A Sip

        Easy money. That’s all I was expecting to make when I signed up for the overtime assignment. As a young police officer, I learned very quickly that I get paid the same amount of money to work outside of a club on a Saturday night dealing with drunks and fights as I would providing security for a fancy dinner party with a bunch of old people. That’s why I usually picked the “easier” jobs to work if I was going to sign up to make some extra money on my time off.

        I hesitated when I saw the sign-up sheet posted looking for people to work overtime to combat robberies. The area where the assignment was focused on was one of the most violent in the city – and also where I had worked for the previous two years in patrol. But one of the days they needed people to work was on a Sunday afternoon. How bad and how violent could a Sunday afternoon truly be? Seemed like easy money when I signed up for it. Little did I know that would be the scariest money I ever earned.

        On a beautiful, sunny, lazy, summer Sunday afternoon. I met at the precinct with my partner for the assignment and we got our equipment loaded into the car. Once we left the precinct, we had to stop by Wawa. If we were going to drive around and prevent crime for the next five hours, we needed to be properly fueled. After spending 45 minutes properly preparing our minds and bodies for the work ahead, we finally drove towards the assigned area. Our plan for the evening was to drive through the area several times to make our presence known, conduct a handful of traffic stops to enhance our presence (and make the time go by faster), and go back to the precinct at the end of the designated time. Then a loud single tone came across our radios.

        A single tone on the radio indicates that the dispatcher is about to announce something important, usually a high priority/in progress crime. I braced myself for what was about to come, hoping it wasn’t a…yep, she’s dispatching officers to respond to a robbery that just occurred in the area we were assigned to. Because of the methodical way we loaded the car and our very necessary stop at Wawa, we weren’t quite in our area when the robbery call was dispatched, but we were close. The regular patrol officers would be going to where the victim was located, so I took one last sip of my Wawa fountain drink and told my partner to drive us to the park near where the robbery occurred so we could look for suspects.

        We were a minute away from the park when one of the patrol officers located the victim. The officer quickly got on the radio to provide the suspects’ descriptions: 4-5 black males, late teens to early twenties, all wearing white t-shirts, blue jeans, armed with guns, last seen headed towards the park. We pulled into the park and everybody was wearing a white t-shirt and blue jeans. There were people by the non-functioning fountain wearing it. There were people by the playground wearing it. For a brief moment I thought my partner had changed clothes and was wearing a white t-shirt and blue jeans. While playing the real-life version of “Where’s Waldo?,” I spotted a group of 5 younger males sitting on the stairs of the rec center.

        While the suspects’ description contained some details, it was not specific enough to start arresting people. My partner drove towards the group on the stairs just so we could talk to them. Maybe they would allow us to engage in a conversation. Maybe they would allow us to check if they had any weapons or anything else illegal. Maybe we could stall them long enough to get more details from the officer who was with the victim. As we drove towards the group, one of them walked away to the other side of the building where he sat down at the top of another set of stairs. We pulled up to the group and I told my partner to stay with the group while I walked over to check on the person who walked away.

        I walked over to the bottom of the other stairs and saw two people sitting at the top – the guy who walked away and a female. I took a couple steps up towards the couple and recognized that it was Ronnie, a guy I’d interacted with several times before. I had never arrested him, but he always seemed to be around when bad things were happening.

“Ronnie, what are you doing out here?”

“Man, Jackson, I’m just talking to my girl. Why you always out here harassing me?”

“You know I don’t harass you. I’m just checking on something that happened around the corner.” I tried to ease his worries while trying not to let on to the serious crime I was investigating.

He sat at the top of the stairs while I stood four steps up from the ground, which made me feel uncomfortable. If he wanted to charge at me, he would have gravity working in his favor.

“Ronnie, do you have any weapons on you?” Though I didn’t have enough reason to believe he was involved in the robbery, him walking away from our car made me very suspicious.

“Nah, I don’t have anything on me.”

It was time for me to move. I was tired of feeling uncomfortable and at a disadvantage, so I walked to the top of the stairs and stood next to Ronnie and his girl.

“Can you stand up so I can check?”

        Ronnie stood. “Why do you want to check?”

“I just need to be sure that you don’t have…”

In a blink, Ronnie was gone. He sprinted down the steps like a school kid running onto the playground for recess. I stepped around the young lady and started chasing.

        Running while wearing boots, a ballistic vest, and 30 pounds of extra gear is no easy feat. With all the added weight, gravity is constantly slowing you down and pulling you forward towards the ground as you run. Unfortunately for Ronnie, this wasn’t my first chase. Because of my experiences chasing (and usually catching) criminals during previous shifts, I had mastered the art of not letting gravity get the best of me.

        So down the stairs I went. By the time I got to the bottom, Ronnie was already 10 yards ahead. Within a few seconds, I was breathing down his neck.

“Ronnie, stop! You know I’m right behind you! How you gonna let me catch you??”

