Cops in South Florida may be feeling besieged. Just last month, a Broward County sheriff’s deputy was shot and critically injured by a man he pulled over in a traffic stop. Then, days later, another Broward deputy was murdered late at night in a Walgreen’s parking lot by someone who fled in a vehicle and remains on the loose. And now this. “We’ve just been really beat up down here,” said Lees.
When a victim is one of their own, officers struggle not to be ruled by emotion. “You can’t do that,” said Lees. “The normal protocols apply … They always exist and they’re not amended because the guy’s a cop killer.” Many departments inculcate that message through rigorous training exercises designed to prepare for just the sort of scene that unfolded in Miami on Thursday. Officers learn to suppress their feelings and focus on tactical matters—like establishing an ironclad perimeter to ensure a suspect can’t escape. “All the huge logistical points—those are the things you concentrate on,” said Lees.
He tried to keep that in mind as he learned the details of the carnage. That morning, two Miami-Dade officers—Somohano and Christopher Carlin—tried to stop a man named Shawn LaBeet, 25, who was driving a Honda Accord alone near a housing development in southwest Miami, according to the police. LaBeet sped off, parked at his girlfriend’s home and ran inside, with police in pursuit, according to a report in The Miami Herald. Perched at a window, LaBeet opened fire with an assault rifle, hitting Somohano in the neck and killing him. Then LaBeet ran out of the house and shot repeatedly at other cops who began to arrive on scene, wounding three of them. The Herald reports that LaBeet fled in his car once again, eventually crashing into a fence, jumping out and disappearing on foot. So began a manhunt that would last the rest of the day. The police would not confirm the details in the Herald story.
In Fort Lauderdale, Lees—one of hundreds of officers from dozens of agencies who were called to assist—leapt into action. He designated eight officers to travel ahead by helicopter to the crime scene. Within minutes, they were airborne in two SWAT team choppers. The officers landed in a vacant lot in Miami, Lees said, and asked a stunned neighborhood resident to drive them and their ammo to the scene a few blocks away.
Meanwhile, Lees and a handful of other squad members got “jocked up”: SWAT-speak for readying their gear. Lees briefed them, and they all jumped into their cars. A few other colleagues stayed behind to prepare an armored vehicle, which would follow them on the highway down to Miami. “We hauled ass down to Dade County,” said Lees, in a small convoy traveling between 90 and 100 miles per hour, blue lights flashing and sirens blaring. They arrived to find the eight men Lees had sent ahead already conducting searches—with the help of dogs—of the tough, lower-middle-class neighborhood where the shootings occurred. The area was swarming with law-enforcement personnel from departments ranging from the FBI to small local police departments hailing from all over South Florida. While his men got ready, Lees went to find the command post for orders. “It was controlled chaos,” he said. “There had to be at least 200 SWAT guys there … searching here, over there, this house, that house.”
At times like these, it’s tough to resist fantasizing about taking out a cop killer, Lees said, or imagining scenarios like shooting a suspect’s car “with a tank and blowing it to bits.” But he had to keep cool and concentrate on his training. Scott Knight, head of the International Association of Chiefs of Police firearms committee and a police chief in Chaska, Minn., says police departments know emotions can run high when a fellow officer is down and most offer cops guidance for such scenarios. Typically, departments follow the command-post model used in Miami-Dade County to lead a manhunt, according to Knight. One person or a small group in charge dictates how officers are deployed and how information about a suspect’s whereabouts is sent back to the command center for analysis. That helps ensure that individual officers don’t take matters into their own hands.
Yet theory can collide with reality. “Even the best-intentioned, best-trained people may resort to undue force,” says Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies and law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “It is not hard with shootings for some officers to understandably get very worked up and sometimes get very physical.” That’s even more likely when the shooter has assaulted an officer—because such a person clearly has little fear of authority and few qualms about resorting to violence. “Somebody who shoots a cop is going to continue to flee, to get away, to resist,” says O’Donnell. “That’s a complicating factor” for law enforcement personnel trying to gauge how much force they should use.
These considerations were surely swirling in the minds of the officers who finally caught up with LaBeet just before midnight on Thursday in Pembroke Pines, north of Miami. According to authorities, a group of heavily armed officers cornered LaBeet at a condo complex, where he was equipped with a loaded weapon. The Herald quoted police sources as saying the suspect had additional ammunition and wore body armor, but authorities would not confirm that report. How exactly the encounter unfolded remains unclear, but in the end, police shot and killed LaBeet.
As Lees’s long day finally came to a close, he allowed his feelings to begin creeping back. Even if an officer is a stranger, he said, it’s difficult not to feel like you know him. “I’ve been to a lot of police funerals in my 23 years,” he said. “It’s a shared experience … You know the job [other officers] do and what they have to go through to do their job and that makes it personal.” In the midst of a manhunt, you force yourself to perform your duties impassively. But “later on, that’s when you get a chance to think about it,” said Lees. “For me, it’s when I get a chance to call home and talk to my wife. That’s when I get upset … when you’re the husband and father at home and you’re thinking about that.” However steely they need to remain on the job, cops need to let their emotions seep out sometime.
