Gun! Gun!

Two Visitacion Valley area gangsters were walking west on the 1000 block of Mission Street, the block between 6th and 7th Streets, in the area of downtown SF that can only be described as the phallus of the notorious Tenderloin area. I was with Kyle and Mary, riding around in Kyle’s unmarked, him at the wheel where he always insisted on being, though he never said as much. Kyle: the Type-A of Type-As. He kept the keys in his desk. The message was clear.

We were all in plainclothes, but it didn’t matter. We knew those two miscreants well from contact after contact in their gang’s turf, down by the Cow Palace in the Sunnydale housing projects, The City’s biggest public housing development.

The presence of these two men wasn’t, at face value and from a police perspective, surprising. They were downtown to sell drugs. Though we didn’t say it out loud, all three of us in the car were thinking as much.

Two young ‘gangsta’-type men don’t have any other business walking around 6th Street. It’s Skid Row. There aren’t any businesses to patronize (there are liquor stores, an adult movie store and a decent pizza place; that’s it) that one couldn’t find in other areas of the city, most of which are far easier to park in. And we aren’t talking about tourists walking to or from unfortunately-located, affordable hotel accommodations. We are talking about hardened thugs, members of a notoriously violent, housing project-based, African-American, criminal street gang. Modern day black gangs are the genesis of groups of drug dealers feuding over turf to sell their illegal product in. Though that isn’t necessarily the primary focus of urban black gangs anymore, dope dealing is still a very common activity that gang members engage in to finance themselves and to finance the gang.

After seeing the two gangsters on the north sidewalk, Kyle slowed the car instinctively. Each of us saw the gangsters glance over at our vehicle; their eyes went wide and they looked ahead quickly, obviously pretending that they didn’t see us. Their respective gaits quickened in pace. It was clear that they weren’t happy about being spotted by three cops who knew them, and wouldn’t buy their inevitable lines of bullshit about just coming down to 6th Street to “meet girls” or “go to the store.”

Upon seeing this, Mary said out loud what we all were thinking, “Hey, there’s Swally and Kaykay.” She then added, after we were spotted, “Oh, they’re probably dirty.”

Kyle, stalled for a few moments by heavy downtown traffic, was finally able to swing our car around in a U-turn. Swally, the shorter of the two thugs, looked over his left shoulder, saw us and then muttered something unknown to Kaykay. Both men stopped walking, obviously aware we were going to, at the minimum, talk to them for a bit.

Mary rolled her passenger side window down as Kyle pulled along side the two Gs. Both immediately crowded her door, what seemed to be a clear tactic to keep her from getting out of the car. They stuck their heads almost in the passenger compartment, and began to run they’re mouths nervously at Kyle.

“What you doin’ down here, man? Shit, you get down here? I ain’t expect to see ya’ll downtown and shit,” Swally said, followed by a nervous laugh.

Unsolicited to do so, Kaykay produced a small jewelry box from his pocket, displayed it, smiled and stated, “We were fittin’ to get some new grillz. We headed back to Sunnydale now.”

Kyle entertained their conversation for a bit before instructing them to back away from Mary’s door. “Deck, get out,” Kyle whispered back to me out of the corner of his mouth.

We all knew that Swally was on probation, and had previously waived his Fourth Amendment rights in court. Thus, he was subject to a search of his “person, residence or vehicle at any time of the day or night, by any peace or probation officer, with or without a warrant, and with or without reasonable or probable cause.” That was the language of his previous plea agreement.

I hated Swally. His presence on this earth made me seethe with anger. He was a murderer who gunned down in cold blood a fifteen year old boy who owed him a few dollars from a prior weed deal. This was a few years prior to this incident. Everybody on the street knew he was the killer, and he was believed to have committed other shootings as well. Homicide could never make the murder case against him, though. And I couldn’t wait until some other gangster took him out in a drive-by or the like. Despite my rancor, I always greeted him with a smile and friendly words. It was a crocodile’s smile though, designed to hide significant disgust and outrage.

I hopped out of the car, as Mary cracked her door and exited as well. “Hey, Swal, you got anything?” Mary asked as she approached him.

“Nah. Nah, I’m cool,” he replied.

“Spin around for me real quick, then,” Mary instructed. “I’m gonna check you for weapons.”

Swally shot a sideways glance to Kaykay. By this time, I’d made it around the car and was slowly walking towards the two men, veering towards Kaykay.

“What’s going on, man?” I asked, as I approached him.

Kaykay didn’t respond. Not verbally. As Mary made physical contact with Swally and began to pat him down, and Kyle put his second foot down on the pavement after stopping the car, Kaykay grimaced at me, spun on his heels, and began to sprint away from me, burying his right hand in the front right pocket of his puffy coat.

My upper body fell forward as I crouched down, beginning my sprint, giving chase. “Stop!” I ordered, bringing my hand up to my radio’s microphone on my chest. Keying the mic, I announced over our dispatch channel, “Emergency! Foot pursuit on Mission towards 7th!”

And just after those words left my mouth, Kaykay pulled out a semi-automatic pistol, a German-looking nine millimeter with a long barrel. My next words over the air and to announce it’s presence to those around me, “GUN! GUN!”

Yell something like that over a police radio, and even the laziest cop on the street fires up the reds and blues.

