It’s been nearly three-and-a-half decades since I killed Edward Randolph, but when I fix my mind on those desperate seconds from the time he thrust the butcher’s knife he clasped with both his hands into my partner Dennis Azevedo’s chest and the moment I shot him flush in his own, it can seem like yesterday.

After being stabbed in the chest and fending off several other attempts to murder him, Dennis fell flat on his back and Randolph leapt on top of him, trying to force the knife he held with both hands into Dennis’s throat. My first reaction when I got close enough to help was to reach in and grab Randolph’s wrists with both of my hands, as Dennis was doing. But Randolph jerked his arms away and broke my grip.

The crucial moments from the time Randolph first attacked Dennis and when I arrived at my partner’s side lasted no more than 12 seconds, perhaps as few as seven. A mere three to four seconds passed from the time I first grabbed the suspect’s wrists to the time I pulled the trigger.

Those last few seconds have proven to be among the most significant in my life. And I have revisited them, along with the moments that preceded them, many times in the past several months as our nation has plunged into an emotionally charged debate over police and deadly force. News reports are filled with people denouncing trigger-happy cops.

The national debate that has broken out since Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in Ferguson,Missouri, has been frustrating to watch because so few of the participants understand the true nature of deadly force in American police work — the complexity of many situations in which officers fire; how officers think, what they feel and how they perceive things during incidents in which they discharge their guns; the emotional toll that a shooting can take on an officer; and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that police officers could use deadly force much more often than do.

I know about all of this not just because I was involved in a shooting many years ago, but also because I have spent a good bit of time since I left police work studying various aspects of deadly force. I’ve conducted formal interviews with scores of police officers who all faced the same terrible choice that I faced, and I’ve talked informally with scores more. None of them wanted to take a life. But sometimes they had to.

***

Had I been successful in my attempt to save Dennis without shooting Randolph, the rest of my life likely would have played out differently than it has since that warm July evening in 1981. I know for certain that the first 12 hours following the incident wouldn’t have been spent repeatedly telling detectives from Robbery-Homicide what happened, that the roiling in my guts that ebbed and flowed over the following several months as I waited for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to rule on the legality of my actions and the Los Angeles Police Department’s Shooting Review Board to decide whether I behaved in accordance with department policy would never have occurred, that I wouldn’t have replayed those last few seconds in my mind hundreds of times as I tried to reconcile my actions with my belief that I should have been able to disarm Randolph without shooting him, and that I wouldn’t have experienced the anguish I felt for many years about having taken a human life.

The climate regarding the use of deadly force by police in Los Angeles in the early 1980s was similar to that which prevails in our nation today: many sectors of the public being very suspicious of officers’ action when they shot and widespread calls for “accountability” when cops kill citizens. Back then, there were two key pieces of the deadly force mosaic in Los Angeles that weighed heavily on my mind: The first was a recently initiated program run by the L.A. county district attorney’s office called “Operation Rollout,” wherein district attorney investigators responded to the scene of every fatal shooting in the county involving an officer, ostensibly to better monitor the investigative process and ensure that officers weren’t getting away with illegal killings. But LAPD cops viewed it differently. I was repeatedly told by my training officers, and by other cops I worked with, that the district attorney was on the hunt to indict a cop behind a shooting.

The author today and as a police officer in the 1980s. Photos courtesy of author.

I also had heard horror stories about the LAPD shooting review process: That the system was rigged to find some sort of fault with an officer’s actions, and that the brass always managed to find something to criticize in the wake of a shooting. As a rookie, I didn’t have the same civil- service protection as did officers who’d made it past the 18-month probationary period, so I could be summarily fired if the LAPD powers that be wanted to make an example of me.

Thus, were my twin concerns about losing my job and facing jail time rooted in my understanding of the politics in play in Los Angeles County and the LAPD in the early 1980s.

