I had chambered a round and had performed a chamber check yet at times like this one does a lot of second guessing. Would all the years of training be sufficient to pull off a shot that we had never practiced on the range? Here we were in an untenable position balancing on the balls of our feet leaning over a tall kitchen sink, shooting through a screen at a downward target seventy yards away. We would be in position for hours and hours with no relief and not for one second could we let down our guard. We had never practiced such a shot before and now we had to pull it off in the real world with real victims against a fairly sophisticated suspect with thousands of onlookers and the media breathing down our necks. This was a far cry from the sniper training days where everything is prepared well in advance and many of the decisions are made for you. It was well into the hours of darkness as the drama of the day would come to a conclusion. The Los Angeles night air was backlit by the lights of the city far in the distance. A light, salt laden Pacific breeze blew at about two to three miles an hour from the south to the north and directly into our faces in our sniper position. Helicopter units hovered far above us and their rotor wash had by now become a normal part of the electric and surreal scene. Thousands of onlookers and media still crowded the perimeter of the crime scene and even though they were some distance from our position we all knew that everyone was watching and waiting to see if ‘D’ platoon could pull this off. It was to be a defining moment in the history of our unit. The suspect would make the next move.

To be continued in the next issue!

"We were to bring the doctor who performed this alleged abortion to the location and chainsaw his arms off while he watched from within the clinic."

"Throughout the day hushed voices from behind us that included SWAT supervisors and command types, discussed options and variables that contingency plans would have to accommodate for. I had to deal with a myriad of ‘what ifs?’."

Nighttime Vehicles Class with Mover

Custom made LAPD door for
Scott’s Retirement as a reminder
of the good old days!

Sgt Bill Kelly demonstrates exiting a vehivle with a weapon

‘Shootin Newton’ Division on
Scott’s last Divisional Training
Day!

INSIDE THE LAPD- CIRCA 1976 –Communications
by Scott Reitz

I wrote last month of the pursuit driving classes we received during the Academy in 1976. That was great fun and came in handy through the years. Another aspect of our Dragnet training was communications. They had a room set up with an RTO (Radio Transmitter Operator) who would dispatch calls that came out on the radios in the room and we would diligently transcribe the information given out at a machine gun staccato. At first we had forty one different interpretations of the same broadcast - one for each recruit. After some work we got down to twenty different interpretations of the same broadcast. (I don’t think we ever broke ten interpretations of the same broadcast however.) We learned to use a police version of shorthand to copy everything coming at us at bullet pace and each of us had our own stylized individual version. For example; M/W wg S/B wstrn/48 BC ws SF was…Male white-with gun-Southbound Western from 48th Street-black clothing-white shoes-shots fired. When it got really interesting was broadcasting imagined pursuits. You had to remember what side of the street the odd numbers were on and what side the even numbers were on. North and West are odd and South and East were even. You had to remember in what direction numbers decreased or increased so that when you broadcast your direction you were going in the right direction that you broadcast. This sounds rather simple but at night and at speed and with everything else going on most of our fake broadcasts had us in every direction imaginable but the right one. As an aside; the voice on the radio did not exactly fit the dreamy vision of what we assumed her to conform to. Ours dreamy version of a blonde, sultry RTO was off the mark by about forty years. One of the cardinal rules of communications was to know just when to put out an ‘Officer needs assistance’ versus an ‘Officer needs back-up’ or an ‘Officer needs help’ call. ‘Back-up’ was to get assistance but in a not yet critical status. ‘Assistance’ was for responding units to get there as soon as is possible as things are not going too well. The big one was the ‘Help’ call. This basically meant that the city’s burning down and all is lost if responding Officers don’t get there right away if not sooner. Help calls caused all other Officers for miles around to come running and usually at great peril to themselves in the process. All the stops were pulled on this one. Lights, sirens and accelerator to the firewall. Assistance meant that other Officers were breaking their necks to get to you but it stopped just short of them killing themselves in the process. Back-up calls meant that Officers headed over to your location at a pretty good clip. Officers sometimes died during response to help calls trying to get to their brother Officers. I thought I had this stuff down pretty well…I thought. About two weeks out of the Academy I was working with my first training Officer Tom Garvin. He was an old timer on LAPD (17 years to be exact), a former Marine Corps Drill Instructor and he had the street wisdom and laconic style that all real seasoned LA coppers had back then. He was real laid back. Wellll…we go to an unknown trouble call and find ourselves on the front lawn of a two story bungalow dating from the early 1900’s. A female is throwing potted plants at us and swearing and Tom is casually dodging the plants as he tries to reason with her between her hurled invectives and potted petunias that narrowly missed our heads. (She was amazingly accurate with these things.) Having had enough of these frivolities after all her potted plants seemed to be on the verge of depletion Tom turned to me and said, “Junior…why don’t you call us some help out here.” (He always called me junior.) So I did. Back then there were no reliable hand held radios so you went back to the black and white to put out the call. I came back up from the city sled and Tom asked, “You get somebody out there?” “I think so.” I responded. (What Tom really meant was for me to get anyone out there on our watch who was not doing anything in particular. I had simply and very calmly, broadcast that we needed some help at our location.) In about sixty seconds, sirens from every conceivable direction along with air units began to converge on our location. The sirens all started out faintly far, far in the distance and Tom, looking up into the city night sky as the faint helicopter’s rotor wash began to grow louder said, “I wonder what’s going on out there?” Now there are times in one’s life that you have a sudden revelation that you have royally stepped on it and this was it for me! Great…just great. Tom figured this out at about the same time I did. “Junior… just what kind of call did Continued next page