Kanye West Saved My Life (Maybe?)

Or how sometimes shit doesn’t make sense, but we may as well just go with it

Story time folks, back in the day when I did stuff…..

I’m running through the woods, rifle in hands, glock on hip, clad in black armor. Here we go again. It’s dark. Cold.

I’m not cold though, I’m pleasantly warm bordering on hot. Running whilst carrying 50 pounds of crap tends to do that. The dark; well not much to do there. I’ve got at least three flashlights on me, and though I have night vision goggles, they ain’t the gucci ones that allow depth perception. Using the goggles is like seeing a grainy green world through a toilet paper tube. Better than nothing, but not conducive to sprinting. And I’m not using the flashlights-none of us are-as that would let him know we’re coming. So it’s better to forgo all the tech and rely on natural night vision, lest we get shot at before we even make it to his house.

Whose house are we going to, you ask?

Yet another drug dealer. And as usual, we’re not actually after this guy for the drugs. In a city where hundreds of people are shot and killed a year, there are thousands of drug dealers. No one, especially us, you know, the cops, really care about drugs being dealt. But we do care about people getting shot and/or killed.

It turns out that the smarter violent criminals in our city, like so many other places, have figured out how to escape conviction for such violent crimes: you just shoot the witnesses or at least intimidate the hell out of them through other violent means. Maybe watch an episode or two of CSI; you can get the basics of how to get around forensic evidence. We generally know who did the shooting, as some witnesses come forward before the follow on indimiation shootings start. Or we have multiple informants pointing towards the same guy, but they won’t take the stand. Self preservation often outweighs civic duty.

Luckily for us, it seems that many of our violent criminals also sell the standard hard drugs everyone seems to want so bad. Easy money. But if you’re going to make a lot of cash selling dope, you develop beefs with others in your profession, which leads to violence. Which occasionally bleeds over to people not involved. The pervasive intersection of violence and drugs is lucky for overworked prosecutors because you don’t need any witnesses for a felony drug dealing conviction. Much easier to get a dealing conviction than a murder or aggravated assault conviction; no witnesses need take the stand, everything relies on the evidence. And if you’re running a dealing business, it’s much harder to get rid of the plethora of drugs you’re constantly pedaling. A gun you used once to shoot a guy is relatively easier to dispose of.

If you’re in the house you own, by yourself, and there’s a crap ton of heroin or meth in this house along with dealing implements like prepackaged baggies and scales to measure out those baggies, we’ve got a pretty good case. Even more so when the cops are allowed to bust in and find you with this stuff because the cops got a search warrant signed by a Judge, who thought separate testimony and actual drugs you exchanged for cash on video authorizes said warrant.

That’s all great and whatnot, but we have to get in before this guy can flush the drugs down the toilet, along with our case. A normal search warrant allows the law to show up, knock, and ask to come in. Only after a reasonable amount of time has passed and it’s clear the suspect is not coming the po po can cave in the door. How much time is that? Dude, that’s a whole other discussion that no court has given a truly definitive and applicable answer too.

When our tactical team was figuring this timing stuff out, we’d use an aerial image of the house to determine the layout and dimensions, and then figure out the farthest distance in the house from the door we were knocking at. Then we’d measure that out on the ground, put a chair at one end, and have a guy sit in it. We’d then say “go”, start a stopwatch and have that guy get up and slowly walk the measured distance. Do this three times, take the slowest time. Then add time if it’s during the day, to account for them being distracted by TV, add more time at night for waking up. Clearly that’s going to be more than enough time to flush them drugs. So the Detectives running the investigation didn’t get a normal search warrant from the Judge before handing it over to our team to serve. They got a No-Knock.

At this point I probably have pissed off more than a few readers. So it goes. I’m not writing this to make some sort of political point, or justify certain procedures. I’m just trying to tell a story about how Kanye West maybe saved my life once. So let’s leave all the rage behind and get back to it.

A No-Knock search warrant allows the cops to bust down your door after an announcement, but forgo the waiting. The burden of proof was higher for these, and they were only given if we had evidence showing said evidence would be destroyed if we waited. We also had to show evidence to the Judge that the suspect was armed, as well as had a violent criminal history. There are issues beyond the politics that I have with No-Knock search warrants. These issues are of a tactical nature, and a few strategic ones as well. And it’d take me multiple posts to truly describe these issues. But this story takes place in the bad old days of the tactical police world; back before we learned from our mistakes. It took half a dozen of my teammates(including myself) to get shot before we changed how we did business.

