They are the strong arm of the law. Shadowy figures who are armed and ready to take on the most dangerous criminals. It is an elite squad. There's no doubt about it. A lot of what the AOS do probably goes unrecognized or unheard of. It was stopped by members of the undefender squad. The story of this elite squad has gone untold until now. Over the next three weeks, an exclusive first look behind the masks of the police armed offender squad. You get about half a second to decide what you're going to do. It was really frightening. And anybody who says that they're not frightened is full of [ __ ] Tonight, we take you inside the cordon, right alongside New Zealand's AOS. From their dramatic origins to the modern cutting edge. I never in my wildest dreams thought that the New Zealand police had any sort of capability like this. You know, if you pull the trigger, your life is never ever going to be the same. You'll see for the first time through the eyes of the men and women who put themselves in the line of fire. [Music] Members of the modern armed defenders squad are highly trained and highly equipped. But the M4 semi-automatic rifles and Glock pistols, the ballistic helmets and body armor worn today are nothing like the old days. In the 1960s, police packing so much firepower was unthinkable. New Zealand was a country where the pubs closed at 6, doors were left unlocked, and firearms were only for deer colors and duck shooters. Firearms and crimes was the most unusual event really. We were so proud to be an unarmed force. You very rarely needed a gun. If you wanted protection, you just put on the uniform and you were safe. But in the summer of 1964, the country was rocked when four policemen were shot and killed in a single month in the line of duty. The police needed to combat the rising tide of violent crime. So, a special squad was formed to deal with armed and dangerous offenders. Roger Gagget was a founding member. The police armed defender squad was issued with old army type battle dress which was dyed black. We had the SMLE 33 caliber rifles and the 38 Smith and Wesson revolvers. These were generally dated round about 1942. I remember squad members were regular policemen. Some were ex-military, but now their rules of engagement would be very different. It was always impressed on us that we must obtain our objectives with a minimum of force and that was was drilled into us incessantly. Their instructions were explicit. Cordon, contain, and appeal. Cordon meant creating a physical line that the offender must not pass. Contain, keeping the offender inside that area. and appeal meant communicating with them to give up. [Music] For the first few years of operations, everything went to plan. Incidents were resolved without a shot being fired. But when things went badly wrong, suddenly the squad were thrown into the spotlight. I'd known Claw for some years when he was a juvenile committing all sorts of crimes around Corory and I'd got to know him pretty well really. I mean, I was a young training detective. Sort of developed a rapport with him. Colin Lines was on a day off in April 1970 when the phone rang. In about 8:30, I got this phone call at home to say that Glenn saw abducted a woman at gunpoint. Because of his history with Glenaw, Lines was called in to help search for the kidnapper. On a hunch, Lines headed up the gravel track to Wright's Hill in Corori where he knew Glenaw liked to hang out. And as we went into her bend, Glenn saw appeared in her headlights from our right. He came down off a bank. In his right hand, he had a sort of shotgun. Get out of the [ __ ] gun. His left hand, he was holding it. His female hostage and a rifle. Calm down. Put the gun on the ground. Glen was screaming at us. He was going to shoot us, going to shoot us, and to put our hands up. And I started talking to him. I told him who it was. I talked to him by his first name. on the ground. Back off. It was crazy. Both Glen and this hostage were yelling and screaming. Don't come in close. Oh, [ __ ] He had the girl up at one stage the rifle right up under her chin and was pushing her chin up. And then and then he said, "I'm going to shoot you." He said, "I'm going to count five. I'm going to shoot you five." And then I'm going to shoot you one. And he got to two, four, three. We left into the gors and just after we left in the gors there's a a shot fire. You know we didn't know whether shooting at us or what had happened. While Colin Lions and his partner hid from Glenn saw and tried to raise help. The armed offender squad was being mobilized. The Nelson section was came across to Wellington. The Wonganooi section came down. Palmerston North came down. So we had quite a big team. But Glenn saw and his hostage had vanished. By sun up, Colin had dusted himself off and made his way to the search HQ nearby. There was actually a base set up in Corori at the sports ground and there was a major operation going on. There was a great deal of danger in the situation. There was no doubt about that at all. And nobody doubted that it would end with a killing of either Glenaw or Glenaw and a number of other people. Sometime late evening, it had been established that that he was in his own house. Glaw, this is the police. And so the armed defender squad had it caught and contained and they were making phone calls to him and appeals by the hail to him. I was uh in the front of the patrol that went up Garden Road to surround the house. I got this message from people in the court that he was calling out from