Metropolitan Police Department
Washington, D.C.
Shots Fired
A Dangerous Business
Washington, D.C., is a great city, and the Metropolitan Police Department works hard so that people will feel comfortable visiting the city and being able to enjoy more than just the monuments. There is an entire city that extends beyond the downtown tourist area, with diverse neighborhoods and cultural offerings.
Like all cities, cops in D.C. earn their pay. Policing is a difficult, dangerous, and often frustrating job performed for a fickle public that seems to want the law enforced — but on somebody else. Sometimes individuals will resort to violence to prevent the law from being enforced against their actions, and cops get hurt.
I recall sitting in the 9•1•1 operator’s area while still new on the job. I wasn’t trained as a dispatcher yet. All of a sudden I heard, “They’re shooting at the PO-lice in 7D.” Word spread fast throughout the communications center when there was an officer-involved shooting. It wouldn’t be the only time I heard the refrain.
Most dispatchers never have to deal with a death of an officer in the line of duty and can only imagine the grief that is felt. Unfortunately, I am among the ranks of those who have firsthand knowledge of the experience.
I still recall the face and my introduction to the first police officer I ever met who would subsequently be shot while on the job. I was in high school and was introduced to him by my father, who was the town marshal in the little town in Southern Indiana where I grew up. The other officer was an Indiana State Trooper. A few years after I met him, he would be shot seven times. He survived. The first officer I knew who was killed in the line of duty was also in Indiana: Bloomington in 1975.
Click on the torch for a memorial
Detective Captain Donald Owens
Bloomington Police DepartmentSince then, I've been involved in a couple of police officer funerals and known several officers who have been seriously injured or killed. I have been on the air for 5 officer-involved shootings: 2 where the perp was shot by the officer, 2 where the officer was shot by a perp, and 1 where a plainclothes officer on a drug detail was shot by another plainclothes officer also working a drug interdiction detail.
In June 1997 I attended my first firefighter funeral.
DC Line of Duty Deaths
The Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia has had 104 officers killed in the line of duty thru the end of 1999. Francis M. Doyle was the first. He was killed on December 29, 1871. Two officers were killed while I was at MPD.
Click on the appropriate torch
for a memorial to each respective officer
Officer Kevin Welsh
Dangerous Times
Around 1986-87, the crack epidemic struck Washington. It seemed to take the politicians at the District Building a while to catch up with the realization that they had basically lost control of their streets. Those of us who dealt with it everyday knew full well the impact of the cheap and dangerous drug. Large amounts of money were involved. That meant people carried guns to protect themselves and their money as well as their supply of drugs and to project their gangster image. The streets became mean. Really mean.
I still went where I wanted to go about anytime I wanted to go there. I did, however, change some of my habits. When riding the subway home from work on the evening shift, instead of walking the ¾ mile from the Minnesota Avenue Metro Station, I started taking the bus. It took about a half hour longer in most cases, but it was safer. The dealers standing out on the streets didn’t always react well to surprises, and I wasn’t taking any chances. Besides, there was always the potential of getting caught in a crossfire.
I’ll admit that I used to yell at the crack dealers. On day shift, I’d be walking to the Metro station at 5:30 in the morning, and they would still be out selling their stuff. They’d see me as a last minute customer before heading in for the night. I used to go off on them. There I was, walking to the subway in the dark at an ungodly early time (I am not a morning person) just to make a living and support my family, and there they were, in my neighborhood, on my streets, selling their junk, and making it dangerous for my kids to go outside and just play. I’d yell at them and stomp my feet and tell them to stay well away from me. I don’t know. I guess I’m lucky I wasn’t shot, after all.
Imported Violence
New York and Miami drug dealers, many of them Jamaican, moved into D.C. Several rival groups battled to control the large open-air drug markets that operated across the city. Shooting calls became the norm. It wasn’t uncommon for me as a dispatcher to have a half dozen shootings and a couple of stabbings working at the same time. A shift without a homicide was a rare anomaly.
One night working 7D, I had a screen for shots heard flash up in front of me. Most places, when a citizen reports hearing gunshots in the neighborhood, it usually turns out to be a truck backfiring or firecrackers or some other readily explainable event. Not so in D.C. If the citizen reported hearing gunshots, chances were they heard gunshots. We didn’t always find a victim. Sometimes there were no victims; sometimes the victims managed to leave the area before the police got there.
