The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [108]
Non-lethal weapons can force a suspect to declare his intentions, and that sometimes leads to a save. Heal once took part in a gun battle with a man who was shooting at him and his fellow-deputies from behind a barricade. “He had a Winchester .458 calibre,” Heal says. “An elephant gun—the bullets are as big as your thumb. He’s shooting through cinderblock walls, and we’re using the holes to look back at him. Finally, he comes out with his hands in his pockets. We’re all yelling, ‘Get your hands out of your pockets.’ All around me, I can hear the slack coming out of the triggers—they’re about to shoot. It’s pretty clear he’s trying to commit suicide by cop, but what if there’s a weapon in his pockets? What gets us killed isn’t the ability to apply lethal force; it’s the reluctance to use it, and the reason we’re reluctant is that we can’t make informed decisions. The rules of engagement that allow us to use lethal force mean that we have to tolerate a lot more abuse and risk. With a non-lethal-weapon option, you don’t have to accept the conditions offered. What happened was, someone threw a flashbang at this guy, and his hands came out of his pockets, and we jumped him and wrestled him down. The flashbang enabled us to determine his intentions. That’s a save.”
HEAL IS ABOUT SIX FEET TALL. His carriage is erect. He has a large nose and sharp, elemental features—he looks a little as if a child had drawn him. He is exceptionally fit—he runs every morning before dawn, and sometimes he rides his bicycle a hundred miles in a day. His manner is emphatic, and his eyes sometimes widen when he speaks. He has blue eyes and brown hair cut short on the sides and a little longer on top. Several times a day, he plants his feet, takes a black comb from his back pocket, and draws it slowly across the front of his head, smoothing his hair with his following hand so that it stands up like a hedge. Commanders in the L.A.S.D. (there are twenty-eight of them) can wear their own clothes, but Heal would always wear a uniform. He was the only commander who did. “I have color-coördination issues,” he says. Heal grew up on a farm in Michigan. The trip he made at the age of eighteen, to San Diego, to join the Marines, was the first time he had ever taken a bus or a taxi or a plane. While he was there, he saw his first movie. His hearing was damaged during training, when a soldier stepped on a trip wire that set off a booby trap about a foot from his head.
Heal has been injured more often at work than he was at war. Between 1979 and 1982, he was a deputy sheriff assigned to South Central L.A., where, he says, he couldn’t drive down the street without seeing a crime. One year, he drew his gun so many times that the bluing on the barrel wore off. He has surgical pins in his hand from a fight with a glue sniffer. Another drug suspect broke his nose, leaving a scar between his eyes that looks like the flippers on a pinball game. (“It’s not pretty,” Heal says, “but it’s better than what I had.”) He was also hurt repeatedly in fights with suspects intoxicated with PCP, which is a dissociative anesthetic. “They’d take off their clothes, because their body temperature was so hot,” Heal says. “They’d be slimy hot, and they’d jump into swimming pools and showers, and, for whatever reason, they’d climb onto roofs. If you got a call for a naked man on a roof, that was PCP.”
PCP made even small men feel unnaturally strong, and a strong man was nearly impossible to subdue. “The only way to overwhelm them was with weight,” Heal told me. “We tried nets, we tried poles, ladders, fire extinguishers.” For a while, they tried throwing blankets over them and binding them with ropes. One man, a Samoan,