the house for me. What column? I said to my wife as I left home that day. I said, "I'm sure somebody will die today." Yet little did I know that it could have been me. Bruce, look, Bruce, it's me. It's Colin. His fingerprints have been identified at a sport shop where a lot of firearms been stolen. So we knew he had these firearms. When I first spoke to him, he's pretty cal and we had quite a long conversation. You know, about quarter of an hour conversation, you know, he was trying to talk him into surrendering and give himself up and he wanted to know whether what was going to happen to him if he surrendered. He was frightened of coming out of the house and being shot. Now look, I don't want to hurt anyone. And I assured him that he wouldn't be shot. But because by this time he had two hostages in the house. He had the girl which he had taken at gunpoint. [ __ ] kill her. Okay. And he had a border living in the house and the border had been aware and had come home not knowing of the drama. Well, he made it quite clear not only to me on the phone and to other people. he talked too early in the day that he wanted to die and uh that he had gone too far and he couldn't see any way out of it and and before he left his house he left a note for his wife and the note reads such that he wasn't coming back. His final words were to me I want to die and I'm going now and he hung up. [Music] what he had said and the fact that he was going to leave the house was relayed to the to the unfair squad. [Music] Graham Wilks was near the bottom of Garden Road as a heavily armed man and his hostages walked toward him. I saw three persons, one with armed fire across his shoulder coming down. It was Glenaw and he called out to to me and said, "If you point that bloody thing at me, I'll shoot her." And we passed within 10 ft. I decided to leave the Cy base and go down towards Garden Road because I thought, you know, possibly if I was there, I might be able to talk to him some more. [Music] For two days, the police armed offenders squad had been scouring the western suburbs of Wellington, searching for Bruce Glenaw, who'd abducted a young woman at gunpoint. Detective Colin Lines had been negotiating with Glenaw over the phone, but the gunman had taken to the street with his weapons and hostages. While Colin raced the 5-minute journey from Corori to Garden Road, squad member Graeme Wilks was face to face with the armed man. We were on a grass verge. There was a few trees and we had 30 m clear view of him and he pulled the pistol out and he turned around to a dog handler who was advancing on him and said, "I'm going to shoot you, too." And as he swung out and aimed the pistol, we both went down in a kneeling position and he was quicker than I was. Glenn saw hit the ground and that was it. But he died before I got there. He was shot. Uh uh so when I arrived in Glenmore Street, he was dead on the street. [Music] [Music] At the time he was shot, there were actually three guns trained on him, but only one gun went off. Uh, and I know that the officer from my discussions with him, that was the thing that affected him greatly later on. Did he do the right thing? Why didn't the others shoot? Why didn't three guns go off? I was not quick enough, clearly, but as close as I'd ever want to be. Is this the first time the armed defender squad has shot anyone? I believe it is. I'm sorry to say I believe it is. I have absolutely no doubt from being involved in that operation over a period of 3 days that the officer who did the correct thing was the officer who pulled the trigger. I knew young Glenaw. I like Glenaw. He's a lovely kid. He was disturbed, but he was a lovely kid. And I was very sad when he was shot, but it was just unavoidable. An official police report found the shooting justified, but the incident highlighted the fact that all squad members had to know exactly when they could shoot and when they couldn't. There are explicit police instructions which say the armed offenders squad can shoot only if they fear death or grievous bodily harm to themselves or others. General instruction F61 applies. That means the fire orders set up back in those early days are still the instructions that guide the armed offenders squad today. There are our substance uh the principles upon which we operate when we draw firearms. If you cannot protect yourselves or others in a less violent manner, the offender may be shot. Members are briefed in them on every deployment uh either once or on several occasions. And uh the key ingredient is that they're not just special for armed offenders are for any incident where a member of the police draws a firearm. But putting this theory into practice is never easy. Deciding whether to take a life, even if justified in order to protect others is one of the hardest decisions faced by squad members of any era. We knew he was armed. He'd been telling um the police operator on the phone that he was going to kill the woman. kill the baby, kill himself. Police, don't move. Don't move. And he was in the back of the car. He had a swand drive covering the shotgun and he was sort of moving around. The person behind me in this in the passenger seat, I heard his safety catch come off as well. I had no doubt that I was going to shoot him or be forced to shoot him in those circumstances. But for my own peace of mind, I couldn't see the firearm. We brought you right to the edge. And it was that time to make a decision. I just thought, "Yep, I'm going to have to shoot this person." And in my mind, I'd