you on that uncertain ragged edge and it’s the reason you carry a gun and wear a bulletproof vest. When you wear a badge and strap on heat the tests can be life or death.  Humans are the most dangerous animal.  

Just like people there are lots of different kinds of cops.  Grass-Feeders feel a jolt of terror when any call comes out with the chance for real conflict or violence.  Then there are the Meat-Eaters, who are just the opposite. Not that Meat-Eaters are looking for a fight-conflict, or to fuck anyone up as the ultimate goal is to take a suspect into custody without injury to them or you or others using your power prudently.   The police are not part of the punishment aspect of the judicial system and more than a few cops got their ass in a wringer thinking they were.  You just don’t go there no matter how badly the guy needed to have his ass kicked for good measure.  

Meat-Eaters instinctively crave the chance for meaningful action.   Deep in the cavern of our souls where the wild beast in us still growls and lurks we like rattling his cage to see what happens.    That animal instinct, handed like a glowing coal from generation to generation from the era of cave dwellers, grunting, screeching and gibbering like apes excitedly while they clubbed people to death with rocks, to “modern man” the fire still burns.  We have tamed, caged, refined it, put a fedora on it, in the “civilized "world but it's always trying to bend the bars and break out.    It's a good to have "in case of emergency break glass" and unleash the beast as you never know what life might throw at you. Sometimes  it is the only answer to a problem.   Sure he has gotten plenty of men in trouble as the prisons are short of bed space but  if you truly find yourself in a fight for your life you’ll be glad he’s there.  It raw and prehistoric. The primal makeup of hearing the growl of a sabretooth on a moonless night at the cave entrance and grabbing your stone headed spear and out into the unknown of the misty darkness.  Knowing in that darkness it’s not the tiger you seek but yourself.    

Meat-Eaters look at cowards like the ones at Uvalde and Parkland and would like to spit in their faces.  A shame to the badge not only for pure cowardice but also wilting at the rare opportunity to do something truly brave and noble.  The chance to save and defend the weak and helpless from demonic murderous monsters while taking great risk and putting your ass on the line.    Not some suicide mission to sacrifice yourself, but to the contrary without hesitation put your skill, abilities and courage to the highest test with the chance to shoot the devil in the face and come away to tell the story or carried out on your shield.   That's the idea anyways.  This is a Superbowl for Alphas but the loss and reward much greater than a 1000 Lombardi's.  Sure some football hero might have made the game winning catch, lets get a little context here...he caught a football playing a game, but they didn't save peoples lives, maybe many people lives and if they dropped the pass better luck next time not Dead.   Meat-Eaters wish they were in the 911 plane over Strongsville for just the chance to slay the Dragon.  

Its never good news when somebody calls the cops.   But sometimes some badass things can happen that makes all the bullshit you have to deal with worth it. 

 A sunny summer late afternoon a call came that a bank robber had threatened a teller with a handgun and left on foot with a bundle of loot.  Normally they give little useful information, but this time they described the robber as a Hispanic male with a white t-shirt and jeans shorts.  He had left in an unknown direction possibly in an older model white VW Rabbit. The bank was over five miles away in a cityscape and the robber could have gone anywhere.   So, what the heck I set up at a busy crossroads intersection to maybe get lucky on the super longshot he might come rolling by. 

It was just the start of rush hour and after about 15 minutes I saw a whitish piece of crap Ford Fiesta kind of VW Rabbit looking car waiting for the light about 10 cars back. When the cars started going, I nudged into the traffic setting off my light bar and siren.  I had lost sight of the car in the rolling road and traffic in front of me. 

Now the road was clear, and people were getting out of my way, as I was rocking and rolling at over 100 when I crested the hill.   I should have been right on the cars ass still doubting this was actually the guy and some loser in a beater with no insurance and expired tags.   But damn, up ahead and obviously driving faster, weaving in and out of the rest of the cars on the road there he was.... fleeing   

Hot Dam!  He’s trying to get away!   It's the dude!  My foot is hammered to the floor, tight grip on the wheel and a dump of adrenaline pounding through my veins.  Fucking Yeeee Haa !!!!…  I am driving a Chevy Caprice with a Vette motor and drivetrain.  Our car mechanic was a Nascar nerd and these cars were his babies and tweaked quick and tight with aftermarket performance extras.  Quicker than a piece of shit Ford he was driving for sure.  But he had a good lead. 

I had a running code ritual and liked playing Zeppelin and out of habit reached across the seat and hit play on my personal tape recorder where “The Immigrant Song" was cued first followed up by "Kashmir" 

 While Robert Plant wailed about the Hammer of the Gods and Viking Conquest backed by the screaming siren and squawking radio I was seeing and losing him with the rolling and curving open road.    “Ahhhh Valhalla I am coming"

At 130 plus you feel like you’re floating on a rocket sled and knew I was gaining ground.  I had just come from a blind spot and just barely saw him pass a car on the inside dirt shoulder on a hard corner kicking up a cloud of dust.  A second later and I would have missed it.  