The source of the longstanding anguish I felt about killing someone was much simpler: I had a deep-seated religious belief, rooted in my Christian faith that one should kill other humans only when it absolutely couldn’t be avoided. In that moral context, I blamed myself for the killing because I believed that it happened because I had failed to hang onto Randolph’s wrists. It took me many years to see things differently, to realize that it was Edward Randolph’s actions that led to his death, but that’s a different chapter of my life story. And thus a topic for some other time and place.

Beyond my knowledge that I wouldn’t have felt the anguish I experienced about taking a life, I wouldn’t have held the fears about losing my job and going to jail, and that there wouldn’t have been an extended investigation in the immediate wake of the incident, there is much I don’t know about how my life would be different had I not killed Edward Randolph.

Chief among them is that I don’t know whether I would have followed the initial career path I had set for myself upon being hired by the LAPD, which included getting promoted to lieutenant or captain during my first 10 or so years on the job, then going to grad school at UCLA part time until I earned my Ph.D. so that I could teach college after putting in 20 years on the job and earning a police pension. But I believe those few seconds were instrumental in me cutting short my police career and heading off to grad school in 1984, after first having left Los Angeles to work for the Redmond, Washington police department.

I had an academically oriented interest in the use of deadly force long before becoming a police officer as I had conducted research and written papers about various aspects of police shootings while earning my bachelor degree in history at Seattle Pacific University. In grad school, I turned my attention to other aspects of policing and wrote my doctoral dissertation on the more mundane topic of the determinants of arrest in patrol work. But as I was closing in on tenure, I decided to turn my attention once again to deadly force, this time with a special interest in how officers experience shootings and how involvement in them affects officers who, like me, had killed someone. I knew from discussions with partners and other LAPD cops who’d been involved in shootings that none sought to kill anyone, that many had experienced the same post-shooting trepidation about losing their jobs and facing criminal charges that I had, that many replayed the event repeatedly in their minds, and that many shared the anguish I felt about having taken a life.

But I didn’t know how widespread such attitudes and reactions were because there wasn’t much sound research on the topic. So in 1997, I applied for a small grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to interview a sample of police officers who had shot people during the course of their duties to see how much my limited knowledge applied across the board. I got the funding, and by the end of 1999, I had interviewed 80 officers from several police agencies across four states about 113 incidents in which they’d shot someone.

None of the men or women I spoke with went into the events that culminated in gunplay with the intent to kill anyone. Where post-shooting reactions go, some of what I learned was consistent with my experiences and with what I had heard from other LAPD shooters, and some ran counter to them. While nearly all the officers I interviewed repeatedly replayed the shooting in their minds during the first days after they had occurred, only about a third experienced the worry about legal and administrative problems that I and so many LAPD cops had felt, and fewer than half shared some aspect of the anguish I had experienced. But many had negative reactions that I hadn’t experienced. Among the highlights: About half of the officers reported some sort of sleep disruption, having problems falling and/or staying asleep, with many having nightmares related to their shootings. Nearly half of the shooters, including many who didn’t have problems sleeping, felt physically fatigued. And about 1-in-5 reported being so emotionally drained that they felt numb.

Listening to these other officers talk about how their shootings affected them sometimes reminded me of aspects of my own post-shooting reactions. Particularly poignant in this regard were interviews during which officers teared up as they were talking about their experiences. One officer, for example, excused himself when he started to cry only a few seconds after starting to relate the anguish he felt about shooting a man who had pointed what looked like a real but turned out to be a toy gun at him. Another compelling aspect of the interviews is that many officers reported a sense of elation in the wake of their shootings, not that they had shot someone, but because they had survived a life-threatening event, because they had proven their mettle in the most trying matter a police officer can experience, or both. One female officer, for example, reported being thrilled that she had proven wrong the many males on her agency that had doubted she could handle herself in the extremis present in a shooting situation; she was particularly proud of the fact that the bullets she fired had hit the gun-toting suspect in the chest—where officers are trained to aim in most situations—while her male partner shot well low of his aim point and struck the suspect in the leg.