worked out how I was going to do it. Shooting through the window, I was going to fire two quick shots. One to break the window and the other one hopefully to incapacitate the offender, but I couldn't see the firearm. And so in my own mind um wasn't prepared to fire the shot. The good thing was I guess that the person behind me in this in the passenger seat had done exactly the same thing. And in his decision-m he decided that he wasn't prepared to shoot him as well. That freaked him out a wee bit. I think how close he actually came to pulling the trigger. So he did he talked about that a lot when he came home from that job. And um we we we talked about the possibility of it happening and we always concluded it was way better for him to be the one to pull the trigger than for him to be a victim and and for it to happen the other way. He gave up in the end and came out and it was a good result for the police and it was a good result for him and and and the victim. It could easily have gone the other way and almost did. [Music] In 1974, the armed offender squad were pushed to new extremes in a 10-day manh hunt through deep bush on the trail of a convicted killer who'd escaped custody. This was one of the first operations where tracking dogs were available to the AOS. The dogs revolutionized the squad's approach to dangerous callouts. For police dog handler Murray Morrisy, it was his first AOS call out. 1:00 in the morning, we received a call to say that another car had been abandoned way up in the north place called Manga Muka and we were to dispatch ourselves there with the armed defender squad to to search for him. So, it started from there. When we took off on the call out, we had our usual uniform issue with us, but we didn't have an overnight bag or overnight gear because you didn't know where you were going, how long you were going for. So, we lived in the same gear for for about a week. I certainly arrived without any weapons, but um in fact, I didn't even have a decent uniform. I had a I arrived here with a pair of um bowler suit overalls. Illfitting, may I say, and u and a cream colored um polar neck long sleeve jersey, which you know, for the cold. And of course, when they saw me front up with this on the night patrol, they were a ghast, you know, get that man out of here. Get him a black jersey from somewhere, you know. So, I had to borrow one from an armed defender squad member who had three. And he lent me he lent me one for the duration of the uh of the search. bush searches, tracking, co entries into buildings, assaulting buildings where we thought he might be. You got your track and harness in your left hand and you got your gun in your right hand, you see. And I mean, I'm almost embarrassed to tell you this sort of thing, but my hand, I tell you, was just physically shaking. That gun was just utterly shaking, you know, and my my knees were shaking cuz I thought this guy could just pop out of the out of the bush and just shoot us. But the trail went cold. The men returned to base safe, although empty-handed. [Music] And in the end, he broke a road check and ended up in um one of the towns up there. He came into Kawakawa. We' shifted our base into Kawaka. In fact, we we were sleeping in the hotel. Fantastic. Sleeping in a bed. And I tell you, we were bugged. I can tell you. You'd come in to break into some shops, of course, get some supplies. and the local bread delivery man had seen him and um disturbed him. Of course, he went running off down the street towards the hotel. We were all sleeping upstairs. So, of course, we were rallying from our rooms and we formed up outside and went over to an area where we were told he had run and um Grad Davies of Dog Fritz, he began tracking. Behind the hotel is a rubbish dump where all bodies of cars were thrown and all overgrown. I was behind with another squad. And as Graeme approached the car bodies, he came to this one particular car body. This person stood up in front of him and pointed out the gun right at him and says, "Fuck off or I'll shoot you. [ __ ] off or I'll shoot you." Well, I mean to say that would scare the [ __ ] out of any man, wouldn't it? So, of course, Graham's dog leaped at him. But his tracking got caught in the car body. His dog stopped it that far away from him. [Music] The offender raised his gun again. The offender was uh loading a round, a live round into the brereech and was having a we bit of a problem with it. At first, we thought we were going to have to do the um do the business and I was behind. So, of course, I let my dog go meet. We raced forward and and he was right in his element there. We couldn't go anywhere else and we got him, you know, after 10 days of chasing this guy we hit him. It was operations like this that cemented the place of dog handlers in the armed offenders squad. Fortunately, in the early '7s, AOS incidents were still uncommon. But when the callouts came, there was no [Music] warning. Even today the life of every squad member and their family is ruled by the chance of a call out day or night. Sometimes it might be a couple of hours. Other times u you know like say I've gone away been away 14 days. You reach an understanding that when the pagery goes and I'm needed, I'm gone and I'll be home when the job's done. Always in the back of your mind, you're thinking, what are you going what are you going to do? What's your what's your plan if there's a call out? you know, can I can I dump the family here and take the car and go or can I get a ride with someone else