March 18, 2014 — a day Lowndes County Sheriff Mike Arledge would like to forget.
Unfortunately, he never will.
On that day, a man opened fire on two deputies who were conducting a welfare check at a New Hope home. The suspect, 30-year-old Kenneth Coscia, is accused of shooting through the home’s door with an assault rifle, severely wounding the deputies before he came out of the house and surrendered.
“I remember getting the call from my chief deputy while they (the chief deputy and two shot officers) were sitting in the back of the ambulance,” Arledge said. “I could hear all the chaos in the background. The chief deputy said, ‘We’ve had two officers shot, and it’s bad.'”
Both deputies recovered from their injuries, Arledge said, and after about a year of light duty, they’ve returned to regular duty.
Coscia was arrested and is currently awaiting a mental evaluation.
“Everything turned out OK,” he said. “But at that moment, on that day, we didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Incidents where police officers are shot do not always turn out OK, however. On Saturday, two Hattiesburg police officers were shot and killed during a traffic stop.
‘This one hit close to home’
Arledge said he and his deputies feel a deep hurt for the two Mississippi law enforcement members — Benjamin Deen, 34, and Liquori Tate, 24 — falling in the line of duty. It’s also given LCSD a heightened sense of urgency to be alert when they are on the job.
Arledge said the department took time Monday to review safety procedures and allow officers to sound off on how they were handling news of the Hattiesburg officers’ deaths.
“There’s an emotion going on,” he said. “It’s more of a deep down hurt since we all represent the same thing as officers. And, of course, this one hit close to home.”
According to Arledge, the sheriff’s department responds to roughly 1,500 calls per month, including disturbance calls to homes. He estimated his officers make about 750 traffic stops per month. They also serve warrants and pick up subjects for mental evaluations. It’s hard to identify, he said, what category of contact proved the most dangerous on average because anything can happen at any moment.
“I don’t think you can put it on traffic stops or calls to houses, as far as what’s typically the most dangerous,” he said. “At a house, you don’t know the layout, how many people are in the house or what’s in the house. At least with a car you have a degree of control. Sometimes you can even control where you stop them … but regardless of how safe you are or how much training you do, the officer is at a disadvantage. If the person in the car has made up his mind he’s going to try to kill you, he has an advantage because he knows that and you don’t.”
CPD: No such thing as ‘routine’ stop
That’s why Columbus Police Department Capt. Fred Shelton said his patrolmen consider nothing “routine” on a traffic stop.
He said CPD averages about 1,500 traffic stops per month, and city officers regularly practice procedures to keep them safe from people that might seek to harm them. Those measures include parking the patrol unit at an angle where it’s difficult to see the officer exiting the vehicle and looking through the rear window of the stopped vehicle before heading to the driver’s side window.
Shelton said officers are required to keep their hands on their weapons as they approach.
Primarily, officers want to keep subjects in their vehicles on traffic stops and always be able to see their hands.
“All of these are factors of officer safety,” Shelton said. “If you want to shoot me, you’ve got to turn all the way around to do it, and then I’ll probably have an opportunity to see you have a weapon before you get it turned on me.”
At night, he said, officers use a flashlight to both help them see the scene and also keep the subject from getting a clear view of the officer’s approach, and a second officer will often conduct a “roll by” check of traffic stops in case the first officer needs backup.
For Shelton, like for many Mississippi police officers, Saturday’s incident reaffirmed the department’s intensive procedures for keeping officers safe.
“Whether it’s the little old lady or a teenager, we don’t know what the mindset is,” he said. “That’s why we tell officers to be vigilant on their traffic stops and don’t take any chances. Follow your training and be safe.”
The Hattiesburg incident also conjured memories from Shelton from a 2008 incident on 18th Avenue North, where a CPD officer was shot in the line of duty. That officer recovered from his injuries.
CPD to hold candlelight vigil
Arledge said complacency is the No. 1 enemy to officer safety, and his deputies train each month to safeguard against it. He said officers don’t employ stringent, micromanaged policies to stops and calls beyond basic safety measures, because he wants them to trust their intuition and adapt effectively to situations as they arise.
As a Mississippi highway patrolman for 25 years before he became sheriff, Arledge said he actually picked up a few safety tips from veteran officers that he didn’t learn in formal training. How many times those measures saved his life, he didn’t know exactly. And as far as he’s concerned, he doesn’t have to.
“When I was on a stop with no backup, for instance, I would pretend I had a partner in the car with me,” Arledge said. “I’d even shut the car door twice sometimes. That’s just a small example of a way you can preserve yourself as an officer.”
The Hattiesburg officers’ deaths fell right as National Law Enforcement Memorial Week began, and both the sheriff’s department and CPD plan to remember not only the two officers, but the more than 100 officers killed in the line of duty nationwide in 2014.
