‘Bad move for a cop to make’ saved life of Mesa teen
Published: September 11, 2003
When the young Mesa police lieutenant climbed out of his squad car, a crowd circled the 15-year-old girl who had doused herself with gasoline.
She was brandishing a knife in one hand. In the other she held a cigarette lighter.
Ten officers and two sergeants had converged on the frantically charged, central Mesa neighborhood in 1978.
“I wanted to create a diversion,” recalled Mike Whalen, then a lieutenant in charge of the detail. “The plan was for others to get her attention so I could disarm her.”
It appeared to work until Whalen started running to the teen. Suddenly, she turned and faced him. As he tried to alter his course and pull his upper body back to avoid the knife, she swiped it across his face, slicing the skin.
Firefighters sprayed her with a hose as she ran to a nearby home. The water’s force failed to destabilize her. Eventually, she crawled into the attic, where she was contained and taken into custody.
Whalen hasn’t recounted the incident often because he isn’t proud of his actions in 1978.
“What I did was a bad move for a cop to make,” explained the former street officer who became an assistant police chief before his retirement and election as District 2 city councilman.
He shared the story Tuesday because it has another moral.
The troubled teen wasn’t shot and killed because police found another way to disarm a kid.
“She found help for her problems,” Whalen said. “Two years later, she graduated from Westwood High School. It’s my nightstick story.”
Even though he didn’t use it at the time, Whalen says the nightstick is a police weapon we hear little about any more.
To Whalen, it’s a term that means more than the old police description for a billy club. Or for today’s baton, the short, blunt instrument that extends telescopically into a formidable, but not necessarily lethal, weapon.
In Whalen context, nightstick is a symbol for better-trained officers so crisis interventions don’t end in death.
“Crisis intervention is a 20-year-old technology,” he said. “It’s using the minimal defense weapon as the situation allows while assuming the defense posture as you confront a suspect armed with a knife.”
It’s Whalen’s way of probing for weaknesses in the training of police officers, not condemning them.
“When you have to shoot at somebody, you’re scared to death,” he said. “Believe me, I know.”
It’s an examination pursued, ironically, by a former assistant police chief, of all council members. It’s an inquiry that many of his colleagues have not yet shown the courage to join.
“It’s a worry,” Whalen said, “about the city needing more money for officer training while trying to overcome a $34 million budget deficit. It’s a department that can’t pull more officers off the streets for training because it is so understaffed.”
Fortunately, for Mesa it’s a council member emerging as a leader for the creation of a civilian police review board, even if it means calling for voter approval of a charter amendment.
“There is a lot of research, and we may be able to come up with a solution that doesn’t require a charter amendment,” he said. “But if it requires one, it goes to the voters as far as I’m concerned.”
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