or or do we take two cars or how how do we cope with it? At times I was really envious. I mean, it's fantastic. The page you go, you go. He just he just got up and left. Whatever we were doing or wherever we were or if the kids were upset, he just left. And yeah, I'd love to just get up and go sometimes and leave the family behind for a few days. One of our daughters, Sammy, she uh as she got a bit older and a bit more aware of things, she would often burst. As soon as a pager would go off, she'd start crying. She'd burst into tears. And because our dad would be off and gone, she didn't know when I'd be coming back. That got a bit heart-wrenching. If he was ever late and it was after their bedtime and they all tucked in, he'd always go in and see them and give them a kiss and maybe wake them up. And that was just sort of daddy was. The other girls were my other daughters were okay, you know, they're interested and they'd ask, "So, what did you do, Dad?" and and you know, did you catch the baddie and things like that, but for Sammy it got a bit hard for her. Kathy was invaluable. I I I you know, you can you can sort of um trace it to her that the kids had as normal life as possible with my two boys. Um she was the one that took them to sports every Saturday. Um she was the one that looked after them, made sure they had all the right equipment during the weekends, you know, things that we perhaps had planned. 10 minutes and uh and again he he he couldn't make it. Hey mate, sorry we're going to have to go fishing tomorrow. Okay, see you mate. Of course later on they found out personally what went on. They both obviously join the team and it's not until you you're part of the squad yourself and yeah, the same things are playing out. You know, you put the phone down or you take that moment, you think to yourself, "Yeah, I know what it was like for mom back then." or I understand how the kids feel at times because every time a squad member heads off to work, there's a chance they won't be coming [Music] home. For squad members, voice appeal is their first and best weapon. Negotiating a peaceful surrender is always the goal. The police officer will do anything rather than shoot somebody. Taff Jones found himself doing some fast talking when he came face to face with an armed man in Wellington. There was a young guy and we had a description was firing a handgun in the air as he was walking down the street and I was just wandering down the street. I was just by myself. This guy came around. So we were facing each other probably about a meter apart don't know and it was a typical sort of you know gunfight the okay coral because his hand went for the gun and I was screaming at him and saying you know and now leave it you know don't touch it then I was bringing my gun out you know when people say it's all in slow motion it it really is even now I I can closed my eyes and actually see they saw a gun coming out and I was screaming at him. Leave us. Leave us. Don't touch it. Leave us. Don't touch it. Put it down. And it turned out to be an air gun. Just imagine what would have happened if I'd shot that guy. That gun may have been a toy. Get out of the car. Put your hands up. But police must treat every AOS call out as a potentially deadly situation. A negotiation could go either way. Something that Colin Lines knew firsthand. Put it down. Colin had spent hours trying to convince young Bruce Glennaw to surrender, but to no avail. When he was confronted with another armed and dangerous man a few years later, Colin was determined that this time it would end differently. He had gone into a sport shop in Mercer Street opposite the Evening Post building. He was shown this gun. He grabbed the gun, grabbed some ammunition, and ran out of the building, loaded the rifle, walked across the road and up into the Evening Post building to find his strange wife. The man's wife was not there. Staff fled and the police were called. Colin Lines entered the building and began a tense negotiation face to face with the desperate man. The Evening Post building was in Willow Street, a hub of the city. A lot of foot traffic, a lot of motor traffic. A shot had been fired. He he was telling us that he wanted to die and that he wanted the police to shoot him and he'd be quite aggravated and threatening and pacing up and down and then he would sort of calm down and he we'd say to him, "Can you point the rifle away somewhere else?" And he would. I was down Willow Street lying in a doorway as a cover position in case he attempted to leave the building and come out onto Willer Street. From where he was in this room, he could see out and he could see a reflection in a shop window across the road. He could see the policeman going up and down. And he said at one stage that he was the next policeman that walked by, he was going to shoot him. There was a senior policeman came along come for a look. He shouldn't have been inside the cordon, but he was. And uh I grabbed him and he said, "What the hell do you think you're doing?" And I said, "Well, sir, you go ahead and walk up there." But I said, "That man in the building just said the next person he sees come, he's going to shoot." And he bailed out. Obviously, over the next 4 hours, we talked to him. You know, I got talking to about fishing and boating and and and all sorts of things. I mean, there was was someone you could talk to. And eventually, if we kept talking to him, I had this feeling that it would be all right. And that's how it turned out to be. [Music] Several