I-80 Westbound 2300 East
Salt Lake City, Utah
Gang Unit
“It’s Radar Love by Golden Earring, how come you can never remember that” I asked Mike, my partner for the night. This was a game we played while we killed the down time between calls. We would turn on the FM Radio and hit the scan button, when a song came on the first person to correctly identify the group or singer won that round. Mike is older than me and should know Golden Earring.
Mike and I had been riding together for about a week now. We had gone through the academy together and had somehow found our way to SWAT with a number of our classmates. SWAT was also the Gang Unit. I loved SWAT but HATED Gangs, most everyone else liked the Gang assignment. They would remember monikers and what the different colors meant. They knew how the one gang member was associated with another one that had done something somewhere with someone else. I thought how much better our City would be if the gang members just killed each other off.
That was the Irony of it, the gang unit I mean. The only reason that the City ever recognized that there was a gang problem, after having been told there was by the cops for years, was a shooting in a Smith’s Food King parking lot that left to dirtbags dead. It always reminded me of the rhyme “two dead boys got up to play. Back to back they faced each other, pulled their swords and shot each other”. Anyway, I hated the Gang Unit assignment and the little booger eaters playing badass all of the time.
Right after Radar Love we got a call of a gang party on the Westside of the Jordan River around 1000 South. We headed there and when we arrived a real piece of crap had a gun in his hand and took off running into a duplex. We ran after him, well I thought “we” ran after him. The duplex was in the middle of what we so un-politically correct called “Indian Country”. The duplex was overrunning with gang members and their ladies. Alcohol and mary jane permeated the air while the stark white tile floors were covered in grime. I entered after the armed gang member with my pistol in hand due to an exception to the rule for a warrant called “hot pursuit”. I was met with an onslaught of potential threats and had to be constantly scanning the twenty plus people in the room as I looked down the hallway at two bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen doorway. The guy I was chasing had just ducked into a bedroom across from the kitchen. I was heading that way when he darted across the hallway into the kitchen.
I ran up to the kitchen and Israel-ed the opening (SWAT used Israeli Military Tactics instead of SAS). No-one was there but there was an open back door. I started to set up on that door way to make my exit when I was hit in the head with a wine bottle from the blind spot outside of the doorway. I saw stars and was furious that I had been taken by surprise. I was also furious that I was by myself and I had no idea where my partner was. I was now an angry, confused, and injuried man.
Once I gathered my bearings I, seconds although it felt longer, I resumed my pursuit. There was still an armed gang member running through my town. I caught up to him just in time for my partner and I to crash into him driving him to the ground. I grabbed him by the throat as he was on his back looking up at me. There was a black Browning Hi-Power pistol next to his head. The hammer was cocked and the safety was off. He was still armed and I started to choke him, there was no time for me to let him get his gun from next to his head and grab at mine in my holster. I was going to just have to choke him to death.
The longer I looked at the pistol, as I choked him out, the more interesting the details of it became. I was Carrying a Brown Hi-Power Practical at the time as my duty pistol. The Practical is a two tone finish, Black on the slide and stainless on the lower, pretty gun. Mine also had night sights which are required for any pistol the department lets you buy and carry on duty. Brownings didn't come with night sights so I thought it was interesting that the black one next to this guys head had them.
I really couldn't hear at the time, the wine bottle to the head and all. As the gang member was going limp I felt someone pulling on me then pushing me and it sounded like someone at the other end of a tunnel was yelling my name. I looked up because I was confused as to why Mike wasn't keeping anyone off of me while I stopped this threat to us when I realized that it was Mike doing the pushing and shoving. He was yelling something and it started to sound like “it’s mine, it’s my gun”. Oh, I got out of the way for Mike to pick up his pistol and rolled the bad guy over. His name was Kelly and he belonged to MOB “Money Over Bitches”. I handcuffed him and we put him in the car.
The bottle to my head really rang my bell, I had a headache for a couple days and a nice shiner on the side of my head. I could have killed Kelly that night, my perspective of what was happening would have made it a “clean shoot” but it wouldn’t have been a “good shoot” as far as the media would have been concerned. The bedroom he had ducked into had his gun, he had dumped it inside before running into the kitchen. Mike had not gone into the house because of the crowd outside that he thought was an equal threat that needed to be managed. I had other dealings with Kelly over my career, some where he was at gunpoint others where we just fought. He was in his 20’s at the time of our first encounter and a little old to be playing gangster but he was the MOB “Leader”.
The last time I saw Kelly he walked over to me with his hands where I could see them and asked if he could talk to me. He was wearing a construction workers vest and helmet. He thanked me for sending him to prison, he had gotten his GED and was now a dad and was working to provide for his wife and son. He apologized for his behavior over the years. I was astonished that he had turned out to be something, I thought that he would end up being killed by the police someday but here he was.
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