I’ve digressed.

Back to that night. There we were; this guy had intentionally hurt some people, and again no one was coming forward on record. But Detectives had proof he was selling dope. At one point I crunched the numbers, for every 5 people that got shot in our city, we’d serve one No-Knock search warrant. And we were serving a few hundred a year. We would have done more, but logistically our team was tapped out at this rate, as well as pegging the limit of the Detectives doing the investigations. All of us were sleep deprived and barely seeing our families as it was; there just wasn’t enough time in the day or enough cops to keep up with the work. People were getting shot, and pragmatically we used what tools we had available to us. Pragmatism can be a real bitch sometimes.

As I ran through the woods behind this guy’s house, my natural night vision was shit after going from a well lit briefing room, then a sporadically lit raid van, to stepping off into dense forest. Luckily we’d planned an easy to follow route that was smooth and flat. All we had to do was focus on this dude’s back porch light and book it.

We emerged from the woods, and crossed his manicured back yard. I’d seen his place on aerial imagery, but in person it finally hit me that this was a big house. It was in an upper middle class neighborhood of classy older McMansions. Our target was clearly a few levels above the dealers selling rock on the streets.

Crashing through the back door after we all yelled “Police!! Search Warrant” was met with slight difficulty. This was just another night on the job for our breachers, who normally could cave a door in with a ram in a second or two. The back door was reinforced though, and the back porch placed the ram guy at a weird angle as he swung around some ornate concrete flower to hit it. What normally took him one hit took five.

We still had a job to do, so we didn’t let the delay bog us down. We flooded in, continuing to yell who we were and why we were there. Police! Search Warrant!!(….motherfucker) We moved through the house, and it seemed to keep going on forever. Again, this was the bad old days. We were using dynamic tactics for jobs such as these. And once we started our dynamic clear(moving as fast as possible while sweeping each room for threats), we didn’t slow down unless we started getting shot at.

We had to learn the hard way that moving fast only kept us safe while we had the element of surprise. Later we would learn that unless we were saving hostages, once we lost surprise it was better to slowly move behind big armored shields after clearing with cameras and robots. Yeah, we were all wearing armored vests and helmets, but they only stopped handgun rounds. We each wore an armored plate in our vests over our hearts about the size of laptop that would stop a rifle round. But that didn’t help much if you caught a rifle round anywhere else. Or just took a handgun round to the face-bad fucking day. But dynamic tactics for search warrants were the best practices of the day. And like so many bright ideas, best practices work until they don’t.

We kept moving. I was hot as fuck now, and it felt eerie inside. This clear was taking forever, a function of the giant house and weird sprawling layout. Much longer than the standard trap houses we hit on the reg. We hadn’t ran into anyone yet. Was this guy holed up deep inside ready to light us up? Whatever. I kept moving, making sure to conduct my clears thoroughly and concentrating on my role as my position in the clear rotated.

Finally I found myself behind a bunch of teammates in a long hallway. There were 3 sets of doors on each side of the hallway, at the end was a final door 20 feet deeper than the last side door. All of them were closed. As we started to clear them, we found them all locked too. Interior doors are much easier to get through than exterior ones. Your front door would probably take half a dozen or so kicks to get in, but only a ram hit or two. Interior doors go easy. They only take a kick or two, due to much simpler and smaller lock mechanisms. Rams are usually overkill for an interior door. So there we were, kicking a hallway door, clearing, coming back out, kicking another door, and so on. We had enough guys that we were hitting multiple rooms at a time, but it still took time.

I rotated into a side room, and was first out to head to the final room. After going through much of the house, getting a feel for how it was laid out, and having cleared several sparse guest suites, it was obvious this last room at the end of the hall was the master bedroom. We hadn’t ran into our target yet. If he was here, that’s where he was.

I didn’t think much about it right then, as I was focused on doing my job right. But in retrospect, this all seems pretty stupid. By that point we’d been in that house forever. And per legal guidance, we’d all been yelling “Police, Search Warrant!!!” and kicking doors. Unless this guy was deaf, he knew exactly where we were. And if he was in this last bedroom, he’d have plenty of time to make tea, have a few sips, load his gun, think about the existential nature of being, and then mow us down as I started to kick his door.

I’m here writing this, so you probably figured out that didn’t happen.

Here we go. I leaned back, and kicked the door. Nothing happens.