hours later, with no further shots fired, Colin Lines and the offender left the building peacefully. This negotiation led to a lifelong friendship between the two. Whether face to face or via loud hala, the key to negotiation is establishing rapport. New Zealanders, male and female, don't like to be pushed into a corner and, you know, they become quite staunch. They don't like to back down. And so, you know, part of the negotiation was really to create a sort of a non-threatening environment where they didn't actually have to feel like they had to be staunched. They weren't going to lose a huge amount of face. The three main offenders you you deal with are the crazies, the crusaders, and the crims. And a crim was always easier to deal with than somebody that's on a crusade that thinks they're right. The crazies, you just never know what they're going to do next. Graham Wilks knows that negotiation is a delicate business, a highstakes game of give and take that he can't afford to lose. He'd smashed the place up, smashed the windows, uh, and the police were called, and on their arrival, he grabbed a large slither of glass, um, well over a foot long, and he held it to one of the babies, one of the kids' throats. It's a baby. You don't want to baby give me that nothing. During the course of the negotiation, he would come to the window with one of the babies in his arms and this big slither of glass and threaten them with um physical violence. We couldn't use CS gas because it would have affected the kids. So, I lit up a cigarette and I could see he was a smoker. So, the negotiations went around whether he'd he'd want to smoke or not. I need you to put the baby down and give a cigarette. And so, I said, "All right, I'll give you a cigarette." I said, "You're going to have to put down the the baby, which he did." So, I lit the cigarette and I gingerely handed to him and he had to lean right out the window, one hand with the glass in the slither of glass like that and reach right out on his tip toes. As soon as I had him in that position, the boys kicked the door and took him out and uh game over. We used time, good negotiation skills and uh it was a successful operation. Being within spitting distance of armed offenders wasn't a great idea. A megaphone or even better a telephone would keep the police a safe distance or at least slightly safer. It was a pretty dangerous job. Believe it or not, a couple of the megaphones um obviously they gave away your position of where the voice was coming from to the to the offender and uh one or two of the megaphones ended up with bullet holes in them. So you did you didn't hold them like you see in the movies didn't hold them to your face and talk obviously we had long leads on them and you put the megaphone to one side of you. As the number of call outs increased, the value of good negotiating became ever more important. In the 1980s, specialized police negotiation teams were established. Part of the skills we equipped them with was to assess where the where the subject is. Are they distressed? Are they suicidal? Are they bruised? Now, all this information is of great use to the tactical response because then you're getting some idea. Hey, who am I dealing with here? Where's this guy coming from? The arrival of the new PNTs caused friction at first. They gave us a fair bit of stick to start with and you know, you think you can fix this and you know, we we're the expert. You know, that sort of ribbing. We used to sort of take the piss out of them a bit and basically say they're only there to carry our kit. We got that much gear to carry now. That's why you guys have arrived on the scene to sort of help us carry our gear out and then you can go and have te coffee or whatever you do until we sort the job out. One particular incident that I can remember was a male who really just started to play games with the female negotiator. This was just one guy who didn't want to talk and hated cops and particularly hated females. So he just liked flinging his power around and he was just one of those kind of guys. But I was sitting there and I was starting to get really irritated, you know, with listening to what was going on. But, you know, she talked her way through that. I think on that particular call out there were there were only three of us and two of us were women. So um one of us had to go and then the other one had to go and you just you know turn the other cheek and keep taking it. You know you're the focal point you know for all the things that have actually happened in their lives sometimes almost like you know you're the catalyst for why they're there. You know you're you're captive. What the hell are we? A successful negotiation often comes down to listening as much as talking. As Derek Webb learned early on, if you really listen to people um people under stress, they would usually indicate um in some way of their intentions. How are you, buddy? Webb had arrived with his squad to a domestic at an Oakland house. When we arrived on the scene, the offender was actually out of the house with with a shotgun and um moving around. Done, mate. Oh, get off my property. All right, calm down. Calm down. What's the story? [ __ ] she's my wife. I can speak her if I wanted. He was making some threatening gestures, but at the same time, just during part of his conversation, he said, "I left the kettle on. I've left the kettle boiling in the house." And that was an indication to me. He was looking for a way out. What are we all doing standing out here in