The moments leading up to the instigation of police gunfire, and those spent once officers start pulling the trigger, are often tense, uncertain and evolve rapidly. People in and around law enforcement had long known that officers are susceptible to experiencing various sorts of unusual psychological, emotional, physical and perceptual reactions during these stress-filled moments, but there was little detailed information about these reactions and how frequently officers experienced them. Because I included in the interviews questions about how these officers reacted during shootings, I was able to develop some fire-grained information about how these men and women experienced the events in which they shot people. About 40 percent reported experiencing a sense of disbelief that the event was happening; they simply couldn’t believe, for example, that a suspect who was looking down the barrel of a police shotgun would try to pull a gun that was hidden beneath their clothes. Well over half of the officers reported being fearful for themselves, their fellow officers, citizens who were in danger, or all three. More than 50 percent reported having an adrenaline rush. And nearly all, or 95 percent, reported experiencing some perceptual anomaly, such as tunnel vision, a sense of heightened visual detail, seeing things in slow motion, and auditory blunting wherein sounds were either softer than they normally would have been, or the officer simply didn’t hear anything (many officers stated that they never heard their gunshots when they pulled the trigger).

Another matter I discussed with the 80 men and women I interviewed were situations where they believed they legally could have shot someone but held their fire and managed to resolve the matter peaceably. I knew from my time on the job that the men and women of the LAPD regularly held their fire when they could have shot. Some of this knowledge came from hearing other officers tell me about such situations, and some came from my own experiences. In the 22 months I spent on patrol in L.A., I had three men and one juvenile look me and/or other officers right in the eye, draw guns from either their waistbands or jacket pockets and then throw them on the ground; I had two other men point guns at me and my partners; I came close to shooting two other men as partners of mine wrestled with them over control of guns they were trying to draw from their waistbands; I held my fire when one juvenile started to pull a small pistol from a pouch on his right hip; and I didn’t shoot a man at the scene of a robbery call who reached with his right hand for a gun he had held under his left armpit. In four of these cases I was the only officer who had a shot, but in the other six, my partners and/or other officers on the scene also could have shot. But we all held our fire, despite the considerable danger we were facing. The stories of restraint from the officers I interviewed were variations on the same theme: Officer, after officer, after officer, told me tale, after tale, after tale of situations where they were in considerable danger, facing people who reached for, held, pointed, and even discharged guns, but opted to hold their fire because they simply believed that they just didn’t have to shoot.

So when I hear people say the police are just looking to shoot people, I simply shake my head in wonder about the abject ignorance that such people have about how most cops actually think, feel and behave where deadly force is concerned.

Race, of course, is a complicated factor in shootings—but not always in the way that the public would think. In fact, research I helped to develop with colleagues at Washington State University Spokane has found that, in controlled experiments, active police officers are actually slower to shoot at black suspects than at white suspects—and actually much slower to shoot a black suspect than an average member of the public. That’s consistent with my own research: When it comes to the issue of race, I’ve never had a single officer tell me, “I didn’t shoot a guy because he was white.” I’ve had multiple officers tell me, “I didn’t shoot a guy because he was black.” I’ve even had police officers confess how relieved they were after the fact that the suspect they killed was white. Even before I started my research nearly two decades ago, police officers—particularly white police officers—were all too aware of how their actions might be harshly judged as rooted in racism.

***

The attack Edward Randolph perpetrated came with no warning. Dennis and I were on opposite sides of Vernon Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles when it happened, dealing with a call about an armed burglar who had barricaded himself inside a residence. Both Dennis and I had initially been crouched down on the safe side of a Cadillac parked one house west of the house in question. But Dennis had run to the south side of Vernon to escort to safety a man standing directly across the street from the house with the gunman. The rest of the crowd that had gathered to watch the LAPD in action on a busy weekend night had listened to our shouts that they were in danger and vacated the area.

When Dennis left my side, I focused my attention on the house with the burglar, fully expecting that I was going to have to shoot the gunman to stop him from shooting Dennis in the back as he ran across the street. Instead, after several seconds had passed and from the direction Dennis had run, I heard a man yell, “Get your fucking hands off me! Don’t tell me what to do!” I quickly turned my gaze from the house to the other side of Vernon Avenue. What I saw was Dennis and the man, whose name we did not yet know, standing on the sidewalk facing each other, engaged in a conversation that I couldn’t discern over the din of the police helicopter circling overhead. Dennis was gesturing and pointing west, apparently trying to convince the man he needed to move that direction, out of harm’s way.

