30 seconds. Parry and I were still headed to the last reported location. Then another police officer came up on


the air, “I’ve got him going eastbound!” He gave everyone the name of the street he was on. The pursuit was heading toward the county area of Spring Valley. Hell yeah, I thought to myself, he’s got him. The San Diego officers came up on air


again, “He’s shooting again! He’s shooting again!” The suspect headed into Spring Valley,


yanked the steering wheel in his Civic, and pulled a tire-screeching U-turn. Just as Parry and I crested the hills, we


picked up the pursuit as the Civic roared onto the South Bay Expressway, headed back westbound. I looked down and started trying to pick out the car. “I got ‘em!” I shouted into the intercom. “All right,” said Parry, “here we go.” I saw the Civic and


freaking way on God’s green earth that I was going to take my eyes off it. I didn’t want to be the guy who lost the car that was shooting at cops. There was an incredible amount of ac-


tivity going on: the noise of the helicopter, the pursuit below, and the radio traffic. I took a few deep breaths to stay calm. Then I saw the gun come out of the


Civic’s window. “Parry,” I said, “he’s about to fire


again!” The suspect blasted more rounds back


at the pursuing officers. As far as I could tell, he didn’t hit anything. There’s a philosophy in most pursuit


pursuing patrol cars screaming up the on- ramp. Parry brought us in, backed up on the cyclic and slowed us to about 80 knots. He set- tled the helicopter into a parallel course, to the left and slightly behind the Civic. The suspect was still brandishing his gun, so we had to be careful. “I don’t want to get hit with any rounds,


so we’re going to stay high and wide,” Parry said. “I’m good with that,” I said. “But we’ve


got to stay close enough so I don’t lose this car.” Even with a long line of patrol cars


chasing the suspect, a big fear we had in situations like this was taking our eyes off the vehicle. On a major freeway with four or five lanes of traffic in either direction, we might never find that car again. If it was a car that blended in really well—say, a standard four-door Toyota Camry—and you took your eyes off of it for even a sec- ond, you might not be able to zero in on it again. Fortunately the expressway was a


smaller road, with only two lanes in each direction. That upped my odds. Once I got my eyes on the Civic there was no


OFFICER OPENED FIRE


THE


policies that once an airship gets overhead, it calls the pursuit so the people on the ground can focus on driving. Also, once the airship is overhead, the officer in charge of the ground units can order his patrol cars to drop out of the pursuit, in the interest of public safety, so the situation is less dangerous. That’s one of the benefits of a police helicopter. That’s what the Lieu-


tenant from the San Diego PD was thinking when he


got on the radio to talk to his patrol cars. “Back off a little bit and let the airship take it,” he said. That was fine. The problem for me was


that people didn’t always know what was going on in the cockpit. Once the suspect got off the freeway, I wasn’t taking my eyes off the vehicle to look at my moving map so I could call out the streets that he was on. And once he bailed out and started running, I needed cops in the area to cordon him off, to get the perimeter up so that we didn’t lose him. I got on the radio to the police cars.


“Don’t drop back too far,” I told them, “because I need units if this guy bails and runs.” Sure enough, the suspect got off the


freeway. He headed back to the same area where the pursuit started. A lot of guys do this, probably because they don’t have any other plan, so they end up going back to what they know. The Civic sped into a nearby residential


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