This is my town I know these roads.  I had cut the distance, had to knock like 80 mph of my speed real quick to make the corner in one piece and soon slid around the same right.  He’s not on the open road ahead.  I had a few seconds to make a big bet or this was all over.     I was betting he had to have driven into the gas station convenience store right around the corner that had one way in and one way out. 

I’m lights and siren as I drive slowly through the gas station lot looking hard.    People are pumping gas and started scrambling for cover or standing dumbfounded not sure what the cops might be all riled up about.  I had been calling most of this on my radio, but cover was far away.    This wasn’t waiting for anyone.  The shit was hitting the fan right here right now.  

 I don't see him.   Shiiiiittttt!    Shitt  Shitt...dammit!!!!.. He had to be here.  

There!   He was in the far corner trying to hide in the exit of the carwash!  Hispanic male white t-shirt and jeans shorts standing next to the open door of the junker Fiesta!   It really really is him!  Fuck yeah! 

He saw me, knew he couldn't drive out and took off running back towards the road.  He had too much of a lead to leave my car and catch on foot.    I could see the robber jump the sidewalk rail and run straight across heavy traffic with cars slamming on brakes and swerving wildly to avoid hitting him.  I couldn't cross the same road with that kind of reckless abandon, and it took some precious time to get people to stop and let me pass.   He was heading towards a small office building that sat by itself next to a huge, tiered dirt field across the road that was being prepped for houses.  I needed to get closer before taking after him on foot.  

I had lost sight of him.   After crossing the road there was a 50-yard road leading the far edge of the buildings parking lot and I hammered it.  That Chevy growled and peeled out accelerating hard.  Just as quick I thought fuck I’m going too fast and slammed on the brakes sliding and screeching for 20 yards coming to a stop just on the far side of the building.  Ten feet in RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME pops out this dude his eyes cartoon wide running into view from the back side of the building.   If the car would have slid 10 more feet I might have hit him.   He is running towards the open dirt field.  

I was hot-shotted with adrenaline and in full predator mode.   I was out of the car sprinting hard about 40 yards behind.  I had my Sig Sauer 9mm out and was yelling at him as I ran under no uncertain terms "If you don't stop, I am Going to Fucking Shoot You!” 

When using Police commands in a high stress situation we repeat the same commands over and over until the person complies or we take other action.  The idea being under stress it might take a few times to sink in. Most of the people you find yourself pointing guns at are drunk, high, super stressed out or normally just plain dumb on their best day.  What you don’t want to do is a bunch of different and confusing commands that can lead to a suspect doing something to looks to be dangerous.   "If you don't stop, I am Going to Fucking Shoot you” was the command my mind seems to have selected to achieve my objective.   To get the guy to stop and give up.  What doesn’t work in situations like this is shit like “By the power vested in me in the State of Colorado I have probable cause to believe that you have committed a crime and I need you to comply peacefully or I will take more assertive action”  You need to make your fucking point leaving no doubt.  You adjust your commands for the type of Bandito you have at hand, the circumstance and what they might react to best.   Never practiced that command in Police training, used before, but seemed appropriate for the situation.  I was yelling it with full conviction over and over as I ran behind him.  

He was running like he was holding something in front of him and I couldn’t see his hands.  And anybody who had watched a couple of cop TV shows know we don't like that one bit.  Hands hold guns and fingers pull triggers, bullets fly and that sucks when they come your direction so we always like know what the fuck people are doing with their hands and that's why you hear “ show me your hands” ad nauseum on any reality cop show.  Every once in a while, a greenback or two would flutter away from him in breeze and he ran ahead.  

He ran around a pile of huge landscape boulders and out of sight.  I slowed and "Sliced the Pie” peeking quickly, gun just below eye scan and clearing a visual area, then moving forward to check another piece of the pie until they area is clear.  The idea being you don't just want to blunder headlong into an ambush.  I was about half done and saw the robber scrambling up a dirt embankment. I kept yelling commands.  Once on top of the embankment it was open and flat. I'm still in a full sprint and gaining on him and could see he was tiring badly.  However, this was going to end it wouldn't be long.  I could smell blood, and my primal instincts were a screaming gorilla. 

Finally, he stopped and turned facing me at about five yards.  I have sprinted now about 300 yards to his 600.  I am winded and my heart is pounding and with my heaving chest my Sig Sauer is not steady.   Full steady with crisp site picture or not I’m point blank.  The kill zone the size of a salad plate.  I know if I pulled the trigger in a flash 147 grains of copper hollow-point cleverly designed to blossom creating maximum damage at about 1200 feet per second is hitting center mass: pulverizing a hole through heart and lungs, maybe severing his spine.   And if one doesn't do it 14 more of his buddies are eager to dance and he's a dead man. 

At that time, I had killed lots of big game animals but never a man, nor wanted to unless critically necessary. You want to be dead sure, or you will be sure dead in one way or another.  A bad shoot and the life destroying aftermath you might as well have put a gun in your own mouth.   I could see his hands now as he held them chest high palms towards me in what I took as a clear sign to show me his hands were clear.  I'm gonna go out on a limb say this wasn't his first Police contact.   In spite of all my commands and assurance if he didn’t stop, I didn’t see any real reason to "fucking shoot him." 