No more than two or three seconds later, the man turned and took a couple of steps west. Dennis raised his left hand to grab the man’s right elbow to hustle the man out of the danger zone. Rather than moving along with Dennis, however, the man stopped, jerked his arm away from Dennis’ grasp, and reached across his body and into a brown Nike gym bag that was dangling from his left shoulder. And then, in the blink of an eye, he pulled a large butcher knife from the gym bag, brought his left hand up to take a two-handed grip on the knife’s handle, pivoted to his right with a forceful and deliberate drop step, and viciously drove the blade into Dennis’ chest.

Like many cops in such situations, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. And for a moment I wasn’t sure. For after the assailant had plunged his knife into Dennis’ chest, he pivoted another 90 degrees to his right as he dropped his left hand from the knife’s handle and withdrew the blade from my partner’s chest, and then stood face-up on Dennis, holding the knife chest high in front of him with his knuckles perpendicular to the ground and parallel to Dennis’ chest. I didn’t see a blade extending beneath his hand, and for a split-second thought, “Did I miss-see the stabbing? Is that a gun in the guy’s hand? Did he just punch Dennis with it to create space and is he now about to shoot him?”

As I was thinking these thoughts, it also flashed in my mind that perhaps I needed to shoot the guy before he could get a shot off on Dennis. But before I could even start to bring my gun up to engage the suspect, he raised his right hand above his head, stepped with his left leg toward Dennis and brought his right hand crashing down toward Dennis’ head. As the suspect raised his right hand, I clearly saw the glint of a knife blade beneath it and realized that my initial impression was correct: He had just attacked my partner with a knife. And I realized that he was seeking to stab him again—that he was trying to murder Dennis with a butcher knife.

Dennis had taken a step back and thrown his hands up in front of his face when the suspect resumed his attack, barely blocking the downward thrust. But the suspect simply raised the knife above his head again, and again brought it crashing down toward Dennis’ head. As I began to sprint away from the Cadillac and toward my partner, the assailant pressed his attack—again and again drawing the knife above his head and again and again crashing it down toward Dennis’. Somehow, unbelievably, Dennis managed to parry each and every blow so that the knife never reached his head. But after blocking four or five blows, Dennis tripped and fell flat on his back, and the suspect jumped on top of him, seeking to complete his murderous mission. Dennis reached up with both hands, and somehow managed to grab his assailant’s wrists as the knife crashed toward him, stopping it inches short of its intended mark.

And this is how it was no more than a few seconds later when I completed my sprint to help my partner: Dennis flat on his back, his arms bent, but almost directly above his throat, and the suspect kneeling atop him, trying to force the blade of the knife he once again held with both hands down into Dennis. While I clearly could have legally shot the suspect right then, I believed that with the combined strength of our four hands that Dennis and I could wrest the knife from his hands, so I reached in with both hands and added my grip to that of Dennis'. But my belief was wrong. More rapidly and with more ease than I could ever have imagined, the suspect jerked his arms away and broke my grip. Dennis then shouted, “Shoot him!” And that’s what I decided to do.

Dennis still had his grip on the suspect’s wrists, and because the two of them were so close together, I was worried that I might hit Dennis with my gunfire. So, as I brought my gun to a firing position, I picked an aiming point on the left side of the suspect’s chest that I believed would maximize the effect of the gunshot I was about to deliver and minimize the danger to Dennis. Fortunately, these beliefs were correct. The instant after I pulled the trigger and the muted sound of the gunshot faded, the suspect, in a voice indicating he realized he’d been gravely wounded, said, “Oh, shit,” and Dennis was able to finally lock his elbows and thereby move the knife blade a full arm’s length from his throat. Seeing this, I quickly reached in and firmly grabbed the suspect’s right wrist with my left hand as I lowered my pistol.