the cold? Why don't you go inside and make us all a cuper? Yeah. Come on then. Milk. This last stage, well, what the hell are we doing here? Why don't we go and have a cup of tea? just put the firearm down. We're going up two. Yeah. And that actually happened. He put the firearm down. We went and had a cup of tea. 15 minutes later, he was on his way to jail. But while some offenders surrender peacefully, the few that are hellbent on self-destruction push the squads to their limits with deadly results. Get on the ground now. Police on the ground. Only one. Get on the ground. Do it now. Armed police on the ground. For armed offender squad members, an ordinary day at the office can mean facing off against heavily armed criminals. And in life or death situations, feeling fear can be a means of survival. Holy one, definitely you feel fear. Um, but it's it's harnessing that fear. It's harnessing the um I suppose the adrenaline that starts pumping and channel it into a positive for yourself. your vision becomes acute, your hearing becomes acute, your feelings become acute, and you're very much focused into the situation. So, there's fear there, and anybody who says that they're not frightened is um full of [ __ ] Ken Foreman knows what it means to feel fear. He and his West Coast squad were chasing an armed and dangerous criminal late at night. Chris Lewis was wanted for a string of armed offenses around the country and was now fleeing from police through the bull gorge. I think it was about the second corner into the the bully gorge. We noticed some marks on the road where he'd hit the bank and gone down over the side. And the problem was that it was like a vertical bank. Somebody had to be lowered down over the bank. to this vehicle. One guy couldn't go down on his own safely, so there had to be two. And I don't know why to this day, but I volunteered. So they roped us up and it was in a place where we couldn't set up any lighting down onto this vehicle. So it was over you go with a torch in one hand and a pistol in the other. And one of the ropes wasn't long enough to reach the bottom and that was the rope that I was hooked to. So, I'm dangling there. My feet aren't touching the ground. And Fitzy, his rope did reach the ground. He had to sort of untie himself and go forward and check the vehicle. All I said to him was, "If he's there and he fires, just hit the ground because I'm going to empty this in that direction. And yeah, he was no longer there. He he had shot through. That was when I found out why we actually tuck the bottoms of our trousers into our boots so that if you do crap yourself, it doesn't run down all over your boots. But yeah, I'd be a liar if I said at the time I wasn't terrified. For squad members, the fear comes not only from facing dangerous offenders, but from having a very good idea of just how much damage a bullet can do. I don't think probably the general public as such probably do realize how how how dangerous firearms are. A guy had split up from his girlfriend, went to an address, walked down the side of the house, and fired a shot from a a 303 rifle. The woman was laying on the bed and the first shot just skimmed her heel, just broke the skin and the and the new boyfriend jumped out of bed and was actually heading out of the bedroom through the door when he fired a second shot, hit him in the back, exited his stomach. His flatmates actually put a pillow across his um stomach and sat a stride at holding everything in place and the ambulance arrived and uh he survived that. But the most interesting thing was how far that that projectile traveled. It went through him. It went through the door jamb of this old 20's wooden house. Hanging in the passageway was the Hamilton phone book which was quite thick hanging on a a string and the the bullet went through that went through the wall through the pantry through all the food and then the up sweep of the sink which was stainless steel. It went through that. It actually went through the house. The round went through the forenon fence into the neighbor's house and into the lounge through a lazy boy which the which the occupant had been sitting in some minutes previously as he'd heard the noise and apparently got up to go and see what the noise was. And the and the round actually was embedded in the wall of the house that the neighbors. So there was a real insight into how um how dangerous firearms are and how far they will travel. Many people believe that when they are forced to fire, the highly trained marksmen of the squads would shoot to wound, not to kill. But in 1975, a call out in Christ Church City brought this issue to very public attention. The squad were called out when psychiatric patient Edward Ross threatened to stab and kill his young daughter. Stay back. Stay back. I'll do it. This was a crazed man. and he had his daughter up on the window and he was starting to thrust the knife into the daughter's back. I'll do it. [Music] [Applause] [Music] An officer had a rifle on Ross and kept it on him. I I'll do it. I'll do it. I swear. And when he attempted to put the the knife into his daughter, he couldn't pull the trigger. Another officer took the right. [Applause] [Music] Decisive action was taken in seconds, but it caused an outcry. Why hadn't the officer simply shot to wound? Was Ross' death absolutely necessary? The officer's actions saved the little girl's life, but it was apparent that the public believed the AOS were too ready to pull the trigger, as if that alone was what they were training