Not all help comes in the manner of wielding a gun.
My Cpl and former FTO once tried to stop a drunk from getting into his car. (The guy staggered to his car, dropped his keys a few times, couldn't find the key, reeked of booze. My Cpl. decided to do him a favor and take the guy into custody for the lesser Class C offense rather than for the higher DWI charge that was forthcoming. Public safety issue, too. ) The guy was very large, and in a slurred babble declared his sobriety to one and all, and that he was NOT going to be arrested. At that point, my pal Sam called for backup and SHOULD have deployed an intermediate weapon, but he was a lot less experienced then, and tried empty hands. The drunk, of course, resisted, and Sam found himself on the ground with the guy, doing his best just to keep the guy off of his weapon, while getting little done in the way of getting the man into handcuffs. A couple of citizens came out of the convenience store, and asked, "Officer, do you require assistance?", all the while getting in some nice kicks to the resisting drunk's ribcage. When they got him on the defensive, Sam got some 'cuffs on the guy. The backup officer didn't arrive for 4 more minutes (we're a little rural). This was a nice example of a citizen helping an officer out.
Then there is the famous Trooper Coates video tape, in which a horrible tragedy was documented on a S. Carolina State Trooper's mobile video camera, back in '91. The trooper was patting down a shorter, much fatter subject for weapons when the guy went ballistic, knocking him down and shooting him in the chest with a little .22 mini revolver he'd had in his pocket. That first shot hit the vest. Trooper Coates got his .357 out and returned fire, hitting the guy 4/5 shots center mass (mostly belly), knocking him down. When the trooper got on the radio to yell for backup (unfortunately not seeking cover first), the wounded bad guy made a one in a million shot, hitting the trooper under the arm in the gap of the vest, severing the aorta from about 25 feet away, in the dark. ( ! )
Trooper Coates, normally a calm man, got on the radio and screamed in a panic, begging for backup as he died, literally expiring over the radio. Another trooper, who'd driven past the traffic stop a mnute and a half earlier, responded at Ludicrous Speed, and HIS video documents how he
very nearly killed two truckers who'd seen the shooting and stopped to help the fallen trooper out. The backup trooper found: two men, one of whom vaguely resembled the man that he remembered having seen Trooper Coates with earlier, standing near his fallen fellow trooper, with a .380 in hand, looking into the darkness. What
they were looking for was the real shooter, wounded but not even dying (
though some shots had come within tiny fractions of an inch of severing great artories or hitting the spine, none was immeditelyh life threatening for the shooter, who never lost consciousness), lying in the ditch in the dark. (The truckers were in the headlights of the assailant's stopped Mustang) The responding tooper screamed at them incoherently to "Git Down! Git Down NOW! I'll kill you right NOW if you don't drop the ****ing weapon and git on the ground!" They tried to explain that there was an armed man in the darkness, but almost died for their insistance on pointing out the real danger.
In the responding trooper's defense, he'd just heard a good friend of his, a powerful ex-linebacker who was in superior physical condition, scream in agony over the radio before he drove up on that same man lying in the slow lane of traffic, not breathing, not moving, his gun by his side. The responding officer couldn't see anyone around but the two truckers, one of whom was armed and looked vaguely like the last person this trooper had seen his buddy with alive. Any one of us would have felt unspeakable rage and confusion. To the responding officer's credit, he did get the truckers disarmed without hurting them, and eventually played a key role in investigating what had actually happened, taking photos and securing the mobile video tapes. But I often wonder whether those two truckers ever think about how close they came to dying, there beside that fallen officer that night?
I wonder if they'd do anything differently? Would they even stop to help again?