Seemed stout. Or maybe I just wasn’t deadlifting enough. Did I immediately slow down, ask for someone to bring up a ram, an armored shield, and a robot to clear the room? Fuck no. That’s not the way we did things-at least back then. Instead, I got a little pissed the door had insulted my ego, kicked the door another time and it swung open. I did the stumbling two step one does after kicking a door that never looks as cool as it does on TV.

This was definitely the master bedroom. While every other room had some token furniture, this one was laid out nice, with a giant bed, beautiful chairs, and dressers. And that’s about all it had in it. Or at least there was noone inside. But as I started moving towards the bed, the metal caught my eye.

Right next to the bed, propped against the night table, was a decked out AK47. A pistol was on the night table, along with extra ammo for both weapons. Once we made sure no one was anywhere in the house, I took a closer look at the the AK. Without touching it, I saw the safety was off. I looked at it, and then looked at the door I had kicked in leading to this room. Yup, I would have been fucked had this guy been home. Would have taken all of two seconds for him to roll out of bed, grab the AK, and start blasting.

Had he been here, would this guy have decided to shoot us? No idea. Most people surrendered peacefully when they saw a dozen or so cops with rifles and heavy armor. But some do not. This guy had shot multiple people, and said he’d kill the cops if they came for him. But then lots of people say that, and when the time comes they give up instead. Who knows?

And where the hell was this guy? The Detectives had established a solid pattern of life on him, he was always home at this time-the whole plan was based on catching him in his house.

We double checked the house, and turned it over to the Detectives. They found plenty of drugs, and more guns. Once the Detectives got prints and DNA from the AK, they unloaded it and found that a round was in the chamber and the magazine was fully loaded, which they relayed to us. All ready to rock n’ roll. So that would have sucked.

As we rolled back to HQ to debrief, the Detectives told us over our radio that they figured out where our man was. He was nice enough to post a selfie-Kanye West was in town, and our dealer was at the concert.

Similar situations, where things could have gone wrong but didn’t, happened dozens of times to me on the job. We hit many a house where the heavily armed and violent target of the investigation left just before we got there by pure luck, or fled after an informant flipped. Hell, the first No-Knock I served, I barged in on a guy sitting in bed on top of his gun. He tried to pull it on us, but it got tangled in his blanket. We wrestled him into handcuffs before he could get it free.

This one stuck out though. In review of our clear, we had taken too much time, and had lost the element of surprise long before we got to where he probably would have been. And the guy had deliberately placed his weapons so he could quickly retrieve it, as opposed to most that just left them laying about like normal people leave a book, hat, or iguna. Yeah, some of those factors happened in other operations. But I’d never served a warrant where we missed meeting the guy because he was at a Kanye West concert. Just freaking odd.

I recall reflecting on the randomness. In some other universe, maybe this dude would not have gotten tickets, and instead put a few 7.62mm through my face. But things lined up in the other way. For whatever reason, the same night we planned our raid, Kanye’s people had scheduled him to appear in our city. And the concert just happened to start right before we hit his house. And our target was a fan. And he was able to get tickets to a sold out show. Did he buy them long in advance? Did he get them from a scalper? I don’t know. But the stars lined up and nobody died.

Also there was the Kanye factor. This was long before he changed his name, and he was just a popular rapper whose antics at the time were normal for his cohort. This was before current events, where he’s clearly gone way off the reservation-he wasn’t yet a social pariah. But in step with many at that time, he appeared to be anti-police. This was before the troubles of a few years ago, and none of us really cared anyways. But this struck me too. How would Kanye feel if he knew his coming to town might have saved the lives of a few cops? Judging by his public stance at the time, he may not have been pleased. Weird too, as I liked the guy’s music. I have fond memories of my team in Afghanistan listening to The College Dropout while cleaning our guns. A bunch of us tangentially identified with the theme, as we had dropped out of school to serve. Plus the music was pretty good, I’ve regularly listened to him since.

All this made me reflect on the randomness of it all, and how people’s lives intersect with others, sometimes unknowingly exerting unintended consequences. So much of life is like this.

I believe we can take control of aspects of our lives. I think we have some choice, some agency, on how we go about our lives. How we react, for sure. But stuff like this? It reminds me that much is up to chance. And that’s OK. Not because of some tranquil cosmic perspective-no. Rather because this is just the way of things. There’s no fighting it. Yes, I try to control what I can. But being any less than OK with a world such as this will not change it, acceptance seems to be the only rational path.

Some days a rapper comes to town, and six degrees of Kevin Bacon later, you don’t get in a gunfight. So it goes.