New Year's Resolution In A Crossfire.

Detective Nielsen recently was transferred to Narcotics after having worked with Homeland Security since 2011. In December, the Seattle PD promoted him to detective and in January, he started working undercover drug transactions. Originally from Montana, he now called Seattle home and learned to tolerate the rain. He even bragged to friends and family in Montana that you don’t need to shovel rain in the winter to get out of your driveway.

Working Homeland Security had been an interesting job for Nielsen, but he was glad to get out from behind a desk. During his seventeen years with the Department, there had been significant changes in leadership for both the Department and the City of Seattle. During his tenure, Nielsen had stayed out of the struggle between the police union and the Department of Justice.

“Made any resolutions for the New Year, Steve?” asked Rodney as he maneuvered their unmarked car in the rain toward Pioneer Square. Rodney had been Steve Nielsen’s partner since his transfer to the Narcotics Unit.

“Yeah, working on it,” Nielsen responded as he scrolled through messages on his cellphone. “How about you?”

  “Nope, I gave up on them years ago,” Rodney advised and waited for traffic to clear on the portable radio. “At the end of every year I’d look at them, and nothing changed. I decided to stop disappointing myself.”

Nielsen replaced the cellphone in his pocket. “Thanks for the encouragement,” he murmured and thought for a minute. “Isn’t change the whole point? I mean, a resolution is an opportunity to make a change and look forward to a goal.”  

Rodney joined the Department just before the 1999 WTO riots that put Seattle on the map. Over 40,000 protesters disrupted the World Trade Organization Conference in what was known as the Battle of Seattle. As a rookie street officer, Rodney was right in the center of the riot at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, following the roaming mobs downtown as they blocked intersections, broke windows, vandalized property, set fires and attacked police officers.

Extra law enforcement support was called in by the mayor, and cops started arresting masked rioters and vandals. Rodney was accused of applying pre-trial punishment on a few who resisted arrest. Despite extensive media coverage of the three days of protest, no video emerged showing Rodney using excessive force, yet he developed a reputation for fearless protection of fellow officers.

“So, what changes are you resolving to make this year?” Rodney asked as he turned the late model Chevy Impala south from Pine Street onto First Avenue. The City had acquired the black Impala in a drug forfeiture proceeding. It came equipped with tinted windows, 21-inch rims, and a Bose premium sound system, which nobody on the police force ever used.

Traffic was slow during the late weekday afternoon as people poured out of buildings onto sidewalks and into parking garages. Despite the rain, not many people carried umbrellas in Seattle; a phenomenon Nielsen did not understand when he first moved to the City, but now accepted as the norm.

The detectives were part of a controlled drug buy operation in Pioneer Square set up by a task force of local and state law enforcement agencies. A controlled buy is a scripted process where either a confidential informant or undercover police officer buys drugs from a dealer at a time and location favorable to the buyer. Ideally, the operation is choreographed, but of course, the drug dealer is unaware of the script. Drug dealers are skittish by nature and avoid selling to people who are in the control of law enforcement.

“You want to make rank, become a Lieutenant or Captain, is that your goal?” Rodney suggested as they looked for a parking space.

“Same goals most people have. You know, family, health, things you care about. Hey, there’s a parking spot on Cherry Street,” he said, pointing to his left.

Rodney turned into the left lane and took an illegal left-hand turn, heading for the parking spot. “To me, a resolution is like writing a check on an account you don’t have,” he said as he parallel-parked the sedan.

“You’re not making this any easier,” Nielsen responded with a chuckle. “And for what it’s worth, nobody writes checks anymore.” The two men sat in the car as the rain pattered the roof and waited for the other team member.

“OK, so what resolutions have you made?” Rodney finally asked.

    Nielsen smiled as he turned on the portable radio. “This year, I plan to lose weight,” he said. “Of course, that was my goal last year, too,” he confessed.

“And I was thinking of buying you a double cheeseburger and onion rings at The Sports Grill tonight,” Rodney lied. The men sat and watched the rain run down the windshield.

    “How much weight do you plan to lose?” Rodney asked as he patted the lapel of Nielsen’s sport coat with the back of his hand.

“Enough to make SPD guidelines - fat ass,” Nielsen offered as he checked the rearview mirrors on his side of the car.

    “Did you put your resolution in writing?” Rodney interrogated.

    “No, I don’t put resolutions in writing,” he replied.

There was a bump on the rear fender of the car, and they both looked back to see a large man with a beard, wearing dark cargo pants, a University of Washington purple hat, and a non-matching blue poncho, standing in the rain. Rodney opened the door locks as Nielsen motioned for the man to get in the back seat. The man opened the door, dropped his cigarette on the curb, and got in the car. He flipped back the hood on his poncho, splashing water on the backseat.

“Good to see you, Vince,” Rodney said as he turned to greet the man. Vincent was an undercover agent on loan to the King County Sheriff for drug investigations. He looked like a homeless person, but he was a veteran at working street crimes.

“Hope this rain stops soon,” said the agent as he settled into the car seat. “If not, I’ll be standing in the rain waiting for our man,” he explained. “Fortunately, there are no games at CenturyLink Field tonight, so pedestrian traffic will be at normal levels.”

The man they were waiting for was to catch the Bremerton Ferry to Seattle at 1800 hours and meet the agent at The Skid Diner on the corner of Yesler and Firehouse Alley.

Rodney reached into the inside pocket of his overcoat and pulled out an envelope and handed it back to the agent. “Eight Thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills,” he said. “Count it out and double-check to make sure they are all marked.”

The men talked over the details of the planned operation as the agent counted and checked the marked hundred-dollar bills.  

In the mid-nineteenth century, Yesler Way was known as Skid Road. Logs on First Hill were skidded down the road to Elliott Bay, where a timber mill was located. The road also was a demarcation between the more affluent Seattleites and the rowdy working-class. The Skid Diner on Yesler came by its name honestly. The area now known as Pioneer Square attracts tourists, pawnshops, retail boutiques, greasy spoon cafes, and the Union Gospel Mission. It is an area familiar to law enforcement in Seattle and King County.

“Vince, our friend Steve here makes New Year’s resolutions, but doesn’t write them down,” Rodney observed, gesturing with his chin toward Nielsen.

“I write everything down,” said the agent with a shrug.

    “Including resolutions?” Nielsen asked.

    The agent thought for a moment. “No, a resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other,” he concluded. The three men laughed so hard they drowned out the sound of rain on the roof of the Impala. Finally, the agent said, “Yeah, I even write down resolutions. As they say, ‘if it isn’t in writing it doesn’t exist,’ right?”

The operation was to be an undercover buy/bust, meaning the dealer was to be arrested following the sale. The task force, using Vincent as the buyer, had made prior controlled buys from this dealer, but tonight the buy was to be followed by an arrest.

There would be surveillance from across the street and inside the diner, an undercover agent would sit at a window table where she could video the transaction. The script was for the detectives to make the arrest within 50 feet of where the buy was to occur. Uniformed officers would then arrive and take the suspect to jail for processing.

“I’d sure rather do this in daylight,” Rodney said, looking over his shoulder at Vincent.

“Yeah, I agree, but our dealer friend has a day job, so he catches a ferry from Bremerton after work,” the agent replied.

“Does he think he is going back to Bremerton on the next ferry?”

"Well, if he does, he will have wasted his money on a round-trip ferry ticket,” Vincent replied.

It was now dusk as the three men discussed their roles in an operation they had all been through many times. The danger usually comes at the end of the process when the dealer is confronted by cops with guns drawn ordering the dealer to the ground. The officers have no way of knowing if the dealer is armed or has confederates waiting for him in a nearby vehicle. The dealer on this night had no arrest record, so the task force could not predict how he would react to the attempt to arrest him after the buy. Guidelines for controlled buys are published by the FBI and other agencies and adopted by the multi-agency task force with slight modifications. The script for each step and identification of each participant had been distributed by email to each officer by the task force commander.

“I read the description of the suspect, but tell me more,” Nielsen asked.

“He is a former enlisted Navy, working at the shipyard, married white male, 6 foot 2, black hair, green eyes, clean-shaven, no visible tattoos,” Vincent said. “Navy intelligence thinks he was working drugs while stationed in the Philippines. He is not a user himself. His wife is a civilian Navy employee. He has no criminal record, but does have a concealed weapons permit,” he continued.

“So, why does the task force want you unarmed?” Rodney asked.

“The first buy I made from him, he patted me down,” Vincent replied.

Rodney started the Impala, turned on the lights, and circled the block to James Street, then down to the intersection with Yesler Way and waited for traffic to clear. The black sedan continued in the rain across First Avenue South, where Nielsen could see two SPD cruisers parked along the curb. Rodney turned the car north up Post Avenue to a small parking lot. The three men got out of the car and walked to Yesler, where Vincent crossed the street and stood at the west end of The Skid Diner. Nielsen could see a woman sitting at the corner booth in the diner with a camera disguised as a handbag on the table. He recognized her as part of the task force. The entrance to the diner was on the east end of the building near Firehouse Alley.

The night sky now yielded a typical Seattle mist as the men started to move into their positions. Agents stationed on rooftops of adjacent buildings recorded the transaction and radioed reports to task force members on the street. Nielsen walked up the street and stood on the first step of a walkup apartment building with an unlit stone archway. Rodney walked west to the next street, turned left and disappeared around the corner. Vincent waited outside the diner and lit another cigarette. They waited for the ferry to land at the Coleman Dock. The blasts from the ferry horn would tell them if the ferry was arriving on time.

About fifteen minutes after the ferry landed, Nielsen started looking out from his post on the stairway for the dealer. He had a radio earpiece so he could listen to reports from task force members on rooftops watching the drug buy.

“They are arriving on the south side of Yesler,” said a voice into Nielsen’s earpiece.

“They?” Nielsen said to himself. There was no ‘they’ in the script. Had he heard it wrong? Nielsen looked around the corner of the stone archway and saw two people heading up Yesler. Vincent was standing on the sidewalk, still smoking a cigarette and looking toward the two pedestrians. “What the hell? Nielsen said to himself. He looked again around the corner and saw the silhouette of a man facing Vincent and the second person was, . . . what? A woman? It appeared to him to be the silhouette of a woman standing about three feet behind the man talking to Vincent. Was she with the dealer? Was she a homeless person who was just in the area? Was it the dealer’s wife? There was nothing said about a second person on the script or during their earlier discussions.  

There were more questions than answers and no time to discuss options. Then Nielsen heard in his earpiece, “We need to take them both down.” It was Rodney’s voice. Nielsen leaned forward again and looked down the street and saw the man put something in his jacket pocket and start to turn away from Vincent, who was also walking away. But the dealer was turning in the wrong direction, and the woman was starting to follow. They were headed east up the street to where Nielsen was hiding. The expectation was the dealer would attempt to walk back to the ferry dock. Nielsen ducked back into the shadow of the walkup, thinking he had only a few seconds until the couple would either walk by him or see him standing on the first step just off the sidewalk. He could quickly walk further into the shallow stairway and hope they did not notice, or he could step out and make the arrest. The last instruction from his partner was to ‘take them down,’ but things were not going as planned.

“Stop right there, Seattle Police, get down right now!” Nielsen yelled at the couple as he stepped to the sidewalk and held his Glock 9mm in both hands pointed at the man. He could see the woman starting to back away and turn back from where they came, but Nielsen kept his focus on the drug dealer who was not moving. “Get down!” Nielsen yelled as he cautiously moved closer to the dealer. Now he could see Rodney running with his pistol pointed at the woman. The dealer turned his head to see what was going on behind him.

“Get down, Seattle Police,” Rodney yelled at the woman. “Nobody has to get hurt!” he commanded. The woman dropped to the ground. The dealer hesitated and looked back around toward Nielsen as he started to straighten up. Nielsen realized the situation was now a potential crossfire with both officers pointing pistols toward the other with suspects between them.

“It's going to be up to you,” Nielsen calmly advised the dealer. “There are cops on rooftops and in the diner. You made a bad decision, but Skid Road does not have to be where your life ends.” The dealer looked at him and then at the Glock. He got down flat on the wet sidewalk.

The task force conducted a routine debriefing at the police station on Capitol Hill and went through the process of searching Vincent to make sure he had no cash and took the drugs into evidence. The commander of the unit said he thought the operation went well.

“Not so much,” Nielsen responded. “We were only expecting one dealer at the buy,” he continued as other members of the task force stopped what they were doing to listen to the discussion.

“No, we thought he would bring his wife because she is part of their enterprise,” the commander replied.

“What are you talking about?” Rodney interjected in support of his partner. Vincent finished pouring himself a cup of coffee and came over between Nielsen and Rodney to join the conversation.

The task force commander was nicknamed “Captain Tech” and had worked in Narcotics for several years. He was an SPD Captain and wore the nickname as a badge of honor because he was technology resistant. He even signed “CT” on birthday cards when they circulated within the department.

“Let’s check it out,” the Captain suggested as he reached for the three-ring binder that contained the assignments and protocol for each buy operation. Everybody else in the room reached for their cell phones. The Captain flipped through the pages and found the right page for tonight’s operation.

“Here it is,” the Captain said and started to read, “Dealer and wife expected to arrive as passengers at 1800 on the ferry from Bremerton, will walk from the Coleman Dock to Yesler and meet our agent on sidewalk at the west corner of The Skid Diner, . . .” he stopped reading and looked around the room. 

Vincent looked up from his phone and said to the Captain, “The email leaves out the words ‘and wife’ on my phone.” He looked around the room, and they were all nodding their heads. Vincent handed his phone to Captain Tech.

Everybody knew the Captain had sent the email, and now understood how the error occurred. After reading the email the Captain looked at the three men and said, “I’m sorry. Mistakes like this can get somebody killed. Fortunately, our dealer and his wife were not armed,” he continued. They all shook hands and went about the business of writing reports without mention of the surprise of seeing two dealers at the buy operation.

“If it isn’t in writing, it doesn’t exist,” Nielsen advised anybody who was listening.