In short order, Dennis and I were able to force the suspect onto his side, and then his back. At some point, the suspect released his left hand from the knife, but he still clung desperately to it with his right, so I slammed it to the ground as I dropped to my right knee, then further pinned his arm to the ground with my left foot. The suspect refused to let go of the knife and continued to fight us. But with our combined strength, and with my full weight on his right wrist, we had the knife under control.

After I had pinned the suspect’s wrist to the ground, I glanced to my left and saw four other LAPD officers running at full speed toward Dennis and me. I recognized two of them, Neil May and Kirk Albanese, academy classmates who’d graduated with me just four months prior, and I presumed the other two were their training officers. When Neil, Kirk and their trainers arrived at the fight, the six of us were finally able to free the knife from the still-struggling suspect’s hand, then roll him onto his stomach and handcuff his arms behind his back.

I can’t recall whether it was Dennis or I (or both of us) who told the other cops that the guy I just shot wasn’t the gunman from the house across the street, but two of them quickly grabbed the suspect and started to drag him to the safe side of a car parked in the front yard of the house closest to where the shooting occurred. At about the same time, a sergeant ran up to Dennis and me and, apparently believing the guy I’d just shot was the gunman from the house across the street, told us to sit on the curb and collect our thoughts. I quickly explained that the guy in cuffs being drug across the lawn wasn’t the gunman from across the street, and the three of us then quickly ran to the refuge of the porch of the house in front of which the suspect lay.

We figured out later that the initial knife thrust that I had seen was stopped by Dennis’s body armor: it cut through 12 of the 16 layers of Kevlar; the last four had saved his life. But while on the porch, I chalked it up to Providence that Dennis’ hands and arms hadn’t been slashed to ribbons as the suspect pressed his attack down the sidewalk and jumped on top of Dennis.

From the porch, I also saw two paramedics arrive and start to treat the man I’d shot, who lay on the lawn, no more than 20 feet to my right. After cutting off his clothes as is medical protocol with gunshot wounds, they found the defect on his left side where my bullet had entered and went to work. A few minutes later, I saw the suspect void his bladder and the paramedics stop working. And I knew that he was dead.

The entire sequence of events, from our arrival on-scene to the point where the paramedics abandoned their attempts to save the suspect’s life, took no more than 10 minutes to play out.

***

Not every police shooting is justified. It would appear that the recent killing of Walter Scott by former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager falls into the category of an illegal killing, and I have testified against police officers in the wake of legally dubious shootings. Moreover, some non-trivial fraction of lawful officer-involved shootings—such as the one in which a young Cleveland police officer killed Tamir Rice earlier this year—could be avoided through the use of sound police tactics, such as keeping distance from armed suspects, when possible.

But most cases in which cops shoot citizens are driven by the criminal actions of the citizens in question. For instance, this week in Garland, Texas, a police officer saved countless lives by killing two armed men attempting to storm an event showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. That’s exactly the type of situation that deadly force is designed to stop.

Police officers know they’ve been given great power by the citizens who want them to ensure their safety. And no good cop wields that power lightly. The public should remember this when reacting to stories about police gunfire. They should also be alert to the perceptual anomalies and other reactions that officers can experience during incidents in which they fire their guns, for such knowledge can help the public make sense of situations that at first blush sometimes doesn’t make any.

Further, the public needs to understand that America’s cops aren’t prowling about looking to kill someone, that officers don’t pull the trigger in most of the situations in which doing so would be clearly legally permissible, and that our police often take great risks to avoid gunfire. And, perhaps most importantly, people need to realize that police officers are human beings who often suffer in the wake of those situations where they can’t avoid gunplay, no matter how justified their actions might be.

The research I conducted, along with my own experience in killing a criminal and living with the aftermath of that action, tells me is that the conversation our nation is presently embroiled in about the use of deadly force desperately needs to be balanced by facts and knowledge. I say this because the vitriol that has been directed from many quarters of our society at our men and women in blue since August of last year portrays America’s police officers as heartless beasts who enjoy killing.

But nothing is further from the truth.