I’m not much of a trash talker, but the fact that I was gaining ground on a guy who was more than 10 years younger than me, 50 pounds lighter than me, and wasn’t weighed down by all my gear gave me an unusual amount of cockiness. In Ronnie’s defense, I also wasn’t being fueled by the Cheetos and flavored soda that I always saw him consuming, so I did have that working in my favor. Ronnie looked at me over his left shoulder. His eyes were as big as silver dollars. His right arm wasn’t swinging, but was bent in a way so that his hand was stuck to the front of his waist. His hand moved up from his waist and that’s when I saw it. That’s also when my butt puckered up so tight, I could’ve squeezed a dime.

        My mortality had not seriously crossed my mind prior to this moment. That thought was enough to make my heart skip a beat, but I was more upset about the fact that Ronnie was going to shoot me. Yeah, I’d stopped him before for hanging out in the park after dark and for loitering outside the corner store, but I was always cool and respectful to him. And after all that, he was still going to shoot me. How dare he?

        But the best defense is a good offense. I refused to let him take me out. Not today. Not ever. It’s been drilled in my brain since I was a kid to never quit and to never give up. You’re always in the fight. My parents taught me this and the police academy ingrained this even more. I knew I was going to have to shoot Ronnie in the center of his back. It’s usually a big no-no to shoot someone in the back as they are running away, but I didn’t have any other choice. I didn’t want to do it, but it was either me or him and sorry Ronnie, it was not going to be me.

        The only problem with that was my gun was still in my holster. I needed more time. Ronnie had the upper hand on me. He already had the gun in his hand while my gun was secured in the holster. By the time I could draw it, Ronnie could shoot every bullet he had into my body. I needed to give myself more time and distance, since my superhuman speed had put me right on Ronnie’s heels. A large oak tree extended its branches towards me like a mother reaching for her baby. I veered away from Ronnie and into the oak’s warm embrace while pulling out my gun.

        Instead of shooting, Ronnie continued to run with a gun in his hands. Confident that he wasn’t going to shoot me, my butt cheeks relaxed. I placed my gun back in its holster and started chasing him again. He ran into the backyard of the first house next to the park where he entered an obstacle course of children’s toys and playground equipment. He ran towards a kid’s picnic table and tripped. This was my chance! He was struggling to get up, so I increased my speed as I was filled with adrenaline at the great opportunity to catch him while he was down.

        As fast as that opportunity came was as fast as I hit the ground. Somehow, I managed to trip over the same picnic table Ronnie did. With my wealth of experience chasing people, I had zero experience dodging land mines disguised as small toys. Pulling myself to my feet, I caught the flash of Ronnie running out of the yard towards the front of the house. I jogged towards the last place where I saw Ronnie.

        When I got to the corner of the house, something metal hit the ground. I immediately knew it was the sound of Ronnie dropping his gun. I can’t remember a time when I heard something metal hit the floor let alone the sound of a gun hitting concrete, but somehow I knew he had just dropped his gun. The most serious danger had subsided. I ran in front of the next house where I heard the sound, but there wasn’t a soul to be seen. I ran to the backyard to check for Ronnie. Again, nothing.

        Ronnie wasn’t a ghost, so he had to be nearby. I returned to the front of the houses and didn’t see him. By this time, my partner and other officers were with me to offer assistance in locating Ronnie. I went back to the rear of the house and stood there, collecting my breath and making sure I hadn’t pooped my pants earlier. In the next yard over, an older gentleman washed his car like it was just another normal Sunday, completely oblivious to the fact that there was a police officer who’d possibly soiled his pants chasing an armed suspect. He casually pointed towards the yard I was standing in. I shrugged, not knowing what he was pointing at. He pointed again and this time I could tell he was obviously trying to direct my attention to a car in the yard. I walked over to the car, squatted, and saw a white shirt under the car.

“Let me see your hands!” I yelled with my gun pointed towards the white shirt as it inched its way from under the car. My yelling had drawn the attention of the assisting officers; they rushed into the yard with me. I put my gun back in its holster and got on the ground so I could handcuff him. With all the work I just put in, I wasn’t going to let anyone else get the gratification of putting him in cuffs. I stood him up. He looked exhausted, dirty, and defeated. Ronnie no longer looked like someone I was about to kill. I was now standing next to a 20 year-old kid with a tear in his eye and regret on his mind. I wiped the dirt off his clothes and his face while my partner spoke to the officer who was with the victim. He confirmed that Ronnie was one of the people who robbed him earlier. Another car came and took Ronnie to jail.

        Back at my car, I tried to write some notes, but I couldn’t. My hands shook terribly. This was the first time where I was truly scared for my life. This was also the first time I thought I was going to have to take someone else’s. Everybody was patting me on the back and congratulating me on catching Ronnie, but my stomach was in knots. We get trained on a lot of things, but nobody told me how to handle the aftermath of a situation like this. So I did what I figured any other cop would do – I took a sip of my Wawa drink and went back to working the rest of the assignment.