This night the scout car pulled up on scene and advised to notify the fire department, confirmed shooting, two male victims down in the roadway. I was on the phone talking with the EMS dispatcher when the officer called back in with a supplement: another male victim on a front porch. A few minutes later, as additional officers arrived, another supplement: two more victims with gunshot wounds found in a neighboring alley.
By now there were a number of officers in the area doing a neighborhood canvass, crime scene search units were on scene, fire department was there. One of the officers got a partial description on a van. The van was located a few minutes later still within that particular housing project. It seems the perpetrators were from New York and had been called to D.C. by a drug gang to hit a rival gang. They got lost in the maze of this public housing project while trying to make their getaway and were unable to figure out how to get out of the project.
It got vicious. One Saturday night in February 1988 I was working 4D and dispatched a shooting in Northwest. Two women were shot to death and two others were wounded in an apartment in the Mount Pleasant area of Washington. It was an execution-style shooting and was witnessed by the women’s four children. The crime would be featured on the TV show America’s Most Wanted. A 22-year-old Jamaican man and an accomplice, both with ties to New York and Florida, would eventually be arrested for the murders.
Another night working 4D, there were 7 confirmed homicides across the city between sunset and the end of my shift. I recall walking out of the building at 11 o’clock onto the steps out front. The man who drove the D.C. Medical Examiners van was there lamenting that he’d picked up 4 bodies in the past few hours. I didn’t have the heart to tell him about the 3 others awaiting his attention about whom he had not yet been notified.
Officer Involved Shootings
There were a lot of officer-involved shootings as well. Six officers were shot in a two month period in 1987. In December, three officers were shot, one critically, when gunfire erupted in Southwest Washington when an undercover drug purchase went bad. Another officer was shot and critically wounded in a notorious Northeast drug market during a drug arrest. In November, two officers were shot in the Central Avenue-East Capitol Street area.
On Thursday, January 30, 1986, I was working dispatch rotating between the 6D and 7D consoles. A brief sequence of events — perhaps no more than a minute or two — left one rookie officer on the ground after being shot twice, and two officers in fear of being seriously hurt, and another involved in a motor vehicle accident. The rookie officer was working his first plainclothes assignment on a dark and chilly winter night near 25th Street and Minnesota Avenue in Southeast Washington. He and his partner were approached by a man who offered to sell them drugs. The officer identified himself as a police officer, a struggle began, and the plainclothes officer radioed for help.
Six police officers — four of them in civilian clothes — responded to the assist call. An unruly crowd gathered and in the confusion, punches were thrown and guns were drawn. The next thing the rookie officer knows, he’s been shot twice by fellow officers who don’t recognize him, and blood is flowing from wounds in his thigh and stomach.
It was a tragedy caused by mistaken identity.
Information was conflicting as to how it started, but two of the officers started fighting. There was no dispute, however, about much of what happened. The newer officer, younger and powerfully built, started pummeling one of the officers who came to his assistance, the one not knowing that the other was a police officer. The responding officer, backed against a wall and afraid he might be knocked unconscious and thus lose his weapon, drew his gun and fired twice, striking the original officer in the thigh.
A second responding officer, positioned behind a garbage dumpster, stepped out and fired once, striking the rookie officer in the stomach. The officer behind the dumpster warned the other man to drop his gun and fired only after seeing the other man’s gun pointed at him. The shot fractured the officer’s lower rib and pierced his colon, liver, and large intestine.
Only after the tumult subsided, did the officers realize what had happened. The rookie officer, it turned out, was wearing a police badge on his belt.
The area, 25th & Minnesota Avenue, was in 7D but not even a block from the boundary separating 6D and 7D. While this activity was in progress on the 7D side of the boundary, a 6D scout car with two officers was in an alley across Pennsylvania Avenue on the 6D side of the boundary. They heard the shots. Calling it in, the 6D officers were advised of the assist call then working in 7D. They responded to help. As they entered the intersection at Pennsylvania Avenue and Minnesota Avenue, their patrol car was broadsided by a young woman driver who failed to stop for the red traffic light as well as for the warning lights and siren of the police car. The scout car was knocked onto its side.
Fortunately, no one involved in the crash was hurt badly. The combined incidents now had the radio channels for two police districts tied up and involved a third channel — City Wide One — for an Accident Investigation Unit from Traffic Division to work the crash with the police car involved.
A U.S. District Court jury later found that the rookie officer and the officer with whom he fought used excessive force on each other. The officer who fired from near the dumpster was exonerated by the jury.