A Series of Firsts: My First (Major) Crash

I was trapped. My cruiser was mangled and I couldn’t get out. But when I finally did, what I saw was not what I expected.

Ever since the Academy there has been a voice in my head reminding me that when an officer calls for help my first job is to get there safely. Because if I don’t, I am no help to the cop who needs it and crashing will only divert resources away from them and over to me. But sometimes our best intentions are laid to waste.

The Call

Shortly after midnight the call for help came over the air. An officer was by himself up against a large group of over a dozen people in a massive brawl swinging bats, sticks, and who knows what else at each other in a bad inner city neighborhood. I was about a half mile away when I heard the call and fired up the roof.

It was straight shot down a two lane road that roughly divided the inner city in half. Several one-way streets with blind corners governed by traffic lights intersected my route. Like your department, our policy was to stop at every red light and stop sign before going through. Sometimes, that’s a dumb rule, but not when buildings block your view and you can’t see what’s coming.

I stopped and went, stopped and went, until I finally hit a green light and stepped on the gas. As my cruiser entered the middle of the intersection I saw headlights coming out of the corner of my eye from the one-way street on my right — and they weren’t stopping.

The Crash

Though my brain was processing what was happening there was not enough time for my body to do anything about it. The impact was sudden, instant, and unavoidable. My front passenger side wheel took the brunt of it and turned into a sort of fulcrum as the entire right side of my cruiser and the left side of the other car smashed together like two handles of a nutcracker. The perpendicular force shattered my cruiser and forced me over to the other side of the road, onto the sidewalk between a light pole and a utility pole, and finally into a chain link fence like a fish stuck in a net.

With the smoke from the airbag lingering like fog, I looked around and saw that my door was wedged up against the fence and I couldn’t get out that way. The front passenger door was my next best option, but my cruiser bag, patrol rifle, and MDT were knocked out of position and became a huge obstacle. I leaned over and grabbed the door handle but it wouldn’t budge. The next thing I knew my cruiser was surrounded by the silhouettes of random inner city people, who probably wanted to help, but none of which I trusted. I was vulnerable, and I knew it.

The Rescue

I tried calling in the crash on my cruiser radio but it was dead. My portable radio took what felt like an eternity to turn on before I was finally able to call it in. My partner in the neighboring route was soon at my front passenger door and, with some brute force, was able to pull it open. I crawled over the MDT and my cruiser bag and out to freedom. Being 6’01” and in full uniform made it more challenging than you might think. But when I got to my feet and looked around, there was a lot going on.

People had come out of the woodwork to view the carnage and were milling around on the sidewalk and in the street. The driver of the other car was pacing back and forth waving his arms and screaming in animal-like grunts and groans. He was a massive human who looked like Andre the Giant and a cave woman had a baby. We got him to sit down on the curb and stay put, but that’s when I noticed his car was on fire in the middle of the intersection.

The Fire

Flames were leaping out from under the hood of his car and, as per usual, there was not a firefighter in sight. I ran around to the trunk of my car — which was amazingly still operable — and opened it to get my fire extinguisher. I threw the trunk open, looked inside, and saw that the fire extinguisher had exploded on impact and my trunk was covered in whatever it was that fire extinguishers were filled with. You have got to be kidding me!

Seconds later a guy from the corner barbershop ran over with a functioning fire extinguisher and my partner grabbed it, went to work, and did the firefighter’s job. With the fire out, the crowd pushed back, and Cro-Magnon Man calmed down, I looked around at the absolute mess I had made. The intersection looked like a bomb had gone off. It was a complete disaster.

The Truth

My supervisor showed up and asked me if I was okay. For the first time I took stock of myself and was embarrassed to admit that my thumb hurt. I mean, what kind of cop simultaneously destroys two cars and all he can say is, My thumb hurts?! I sounded like a whiny Major League Baseball player with a hangnail.

Besides that, the whole time I was convinced that I had a green light. But the truth was, I didn’t. It was all my fault. The only reasonable explanation that I could come up with was that because several intersections with traffic lights were so close together, that I must have been looking at the next set of lights, not the one I was about to go through. Even though I had done my best to respond to an officer that had called for help and had stopped at other stop signs and red lights, I had failed to stop at the one that mattered. I became a poster child for what not to do when responding to a call for help. The truth hurt — even more than my thumb.

The End

I can’t tell you how many times I replayed that crash over and over again in my mind and still convinced my light was green. I knew that I was paying attention and had every intention of backing up that officer and arriving in one piece, but I never made it. In the end, no one was seriously hurt in the crash, and no officers were injured at the fight call. In the end, those two outcomes are the only things that make the pill a little easier to swallow.

We can remember our training and do our best to follow it, but we can still make mistakes. Things are going to happen that we cannot control and did not intend, despite our best efforts. Even though we should always maintain the highest standards and stay sharp, we must not forget to give ourselves a little grace — we are only human.

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• How’s your driving?
• Is getting there in one piece your top priority?
• Have you been on the other end and called for help?
• How would it feel if your backup crashed?

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