Three dangerous situations, three lives spared

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/06/2022 (1358 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“I’m about to see somebody die. I need to get behind a tree, just in case a stray bullet is fired in my direction.”

Those aren’t the words from an action movie on Netflix. They’re the words I spoke to myself last Sunday afternoon as I watched a drama unfold on a sidewalk down the street from my house.

I was writing a column and heard loud yelling outside. I went outside to see what the problem was and saw something I won’t forget for awhile.

Two women were arguing in front of a house that has become a problem property since it was sold a few years ago. The police are there quite often these days.

What happened last Sunday was way beyond the noise and vagrancy our neighbourhood has been forced to put up with, however.

As I stepped outside my front door, I saw the argument between the two women was escalating and could get violent. I also saw that there were also a number of men nearby, most of whom seemed to be allied with one of the women.

But then I saw three more men walking up the sidewalk, moving aggressively toward where the argument was happening. One of them had a big, full-sized axe.

At first, he was just carrying it with the handle up and the sharp head hanging down. As he drew closer to the arguing women, however, he lifted the axe above his head as if he was about to strike somebody with it.

At that moment, a Brandon Police Service officer came out of nowhere in a patrol vehicle. In seconds, he was out of the vehicle, ordering the man with the axe to drop it.

The man didn’t comply. Instead, he stepped toward the other two men, with the axe ready to strike. Then he veered toward the officer, who was at most 15 feet away.

In the blink of an eye, the officer returned to his vehicle, grabbed a shotgun, cocked it, pointed it at the man with the axe and yelled for him to drop it.

That’s when I spoke those words to myself. I was sure that I was about to see somebody hit with an axe or “axe man” have his head blown off. Maybe both.

The man immediately dropped the axe and by doing so undoubtedly saved his own life. Seconds later, two other police officers arrived.

While the first officer continued to point his shotgun at the axe man, yelling at him to get on the ground, the second officer on the scene pointed his handgun at one of the other two men, telling him to get on the ground. The third officer pointed his stun gun at the third man, yelling at him to get on the ground.

All three men complied and they were each handcuffed and placed in separate BPS vehicles. The very dangerous situation was resolved in less than three minutes. No shots were fired, nobody was hit with a stun gun. Nobody died.

That’s solely because of the split-second decisions made by the first officer on the scene. When he saw the man with the axe moving toward the other two men, he could have easily fired his gun. It would have been justified.

When the man with the axe stepped toward him, with the axe ready to strike, the officer could have shot the axe man then, and it would have been totally justified and defensible.

That officer held the life of the offender in his hands, and he spared him. In a handful of seconds, he made decision after decision after decision perfectly.

I don’t believe for a minute that he was scared to fire his gun. I believe that his training, experience and judgment enabled him, and his fellow officers, to read the situation correctly and make the right choices. Because of that, nobody’s dead.

Monday’s Brandon Police Service media release discussed the situation that had occurred on Sunday. It said that “Police were able to deescalate the situation and no injuries were sustained to anyone involved.”

That’s a severe understatement, but I think it reflects the fact that these types of incidents are becoming far too routine for the BPS. Our police officers are being exposed to a level of danger that was much less common in this city a decade ago.

They are repeatedly being forced to make split-second, high-consequence decisions, and they keep making the right choices.

For example, just four hours after the incident I just described, BPS officers had to deal with a man with a knife who, according to the same media release, “was looking for someone to stab or he would stab himself.” The release says he repeatedly refused to obey police commands to drop the knife and was eventually subdued with a stun gun “without further incident and no injury.”

Two days earlier, officers apprehended a man who was chasing another man while armed with a machete. The release says the suspect was detained “without incident.” I suspect the arrest was more serious than that, but it becomes a matter of routine when it happens with such regularity.

Three violent incidents in three days. Three instances in which the offenders are only alive because BPS officers made the right decisions while under a heck of a lot of pressure.

Being a police officer is a tough job on the best of days, and it’s getting harder for our officers here in Brandon.

That’s something to remember the next time you see them drive by. You wouldn’t want to spend a shift in their shoes.

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