From: RustyBullethole, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sunday Telegraph Magazine 10.12.00 (OCR) "Suicide by Cop" Roger Gray is a tall, self-assured man with a grey moustache and blue eyes. A 54-year-old former sergeant in S019, the Metropolitan Police's Armed Response Unit, he speaks softly but firmly, and exudes competence and conviction. `You do not know,' he says, 'you cannot know what is going on in a man's head when he is holding a firearm. Even if he tells you he is suicidal, how do you know he is telling the truth? How do you know he isn't going to kill you or the people he is holding anyway?' This was precisely the dilemma faced by Gray and two of his colleagues on 28 July 1994, when S019's headquarters in Old Street, east London, received a call from a member of the public who claimed to have heard gunshots. The call was not greeted enthusiastically. It had already been an unusually busy night for the officers on shift, and in any case such reports frequently turn out to consist of nothing more serious than a backfire from a passing car. Or the 'gunshots' are revealed to be exploding warning caps left on railway lines by rail workers to alert them to an approaching train. Nevertheless, on Thursday 28 July Roger Gray and his colleagues undertook a detailed search of the back gardens of Shaftesbury Road in Holloway, north London, the place from which `the shots' were reported to have originated. They uncovered nothing. Nor, despite its thermal imaging and `night-sun' aids, did a police helicopter hovering above. Gray and his two armed colleagues returned to Old Street, relieved that the call was a false alarm. But then they were called out again: there had been further reports of shooting in the area. `We weren't keen to return,' remembers Gray. `We didn't think there was anything going on.' But back in the quiet street of terraced Victorian houses, it was clear that something was very wrong. There had been more `shots'; and, as the police arrived, a window was shattered, apparently by a bullet. Moments later Lavinia Jessup, a 30-year-old accountant, was captured at gunpoint by her neighbour John O'Brien, 37, and held hostage at 51 Shaftesbury Road, her own house. Armed police officers assumed position. Then, with his gun pointed at her left side, O'Brien took Jessup back to his house next door. Gray was in charge of negotiating Jessup's release. Inside the house Jessup was also attempting to negotiate her release. After all, she knew O'Brien; they had even had a few drinks together. Even in these extraordinary circumstances he was surprisingly calm. Over and over again she tried to find out what had driven him to such desperate measures. He refused to tell her. In exasperation, she asked him if he wanted to (lie, if this was just a silly attempt at suicide. To her astonishment, O'Brien said, `Yes, but I haven't got the guts to do it myself: if I start firing at the police, they'll have to shoot me.' When dawn broke O'Brien told Jessup she could go. He then walked out of the house through the back door, and as Jessup screamed, `He wants you to shoot him, he wants you to shoot him!', O'Brien approached the waiting police. Ignoring repeated pleas by the police to put his weapon down, he instead pointed it at them and was shot dead. It was only afterwards that the police discovered that his gun was a replica, albeit one which fired `shots' that sounded genuine. The fact that his gun was only a replica would seem to confirm Jessup's description of O'Brien's motive: he wanted to die, and he wanted the police to be the agents of his death. At St Pancras Coroner's Court on 14 June 1995, the jury returned a verdict of `lawful killing'. The idea that someone might deliberately manipulate the police into abetting a suicide bid seems bizarre, but the O'Brien incident is not an isolated case. The terms used by the authorities to describe it are Police-Assisted Suicide or Provoked Shooting. In America the phenomenon has become so commonplace that it has been given its own mediafriendly name: suicide by cop. `Suicide by cop' isn't a term used to describe the acts of mania or rage that follow a bungled criminal act and lead to a criminal's shooting; nor does it refer to the actions of a person too mentally ill to be aware of his actions. What the phrase is meant to convey is a calculated suicidal attempt to force the police to act as executioners. In many cases that suicidal intent is unambiguous: those who have been killed or wounded in this way have often warned friends or relatives about their plans. And sometimes the victims leave suicide notes, apologising to the police. Take the case of Moshe Pergament, a 19-year-old New York college student with a penchant for gambling, who had racked up a $6,000 debt during the baseball season. Pergament planned his death on 14 November 1997 with chilling precision. For 40 minutes he drove erratically along the Long Island Expressway in his brand-new Honda Accord, at speeds likely to attract the attention of police. Sure enough, a police cruiser soon flashed its lights at him, and Pergament pulled over. Then, with a plastic replica of a .38 revolver in his hand, he jumped out of the car. Anthony Sica, the police officer in the cruiser, ordered him to drop the gun. But Pergament didn't drop it; he kept on coming. Twelve feet. Ten feet. Seven feet. Sica fired. It was only after an ambulance had taken Pergament's body away that detectives found an envelope on the front seat of his Honda. It was addressed `To the officer who shot me', and inside, on a Hallmark card, was a neatly written note: `Officer, it was a plan. I'm sorry to get you involved. I just needed to die. Please