I was in the apartment next door on the phone and he wouldn’t let me talk to her.

About fourteen hours later he said, “Why do you want to talk with her?”

I said, “I just want to make sure she’s alright.”

He said, “Alright.”

She finally got on the phone. I said to her, “This is the police.”

She said, “Yeah?”

I said, “What is wrong with you! Shut up!”

“But he said…”

“I don’t care!” I was screaming. We’re not suposed to lose control like that, but I was screaming at her. “I don’t care what he said! Agree with anything he says! The idea is to get you and your child out of that apartment!”

“But he said…”

When she said that to me, I gott more crazy, and started just screaming at her. Finally, she started crying. It shook me that I lost control there. I backed down.

I said, “I’m sorry. Let’s agree with anything he says, because we’re not going to let him do all this stuff. Just agree so we can get him out.”

He put the gun down and started talking about coming out, saying, “When I get her, I’m going to do this.”

And she’d start, “No you’re not!” And then the fight would start all over again.

I finally talked him into coming out. Coming out came be very dangerous.

I told him that day, “you have to listen to everything I tell you to do. You can’t deviate because there are so many cops out in this hall and they all have guns.”

When they come out they can often seem quite calm, but when they see weapons all over they freak.

She just kept with the mouth. By the time this guy came out 14 hours had passed since it started. When he did I was screaming final instructions. We were in a housing project. -I knew on the phone he was mad at me the whole last hour.

Two other police came up and said, “Get him! Get him!” So I went dashing down the street.

But then I realized, “Ah, I don’t see him.”

Two women hanging out their window said, “He went down there, officer.”

There was a door in the side of the street. I just go in there, walking into the dark until I came out the other side into a series of back yards. Then I began running and jump over fence after fence. I finally come to the last yard where the building rounds the bend into an L. I go running in.

There I see this poor suspect towering over me, but huffing like he was going to have a heart attack. I am just standing there as cool, as non-winded as possible. I had run track in school.

Here I am confronted with him. And I hadn’t had that much practice and I wasn’t really that tough. I’d never have made it in the regular police force. I just wasn’t that aggressive. But all I had to do was say, “OK, you’re under arrest, turn around, put your hands on your head, walk to the wall.”

And he just did everything I said. I didn’t even touch him. He was so astonished that I would show up. He was just so exhausted. After I had put him in cuffs, my two partners showed up.

Then things got interesting. I was the only white person there–black suspect, two black transit police officers.

And they were beside themselves, saying, “Hold him up. Let me hit him!” He had apparently assaulted one of our female officers on her way to work. So here I am, protecting this suspect. Once I had my suspect arrested, I lost all my anger. I thought they were pathetic at that point, because they were defenseless. You had done the worst thing you could do, which was to take away their liberty. I never understood the temptation to beat them further. Even though in the pursuit I’d be agitated, angry.