I think and tell trainees, don’t shoot somebody cause it is justified, only shoot people that really really need to be shot.  Once "yer booger hook pulls the bang switch" and you send bullets on their deadly mission there is no "Oopsy Daisy can I take a Mulligan on that? I thought those car keys were a gun” and your life is toast.    The criteria for deadly force is "If they are an IMMEDIATE (right here-right now) threat of serious bodily injury or death to yourself or others"  Be damn sure they need to be dead right here right now. 

Often the decision to use lethal force are literally split second decisions, from good to bad and back to good again, under an avalanche of stress and almost always  in the middle of some sort of chaos.   Through that speeding shit storm you need to decide the most important decision possible.  To kill a man or not.  But if they really need to be dead; Do it.

Sometimes under stress people get tunnel vision but I have found it makes all my senses crystal clear, and I notice everything.    The first thing I thought is he looks just like a Hollywood bad guy.   Mid 30's Hispanic, slicked back hair, Black wraparounds, skull shaped pock marked face with a gold hoop earring.   He yelled. "Why are you chasing me...you got the wrong guy!"   You would be right if you thought at this point, I was pretty sure he was lying.    I was still yelling at him in no uncertain terms I am ready and likely sounded eager to “Fucking shoot you" if he doesn’t drop to his knees.  He turns and tries to scramble up a dirt embankment.  With my gun free hand, I caught his ankle, and he fell flat the next level up.   

At the time I was in my mid 30's, 5-11, a muscular 215 and with my gear on like 240.  As he tried to get up to his hands and knees, I hammered him hard with a drop flying knee dead center of his back. I'll never forget the big "OOOOOOffffffhhhh" sound he made as I pounded him to the dirt  with a heavy thud.  He was done.  I holstered my gun and chained him up and did a body search.  I had taken him into custody without injury to myself or him and he ended up with a mouthful of dirt instead of a bullet.  In his shorts, underwear and pockets he had a few hundred sweaty dollars.  In police work we call those clues and I was sure to make note of it in the  arrest report;)   In the distance I could hear wailing sirens getting closer.   They had missed all the good stuff. 

Soon it looked a like a Smokey and the Bandit movie with sirens and lights and cop cars descending on the scene stirring up a cloud of dirt and soon a news helicopter hovered above.   Somebody checked the boulder area and found a couple of thousand dollars stuffed under a rock or blowing in the breeze. 

They never did find the gun, apparently guns were good for pointing at terrified bank clerks and not so good to have when it might lead to a gunfight with a cop.  It was the money he was holding in a desperate attempt to keep his loot when he was running with his hands in front of him ditching his gun sometime during the car or foot chase.  Another cop took my prisoner.     

It had all happened in less than 10 minutes and was over.   As the arriving cops cars turned off their lights and quieting all the commotion of the sirens my attention went to my car a few hundred yards away.  Behind the building sitting by itself, drivers door open, lights flashing and siren still wailing at the end of two black skid marks.   

An unmarked detective car rolled to a stop.   I could see a young woman, distraught, mascara smeared from tears.  The the cop who had taken my prisoner pulled the robber out of his squad car and he stood there slump shouldered in his dirty shirt squinting in the sun like a broken animal.  His afternoon had gone to shit, shackled in chains and surrounded by cops.  Instead of a wild night of blow, booze and babes flush with cash he was fucked and looking at a long stay in a pen and he knew it.   I could see the woman slightly nod her head and a small frail finger pointing at the robber.  It was the bank clerk for a drive-by ID.    I thought to say something to her, but she looked small and scared in the back of that car and something said to leave her alone.  

Never went to court on that one, heard the robber plead out and got 16 years. 16 years in a cage with other animals.  Looking at his rap sheet this guy had lived a wild, reckless and dangerous life, assaults, resisting arrest. Drugs, weapons charges, robberies, Dui's and domestic violence etc  He was a dangerous menace and was glad he was in a cage where he belonged. 

 At times I reflect back on that afternoon, sure some police training came into play but mostly it was raw animal instinct. Sensing to lie in ambush at the crossroads.  The car had become my cheetah, the gun my fangs and claw, I was younger then in the physical prime of my life and tried to prepare myself for this kind of challenge.  But beyond that Something primal was processing it all as it unfolded at blinding speed and coming up with thoughts ideas and decisive action.   Things were happening far to quickly to weigh reason or contemplate options.    What to do, what move to make, a little bit of thinking but mostly reaction the overwhelming desire to pursue and attack when prudence would dictate otherwise.  I think that is our wild heart at play.  For all of us that ember still glows in the heart of our beast.    I have made choices in life where there is a much greater chance for those flames to be fanned.  I would argue it there in everyone.  the robber had took his flame to lead a demonic life that had led to a cage.  When the Sabre tooth growls for you  something stirs, Something awakens trust your flame , don’t  hesitate to leave the fires circle of security and warmth grab you spear and go into the misty darkness find the light.