remember that this was all my doing. You had no way of knowing. Moe Pergament.' Though Pergament clearly wanted to die, why should he - or anyone - choose to do it this way? Rebecca Stincelli has worked as a crisis interventionist with the Sacramento County Sheriff Department in California for more than 20 years; as a result, she has frequently come into contact with both the bereaved families of a suicide by cop, and the officer responsible. She believes there are a number of reasons for choosing this method of suicide: `Suicide has always carried a stigma in our society, and it still does. For many of these people, police assisted suicide achieves the result but without the suicide verdict. That way there's less shame for the person and their families. In other cases, the victims target police because they know they don't have the nerve to carry out the suicide themselves. I've also heard of incidents where individuals have phoned the television and radio stations right after they call the police. They want to go out in a blaze of glory.' For Randall Curtis Fullerton, of Mooresville, North Carolina, suicide by cop seemed to be the easy way out. The 36-year-old knew how the police would react: `My experience as a former army officer taught me that if I posed a sufficient threat to the police they would have to respond with lethal force.' So on 17 September 1998 Fullerton called 911 and then left the phone off the hook, aware that it is police procedure to investigate all emergency calls. `I had been living with depression nd addiction to cocaine for several years. Suicide seemed like the only option. I wanted the pain to end.' And so the police came, and Fullerton advanced on them, brandishing a shattered bottle and threatening to kill them. But Fullerton was lucky: though Officer Patrick Hairston fired at him, the bullet narrowly missed Fullerton's heart, and he survived. He now regrets his actions. `The first thing I did when I was able to was to make an apology to the officer involved. I do not hold him to blame at all. I manipulated the officer's responses. I manipulated him into becoming a mechanism for my suicide. I'm only grateful I survived.' Although it is now suspected that suicide by cop has been practised for decades, there had been no formal studies of the phenomenon until 1996, when Richard Parent, a Canadian police constable, examined cases of fatal police shootings in British Columbia from 1980 to 1994. To establish suicidal motive, Parent went through each case thoroughly. Where there was no suicide noteor suicidal declaration either to family or friends, he built up his own exhaustive psychological studies. In other cases he was able to rely on psychological autopsies (the analysis of suicide through interviews with friends and relatives in the hope of discovering why he or she committed suicide). His startling conclusion was that ten per cent of the shootings had involved people who wanted police to kill them. A year later, a study by Dr H Range Hutson, research director at Harvard Medical School, found an even higher percentage. Hutson examined more than 425 fatal and non-fatal officer-involved shootings in Los Angeles County in the period from 1987 to 1997, and, using the same methods as Parent, established that nearly one in six were suicide attempts. In this country in a study covering a three-year period, an even higher proportion of such incidents seems, remarkably, to have taken place. In its review of shooting incidents in England and Wales from 1991 to 1993 the Joint Standing Committee on Police Use of Firearms, in consultation with the Police Complaints Authority (PCA), found that of a total of 23 incidents, nine involved 'armed people engaging in language or behaviour which would suggest that they were provoking the police to shoot them'. Richard Offer, a spokesperson for the PCA, believes the figure, which, he says, was unusually high, can partly be explained by the policy of 'care in the community' which was taking effect at the time, and partly by the recession. Sir Alistair Graham, chairman of the PCA, adds, 'Mercifully, the number of shootings by police is very low in Britain... But this was a period when there was a larger than normal number of domestic incidents. The provoked shootings examined did include those which are reckless [due to intoxication] and some people who wish to die.' The case of Peter Swann seems to be an example of this kind of 'provoked shooting'. In June 1992, after repeated requests from police officers to put down the sawn-off shotgun he was carrying, Swann was shot dead outside his south London flat. Swann was an unstable character who was wanted in connection with a burglary carried out a month before at Sydenham railway station, where his wife, jenny, worked. According to Jenny Swann had been shattered by the suicide of his 35-year-old sister Janet the year before. Jenny believes that there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent her husband's death. 'Peter wasn't drunk and he wasn't on drugs,' she insists. 