Shots Fired

Hey everyone, I hope the New Year celebrations were good for you. Just as expected, it was gunshots all night for me. Last year it seemed like the gunshots were going from the start of shift all the way until I was home. Yesterday they started roughly about 545pm local time and went until I got home.

I made it a point to try and not let a nearby officer go to a call alone if I couldn't help it. I'll be honest in the fact that every time I answered a shots fired call in a large apartment complex I had my service weapon unholstered, my seatbelt off, and the windows down. Ready to act at a moment's notice.

I never will understand the concept of celebratory gunfire. Everything that goes up must come down. A bullet coming down will come down with enough force to be comparable as if fired normally at a target. (side note: just after I got off work an elderly lady sitting in her living room was struck by a falling bullet which fell through her ceiling-thankfully just a shot to her leg but horrible nonetheless).

With all of the shots fired and fireworks calls coming in, a lot of house alarms were going off. My beat partner and I answered a high priority panic alarm call at a residence. We get there and everything seems very normal. Car in the driveway, lights on in the house, no shouting or anything which may bring alarm. We ring the doorbell and knock on the door and nonchalantly the resident's daughter states her mother's boyfriend accidentally hit the panic alarm button and he walks down the stairs just casually brushing his teeth. We normally get canceled for false alarms before we get to the houses. This would have been one to have been canceled so we could have attended to greater things.

Now as I've said before the zone where I work in divided into the North and South sectors handled by two difference squads. The north sector had a particularly horrible tragedy they dealt with. A lady was driving home from church when a man jaywalking crossed the street and she could not brake in time. The man was clearly dead upon arrival by officers. From what they've told me it was a very graphic scene. We as police officers tend to see a lot of dead bodies by the very nature of what we do. In my time as a police officer I have definitely seen my fair share. When an officer says a body is horrible it is clearly so. My heart goes out to the driver who had no fault in the accident who now has to live with that moment etched in her memory.

Around 1145pm, my squad plus one New Year's Eve ride along (would have been an amazing day for a ride along) parked ourselves underneath a highway overpass and counted down to the New Year. As always, right at midnight the skies opened up with shots fired. Just around the corner from where we were was an apartment complex. There were people firing shots JUST within the entrance to that complex. The shots were so loud they scared this beautiful dog underneath the overpass who came to hide among us. It was an interesting sight amidst the chaos. Shortly after, it was time to go home.

2015 is upon us and a new year begins. I just want to close with remembering the 118 law enforcement officers and the 20 K9's who died in the line of duty in 2014. I would love to see that number be zero in the next year but by the very nature of the job we do that will not be the case. Hopefully we can significantly reduce that number by doing the things we can control.