Within the first twenty feet of the chase I had already produced my forty caliber pistol from its home on my hip, keeping it ready in my hand if Kaykay decided to give me even the slightest indication that he planned on shooting me. For some reason, and god knows why, simply whipping the gun out didn’t at the time inspire me to lay waste to the armed gangster in front of me. I can only attribute this hesitation to countless previous foot pursuits in similar circumstances, wherein the suspect whips the gun out of his waistband or pocket, only to summarily discard it somewhere wherein it’ll be difficult to retrieve. This is what I figured Kaykay would do: toss the gun within the first hundred feet.

But he didn’t.

The more disturbing reason for my hesitation was the fact that I didn’t want to shoot Kaykay in the back. Now, tactically, it shouldn’t have made a difference. He was gangster armed with a gun. He wasn’t discarding it. There’s only one reason to keep a firearm in such a situation, and I was the most likely target. What should have been going through my mind was: SHOOT, DECK, SHOOT! Don’t worry about knee-jerkers quarterbacking on Monday morning! Save your ass!

But I didn’t.

As I sprinted forward behind him, Kaykay first juked right a few steps then quickly spun halfway to the left, running diagonally across the sidewalk, the gun pumping in front of his body. Kaykay looked over his shoulder back at me, and I was all but certain that he was deciding whether or not to take a shot.

In response, I slowed my gait to a trot, bringing my own gun up to a two-handed firing position. I yelled out, “DROP IT! DON’T DO IT!” My finger found the trigger as I superimposed the front site of my weapon on the center of Kaykay’s torso. Yet in the background, in my distant field of fire, a landscape of occupied vehicles and pedestrians on the sidewalk made me again reluctant to pull the trigger.

Kaykay, seeing my gun come up, spun back away from me and continued to run. I continued to chase.

In the left side of my vision’s periphery, I saw Kyle’s car paralleling Kaykay in the street. I knew Kyle’s plan: to let the fleeing gangster tire himself out enough until Kyle could cut him off with the car and run him down. We always did it this way. But I had no idea if Kyle knew Kaykay still had the gun.

I yelled out into my radio, “Kyle! Gun! Gun!” for good measure, if he hadn’t heard the first broadcast.

The echoing sound of sirens hit my ears as Kaykay rounded the corner to northbound 7th Street, the eastern sidewalk. I rounded the corner as well, about thirty feet behind, trying to make up lost yardage from the previous near-shooting I’d just been in.

Halfway down the block, Kyle made his move, jumping the big Crown Vic’s front tires onto the sidewalk, throwing the thing into park and then alighting from the car on foot. Kyle, a talented athlete, sprang forward a few steps and then shoved Kaykay towards the building line, sending him off his feet. The gangster flew through the air, down onto the pavement. The gun bounced from his hand upon impact, clacking against the marble outside of the stately government building which took up most of the block. In moments, I crashed my knee down onto Kaykay’s downed form as he scattered to get back up.

To say that I was angry or even really, very, severely pissed at this point would have been an understatement. Frustration knows no peer to having a righteous, maybe life-saving shot and not being able to take it due to a poor field of fire. A dangerous criminal had pulled a gun on me, and obviously thought about using it. He had to be forced to a stop, and was still trying to get back up, maybe even get back to his gun.

Socking Kaykay in his face, and feeling his body momentarily slack, stunned by the blow, did much to enhance my calm.

“Get on your stomach!” I growled, while flipping the gangster over by his hip and arm. “Put your hands behind your back! Do it now!”

Kyle quickly seized the gun from the ground as I cuffed Kaykay’s wrists up.

Kyle looked down at our prisoner and said, superfluously but none the less sincerely, “You’re under arrest.”

During an ensuing search of Kaykay’s clothing, I located about forty ‘dime bags’ of weed and about $400.00. Mary had taken Swally into custody as Kyle and I chased Kaykay for also possessing a good amount of weed, obviously possessed for the purpose of street sales. Swally also had another few hundred bucks in cash.

The gun Kaykay had was used in a shooting in Stockton, wherein a man was shot during a weed deal. The victim was too afraid of retaliation to identify his shooter.

Months later, both gangsters pled guilty to felony charges. Swally’s probation was modified and extended. Kaykay took a felony conviction for credit for time served and three years probation. The public defender said that he was a young man without a criminal record who had just made a one-time mistake. They both got stay away orders for three years from the 1000 block of Market Street. Both were already out of custody when they took these sweet deals. The visiting judge from Los Angeles said that Kaykay’s case was “outrageous” and “a state prison case anywhere else in California,” if I recall correctly.

Within six months both were back in custody, on separate occasions, for being gang members in the possession of loaded firearms. (I was involved in Swally’s gun arrest; I might write about that one later.) Both those guns were found to have been used in gang-related shootings. Kaykay’s arrest was after a high-speed car chase. If that isn’t enough, between the two described gun arrests, Kaykay was pulled over and another gang member in his vehicle was arrested with a loaded gun stuffed in his waistband. I think it’s pretty unlikely that Kaykay was ignorant of this when he let the fellow gang member into his vehicle.

I know that I’ll see Kaykay again on the street one day, probably sooner than later. And I imagine that I’ll smile at him the same way I smile at Swally: artificially, like a crocodile.