Shelton said CPD will hold a candlelight vigil at 8 p.m. on Wednesday dedicated to the Hattiesburg officers and an 11 a.m. memorial service on Friday for fallen officers across the country.
Arledge plans to send a representative to Hattiesburg this week to offer his department’s condolences in person.
In Oktibbeha County
When Steve Gladney joined the Mississippi Highway Patrol as a rookie in the early 1980s, it had been 16 years since an MHP officer had died in the line of duty.
But an officer died each of the next five years, Gladney said, and each officer’s name and the details of how each died remained etched in his memory.
The first incident, he said, involved an officer awaiting backup on a traffic stop because he had three suspects and two sets of handcuffs. With two suspects cuffed and in the patrol car, Gladney said the third suspect stabbed the officer with a butcher knife, took his service weapon and shot him dead as he tried to crawl to safety.
“I still remember going to that funeral,” Gladney said. “It was drizzling rain and it was on an old county road. They started playing “Taps” and I heard the officer’s son yell out, ‘I want my daddy.’ That sticks with you.”
On Saturday, two Hattiesburg officers were shot dead on a traffic stop. While Gladney, who now serves as Oktibbeha County sheriff, mourned the two officers’ deaths from a distance on Monday, he also reflected on each of the MHP officers lost during his 28 years career with the state, their lives, their families and their funerals.
He also reflected on how rapidly law enforcement has changed since he began and wondered how much more dangerous it would become in the future.
“I don’t know why it’s changed,” Gladney said. “Nothing is routine anymore. You have to take every stop seriously. … Respect for authority has just gone down so much. Most people you stop are good-hearted folks who just made a mistake, but there’s a percentage out there who will harm you if they get the opportunity.”
On Monday, both the Oktibbeha County Sheriff’s Department and Starkville Police Department spent time remembering the two Hattiesburg officers and also reviewed their policies for traffic stops and other official contact with the public — such as welfare checks and disturbance calls — reasserting an urgency to keep themselves safe while on duty.
In Starkville
The last time Starkville saw an officer wounded in the line of duty was 1986, Police Chief Frank Nichols said, when an SPD officer suffered a non-fatal gunshot wound to the stomach on a burglary call. But Nichols said Hattiesburg reminded him that any day could be “that day.”
“It makes everybody more attentive, alert and aware,” Nichols said. “We get complacent sometimes and start to treat parts of our job like they’re routine. But there’s always that unknown because any call, or any stop, can become volatile. … I know that every day I put this uniform on could be my last, but I keep doing it because I know this is my calling.”
Nichols said his department has averaged almost 650 traffic stops through the first four months of 2015, and weekly training on procedures helps remind officers to “keep their head on a swivel.”
He said his officers safeguard themselves on traffic stops, particularly, by parking their patrol units at angles where it’s hard for the subjects in the car to see the officer’s approach. He said they also tended to lean forward at a subjects driver’s side window to reveal the least amount of their bodies as possible, and they also instruct subjects to remain in their vehicles when possible.
Nichols said officers use flashlights at night not only to help officers see what’s in front of them but to also obstruct a subject’s view of an officer’s approach.
“I know it doesn’t sound like it, but those are the types of things that save your life,” Nichols said. “Some people think we’re doing it for aggravation, but we’re not.”
Both SPD and the Oktibbeha County Sheriff’s Department outfit officers with bulletproof vests and require officers to wear them when they’re out in the field.
Those vests have proved invaluable, Nichols said, especially in an incident in the late 1990s when a suspect stabbed an officer in the vest.
“It didn’t penetrate the armor, and the officer ended up not being hurt at all,” Nichols said.
Gladney said it’s impossible to nail down his department’s exact number of traffic stops, especially since it conducts regular roadblocks centered on drunk driving enforcement around the university. He said his officers, too, are trained to always be on guard for anything.
“I could be stopping a vehicle for going 75 (miles per hour) or weaving, and the people in that car could have just robbed a store,” Gladney said. “I may not know that until after I’ve stopped them, but they do. Any time you approach those cars, there’s always a risk involved.”
Not only must officers safeguard against malicious danger, Gladney said, they must also be aware of oncoming traffic. He said it’s easy for an officer to become so focused on the elements of a stop that they don’t pay proper attention to traffic traveling on the roadway, and sometimes drivers don’t always pay attention to what’s on the shoulder of the road.
More than anything, Gladney said he tells his officers to rely on their training and their intuition.
“Training is much better and much more thorough now than ever before,” he said. “You can get the best training in the world, but nothing compares to experience (and intuition). I tell my guys all the time, if your hair is standing up on the back of your neck, there’s a reason for that.”
Nichols said he’s reached out to the Hattiesburg police chief to offer assistance and condolences. Since one of the fallen officers, Liquori Tate, grew up in Starkville, Nichols said he also reached out to Tate’s family.
“We want them to know we’re thinking about them, praying for them, and we’re here to assist them any way we can,” he said.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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