An officer and a gentleman

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/12/2016 (3431 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It seemed like the right time — and about time — to share this story of clear-headed police action and bravery that has gone uncelebrated.

I say that because on Wednesday morning, the Winnipeg Police Service offered the media an opportunity to observe the kind of mental health awareness training and de-escalation techniques its officers learn that can help defuse and prevent violent encounters.

And because of what happened that day on the streets of Winnipeg nearly 50 years ago, long before there was any training on how to defuse an emotionally charged and potentially deadly encounter between cops and the public. It was retired city police inspector Bob Taylor who sent me the story almost a year ago, which is another reason it’s about time I shared it with you.

Taylor began this way: “The shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., reminded me of a similar incident that occurred in Winnipeg in 1969, but with a much different ending.”

There was at least one major difference in the Winnipeg case, though.

The person police encountered was armed.

Back then, Taylor was the street supervisor on the night two of his constables were called to a domestic incident involving an individual he referred to as John Doe.

“Doe was a young man in his early 20s who lived in the Fort Rouge area,” Taylor said. “Doe had no criminal record but made a bad choice one hot summer evening. Doe returned home after an evening of heavy drinking and went on a rampage. He drove knives into the walls of the kitchen. Terrified family members called 911. Consts. Gil Johnson and Burt Anderson were on cruiser patrol in the area when they got the call. Just as they stopped the cruiser in front of Doe’s home, he charged out the front door with a knife in his hand.”

Anderson, or “B.G.” as Johnson called him, died in 2005. But while Johnson, who will be 92 at the end of the month, still has his police notebook from that day, he didn’t have to refer to it to remember what happened. When I called him Wednesday at his Charleswood home, he picked up the story about the midnight call of a “guy gone berserk” as if it happened the day before.

“When we got there it was raining a little bit and the guy was out on the street with a couple of knives in his hands.”

Johnson was behind the wheel and managed to scramble out of the cruiser, but Anderson didn’t have a chance to get out before Doe was at his door.

“He just about got it,” Johnson recalled of how close his partner came to being slashed. “The guy swiped inside the window. The open window on his side.”

Somehow, Johnson was able to pull his partner out of the driver’s side.

“And the chase was on.”

Except it wasn’t police chasing the violent young man; it was him chasing the police with his two knives.

Johnson remembers he and his partner being on one side of the cruiser and Doe being on the other and thinking to himself he had three kids and Anderson had one. Then the chase was on again and Doe seemed to be more intent on finishing what he had started with Anderson than getting the other cop. By this time, Johnson pulled out his revolver and was able to get close enough to hit Doe over the head with it.

“I tried that first to see if I could bring him down, but he just kept a runnin’.”

So Johnson, now having closed again to a little more than a body-length from Doe, shot him in the knee.

“In the fleshy part. I thought, well, that’s the best way.”

The best way of stopping him?

“That’s right, that’s the best way of stopping him,” Johnson. “There’s no other way.”

Well, there was another way, of course, but Johnson had decided to shoot to wound, not to kill.

Trouble was, Doe was still on his feet. “And then I shot him again.”

This time, Johnson hit him in the other leg, but higher up.

That finally took Doe down.

It was when the two constables went into the home to check on Doe’s wife and kids that they saw two knives stuck in the wall. Which prompted the question every law enforcement officer reading this — every cop who is trained to shoot body mass and shoot repeatedly in such circumstances — is asking right now. Not that you have to be a cop to wonder the same thing.

Why didn’t Johnson shoot to kill?

“There’s no reason to,” he said.

But wasn’t he afraid for his partner?

Johnson explained that Doe was chasing Anderson, but he wasn’t close to his partner when the first shot was fired.

There was another reason Johnson had been hesitant to use his gun.

“You want to be careful, because there were people standing on their verandas all the way around, watching.”

So, I suggested to Johnson, he didn’t want to kill the crazed man.

“No. Nobody does. I don’t think nobody does. You’d have to be in pretty bad straits to take a life.”

I wondered if the incident — the only time in his more than 30 years on the job he fired his gun outside the shooting range — had haunted him.

“It didn’t touch me,” he replied. “I had to write some reports. But it never bothered me. If you do the right thing it shouldn’t bother you.”

And if he had to shoot and kill Doe, would that have bothered him?

“No, not a bit, because it probably saved my partner’s life or my own.”

Before I spoke with Johnson, I talked to his daughter, Sharon Johnson, who had suggested that — with one obvious exception — her father had a way of defusing volatile and potentially violent encounters; a kind of calming way about him. Indeed, Johnson said he had to deal with many difficult domestic calls, as all cops have.

I asked how he did that.

“I don’t know,” he began. “It’s a matter of not raising your voice and not saying, ‘You have to do this, or that.’ You know… Anything to change their minds a little bit.”

I asked him how he learned to do that? “I think it’s natural. You don’t get training for that. It would have to be in your genes.”

That’s when I told Johnson about the de-escalation training the police service demonstrated earlier on that day, and wondered if de-escalation is what it was called in his day.

“No, no, no,” he said. “No such big words. We couldn’t spell them.”

Gil Johnson is still married to his wife of more than 70 years. And still a member of what is properly called the Greatest Generation.

As John Doe, for one, lived to appreciate.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca