Chief Wright: Vantage Robot Takes Rifle Fire During Armed Standoff

Transcript

Two of our officers conducted a traffic stop on a vehicle for a traffic fraction. The gentleman who was operating the vehicle, was cooperative at first, but then decided to flee the scene of the traffic stop. Vehicle pursuit ensued, was not lengthy at all probably only about five blocks into a neighboring neighborhood, from where the traffic stop was initiated. And the suspect who was driving the vehicle fled from the driver's side. He had a handgun in his hand and went into his home.

So the two officers who were pursuing immediately, took a posture of setting up, somewhat of a perimeter to make sure that the home was being covered, so that they could see, what was actually transpiring around the home. We were pretty quick on scene having our crisis intervention team to begin communicating with the gentleman inside the home as well as with his significant other. And we had a series of conversation that went back and forth for quite some time trying to negotiate, a peaceful surrender from the gentleman. The SWAT team was immediately, called into action, and deployed to the scene, and they took a posture surrounding the home, just more so to make sure that we had good eyes on the suspect's home, as well as any types of points of escape that he may have as well as to just make sure that the officers first responders that were on scene and around, as well as the neighbors who were evacuated from the scene, were gonna be protected. So, that posture went on for quite some time.

And then during the conversation, with our crisis negotiators, we made the decision to deploy our robot from Transcend. And the robot was moved to one of the locations outside of a re residential, window where, we can have eyes on the back of the home. We did have people set up at strategic locations, around the home, but we wanted to make sure we can get up close to have some type of conversation back and forth with our robot and our team. So, we moved that robot up into a position, for to enable us to do that on the backside of the home. And that allowed us the protection of not having to deploy officers into potential, fatal crossfire situations or into an area where they wouldn't have the proper cover.

The armed suspect had gone from a small arm, type caliber handgun. He moved to a AR platform, type of firearm, shoulder fire weapon, and he began to first he shot through the windows and struck a robot. But that could have potentially been a human being that could have been a police officer that would've been maybe up close on a stick that would've, had maybe had the concealment and partial cover, but could have been a very dangerous situation with rounds, that are rifle caliber rounds. So, a robot did take fire, but we were able to see that and we were able to relay that information in real time. When we bought the robot at first, I heard under the breadth conversations of from some of our operators, and at the time, why are we buying that?

That's, is that something we really need? Is that something we could have certainly bought? And they could name 10,000 things that we, they could buy, but, they're not saying that now. And a lot of those operators, I can tell you that were out there that day. They were appreciative of knowing that we had that one more asset out there, on the ground, giving us real time intelligence that was being relayed directly to them and their comm gear.

And obviously, you don't really know until you have it, how much it means to you and how important it is. And you don't know how much it meant to you until you don't have it anymore. The robot did its job and that and that's the main thing is we, there's gonna be mitigating circumstances and an unknown situations, and we never could. We could plan and train and we just never know what the outcome's gonna be. But in this case, I would go so far as to say the robot put us in a position to save lives, and save my operators.

And just having the peace of mind that they have where they know they're not up close and personal. I think you do have a propensity for somebody to escalate a situation based off of a show of force. So if they were to see, operators on a stick, or an element moving up or into place, up closer, I think that could intensify, the reaction you're gonna get out of the person or the compat inside the home or car, wherever you are. So I think having that robot really reduces that optic, for how that may look when you're moving a team into position. If you want things done right, you got you have to spend the money.

There's a lot of different vendors out there that make a lot of different things. We did our homework on this when we, when we made the decision to purchase our trends and robotics, robot. Certainly our funds were limited as well, but when we looked at all the different types of varieties or companies, that are out there doing this type of thing, we just felt that transcend was the best, the best answer to the questions that we mostly had. And we were able to have test demos and kind of read a lot of feedback from different people and both small and major agencies around the United States. And we just felt like adding, this robot to our inventory was just gonna help en enhance our ability to further the situation from in to make it end quicker comes time to spending money.

Nobody wants to do it. I'm one of them, but I'm also of the mindset if I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna do it right and I'm gonna do it right the first time. And that doesn't always happen in this profession. We have to fail a lot of times to learn from our mistakes. We have to fail, with purchases to learn from our mistakes. And in this case, although our robot was eventually incapacitated, I didn't lose a police officer, I didn't lose an operator.

I didn't have to deal with those types of worries or woes that happen. When you are overseeing a major, critical incident like the one we had that day, you're making these decisions. It wasn't easy for me to spend any kind of money that I wanted to spend, but I wanna make sure we got the right solution. And we knew we did. And getting our robot from Transcend.