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Hank Earl Carr broke free from cuffs, which were bound in front.
[Times photo:
Ken Helle] |
Deadly Rampage
Handcuff
procedures
questioned
By JEAN HELLER
© St. Petersburg Times,
published May 20, 1998
 hile refusing to second-guess two veteran Tampa homicide detectives
who were shot to death Tuesday, several experts in police procedure
said they train law enforcement personnel to handcuff prisoners
behind the back except in extenuating circumstances.
The man who said in a radio interview that he killed Detectives
Randy Bell and Rick Childers was shown in television video in
the custody of the two detectives with his hands cuffed in front
of him, which might have made it easier to reach into the front
seat and grab a gun from one of the officers.
Along with the anguish that surrounded the deaths of two highly
respected detectives, and the later death of a Florida Highway
Patrol trooper, the case raises questions about police procedures
and spotlights the unusually high death rate among police officers
in the South.
"Handcuffs are only a temporary restraint for the purposes of
transporting a suspect, and ordinarily police officers are trained
to cuff in back," said Dave Grossi of Naples, a retired New York
police officer who now trains about 100,000 officers a year in
the United States and Canada in avoiding and surviving armed confrontations.
Although Tampa police officials said cuffing procedures are at
the discretion of individual officers, Pinellas sheriff's spokesman
Greg Tita said his department's procedure is to cuff behind the
back.
"Exceptions might be made for a pregnant woman or a particularly
large person whose arms don't bend back naturally," Tita said.
"But our policy is to handcuff from behind."
When the man initially identified as Joseph Lee Bennett, and later
as Hank Earl Carr, was taken in for questioning by uniformed officers,
television video showed his hands cuffed behind him. When the
detectives returned with him to his house to pick up his rifle,
his hands were cuffed in front. When and why the cuffs were changed
is unknown.
It also is not known how significant the change is. He told a
radio station he wiggled out of one cuff, which he might have
been able to do regardless of the position of his hands. He then
grabbed a gun from the detective who was driving, shot the two
men, retrieved from the car trunk a rifle that had been taken
from his home, then fled in a stolen truck.
He died late Tuesday, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot,
after taking a hostage at a Shell station in Hernando County.
Along with the matter of how a suspect should be cuffed, there
were questions about where the three men were riding in the car
and how the detectives stowed a loaded rifle in their trunk, a
weapon thought to have killed Carr's 4-year-old stepson earlier
in the day.
Bell and Childers were in the front seat, Carr in the back. That,
the experts say, is the way it should be done.
"When you have two officers, one drives, and the passenger becomes
the cover officer," said Grossi. "His job is to watch the suspect
in back."
Because the two officers were detectives, it might have been easier
to get one of the guns, he added.
"Security holsters, which have devices that hold a gun in place,
are a standard weapons retention technique, but they might not
have had them," Grossi said. "Uniformed officers always have them
because their weapons are exposed, but detectives don't always
use them since their weapons are concealed under a coat or jacket.
"We also teach police officers to keep their weapon on the side
away from the suspect," although that might be more difficult
to do and still keep the weapon within reach of the gun hand.
As for transporting Carr's loaded rifle, Capt. Gerald Garner of
the Lakewood (Colo.) Police Department, also a police training
specialist, said there is no hard-and-fast rule.
"If you were trying to preserve evidence and could transport it
safely without unloading it, you would do that," Garner said.
"It wouldn't be unusual to unload it, either, if you weren't risking
evidence."
According to FBI statistics covering the decade from 1986 through
1995, of the 706 police officers killed in the line of duty, 92
percent, or about 650, were killed with firearms. Of those, 502
were killed with handguns -- 215 of those in the South.
"That is more than twice the number killed by handguns in any
other of our five regions," said Tampa FBI Special Agent Brian
Kensel.
Of the total slain over the decade, 84, or 13 percent, were killed
with their own weapons.
Such cases in the Tampa Bay area include Belleair police Officer
Jeffery Tackett, killed with his own gun in 1993 by a burglary
suspect; state Trooper Jeffrey Young, who in 1987 was shot in
the face and killed by his own weapon, grabbed from him by a drug
suspect; and Hernando sheriff's Deputy Lonnie Coburn, shot with
his own weapon by two men outside a convenience story in 1978.
"It's bad enough when it happens to one officer," Kensel said.
"But this . . . I've never seen anything like this."
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