'He was just too far gone with his problems. He wanted to die that night.' A similar motive seems to apply to Kirk Davies, a 30-year-old who is strongly suspected of having engineered his own death earlier this year. Davies, who was shot dead by officers in North Yorkshire in September, was a former soldier; he had served in Northern Ireland before deserting, and had later become a mercenary in the Croatian army during the war in Bosnia; he once boasted that he had killed 46 Serbs - a claim disputed by the Croats. Whatever is the truth of his claims, Davies was a troubled man: not long after he was dishonourably discharged from the Croatian army, he discovered that his father - who had claimed to be an SAS hero and whose achievements Kirk may well have been trying to emulate - had, in fact, been a lorry driver in the Royal Corps of Transport. He responded to this information by smashing up the family car and then threatening his father with a Gurkha kukri. For this, he was sentenced in September 1997 to two years probation, recorder Aidan Marron remarking that 'There is a need to address your problem and we wish you well.' Three years later, on 24 September, Davies walked into the police station in Selby, North Yorkshire, and pointed a gun wrapped in camouflage netting at the officer on the desk before fleeing in his car. Davies then drove to a nearby hospital and threatened staff. As armed police arrived on the scene, he refused to hand over his weapon and fled into a wood. He was challenged again, and after once more refusing to hand over his weapon - which was later discovered to be a relatively harmless air rifle - he was shot. Given his military background, Davies must have known that his actions would provoke the police to shoot. As in the cases of O'Brien and Swann, it is possible that Davies got what he wanted. If this is so, it also seems unlikely that he would have considered the effect of his action on those who were forced to kill him. Britain is not an armed nation; it has some of the world's strictest gun laws, and less than five per cent of our police force is authorised to carry firearms. This fact is reflected in a comparison of London and New York police firearms records. Between January and October this year there were 105 incidents in which New York Police Department officers fired their guns, discharging 432 rounds; 25 civilians were hit and ten killed. In the Metropolitan Police area over the same period only four shots were fired, with two casualties and one fatality. That fatalities in this country are relatively few in no way diminishes the pressure on our armed police officers. They join armed units in the knowledge that if their fire either injures or kills someone, they face an automatic investigation from officers from an outside force, supervised by the PCA. They will be taken off operational duty pending the outcome of the investigation - an outcome that is by no means a foregone conclusion. In 1995 PC Patrick Hodgson, an officer who had shot dead a suspected armed robber near Hammersmith Bridge, in west London, was charged with murder and manslaughter after the victim was found to have been unarmed; a year later at the Old Bailey he was acquitted on both counts. A police shooting will also be followed by a coroner's inquest, during which it is likely that a solicitor will query the inevitability of the fatal outcome. The solicitor may also want to know why the officer didn't aim at the assailant's hand to try and dislodge his weapon, or at his leg in an attempt to disable him. Police officers in this country and America insist they 'shoot to stop' and not `to kill', but they concede that the fact that they are trained to aim at `centre mass' - the area between the neck and the belly button - means that there is a high probability of death. None the less, the police insist that shooting at centre mass is the only effective way of containing a threat, that aiming at the chest gives the officer the largest target and the best opportunity of disabling an assailant. They are quick to point out that an assailant who suffers minor injuries can still use his weapon. In most cases an inquest will clear the firearms officer of any wrong-doing. The internal process of reports and statements, inquiry and assessment - a process that can last up to two years - will finally come to a close. But as far as the officer in question is concerned, that is rarely the end of the matter. Colin Jackson is a Police Federation representative in the Armed Response Unit. He has seen the effects of a fatal incident on an officer. `He is required to make a decision in a split second which may change the course of his life. He will usually go on questioning his actions for far longer than any investigation or inquest. What would have happened if he had reacted sooner? Could he have prevented it from happening in the first place? It is an extremely traumatic period.' As well as that, trauma officers must face the possibility that they may have been used in order to carry out a suicide bid. `It is devastating for them,' says Jackson. `Police officers are taught from the beginning of training to deal in facts; now they have to start dealing in cognitive issues. They may doubt themselves and their perception of the incident. Should they have known the people they were facing were suicidal? Should they have been able to recognise that the gun was a replica? I have to reassure them that they have got to stick with what was known at the time because that was the reason they did what they did.' Roger Gray is also certain that the outcome that night on Shaftesbury Road would not have been any different had he or his officers suspected O'Brien's suicidal intentions. 'The rules of armed confrontation are simple,' Gray insists. `They have to be. If a man has a dangerous weapon, you ask him to put it down. If he then points it at you or any other person, you shoot him. It makes no difference whether it is a suicide attempt or not. The only way to carry on is to know that you did your best; that, in the end, it wasn't your decision. He forced you to do what you did.' Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___________________________________________________________ T O P I C A http://www.topica.com/t/17 Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Your Favorite Topics