for. I was concerned that Armed Defender Squad members would stop shooting. I was concerned that they would be so confused in their minds about what their liability and what their responsibilities were that they wouldn't be able to do their job. Former police officer, now a prominent lawyer, Rob Moody wrote a paper to address what he considered to be an unfair and undue burden on police officers. The police commissioners were always talking about, "We don't shoot to kill, we shoot to wound." And in Ross's case, the only target he really had was the offender's head. Uh, and of course, you can't shoot from some distance away. Shoot somebody in the head and say, "Well, I was only shooting to wound." Uh, so it seemed to me, and it had always seemed to me, that there was a much better formula than that. In March 1976, Moody coins a new phrase. Members of the Armed Offenders Squad shoot not to wound, not to kill, but simply to achieve the instantaneous and complete elimination of the offender's capacity to kill or seriously injure others. Our key mission is to resolve the incident in the safest manner in which we can. Shooting is is essentially a last resort. When we do shoot, it is to incapacitate and remove that threat. You must be prepared to take that vital step which is very difficult to decide to take. What the armed defender squad member is concerned with is protecting those who are in danger by preventing the person that they're shooting at from carrying out the threat of danger to the other person. If an offender is warranted to be shot, then um there is no time to to work out, okay, which limb am I going to shoot to to to stop him. Basically, if you you're pulling that trigger, you you're there to stop him full stop. If you shoot them somewhere where um they can still keep going, you you haven't really done the job that you're supposed to do and you put other people at risk. The way offending has transpired and the use of methamphetamine and other drugs and alcohol even shooting to wound is just going to piss them off and you haven't achieved your goal. You haven't rescued the person. You may not have saved your own life. If a police officer is shooting someone to wound them, he's possibly breaking the law because he's not in fear of his own life. He's not going to shoot to wound if he's in fear of his own life. That's what I'm saying. So every time it's critical mass, the biggest bit that's cheesed. But even with justification in law, taking another life doesn't come easy. As that Christurch policeman found out sometime later, his son said to him, "Dad, you've killed a man." And I know that this officer was very upset at this at the awe and u the way it was said. You know that officer has to live with that for the rest of his life but he had to do it. You know if you pull the trigger your life is never ever going to be the same. It's a terrible thing but that's just the way it is. Next week, the 1980s bring a call out in Wellington, which puts squads on notice throughout the country. A gunman firing shots in downtown Oakland hospitalizes one member of the team. The tension around that truck. I mean, you could smell it. You knew that the TV cameras were out there filming it and the whole world was watching it. and the shadowy anti-terrorist squad are tested for the first time in a seaside village called Aram Moana. I thought he'd done a murder suicide. I was convinced that someone had done such horrendous things couldn't live with themselves. Formed in 1964 in response to escalating violent crime, the police armed offenders squad is sent to deal with the worst armed criminals. I thought this guy could just pop out of the bush and just shoot it. My hand, I tell you, was just physically shaking. Though authorized to use deadly force when their life or that of another is at risk of death or serious injury, most call outs ended peacefully with offenders and officers unharmed. He said, "I've left the cattle boiling in the house." And that was an indication to me he was looking for a way out. But the squad was forced to fatally shoot their first lawb breaker in 1970. The officer who did the correct thing was the officer who pulled the trigger and would kill three more times in that decade. That officer has to live with that for the rest of his life. As the 1980s dawned, the squads found themselves under fire from the very public they sought to protect. [Music] [Music] For many in New Zealand, the 1980s are remembered as a decade of opulence and optimism. But for Murray Forbes, who just joined the Wellington Armed Offenders Squad, it was far from it. In April 1983, Murray's squad was called out after a man fired a shotgun in a crowded bar. What began as a routine job became a turning point for the AOS. I'll never forget it. Paul Chase shooting, the one in Paton was the first call out I had. Paul Chase had fired shots in the hotel the night before. He had gone home. We had information that he needed to be located as quickly as possible. He lived in a block of flats in Poni. The understanding we had is that it could well have been a gang place. There could have been a lot of people there, you know, and before we knew the firearm was still in the building. Not wanting to wake the whole neighborhood with a loud hailer, commanders decided to send a team into the building, enter the flat, and recover the firearm as quickly as possible. It was dark. You had to go through all these stairs and then bang on the door. Police. We kicked the door in because he could have hit the fire. I'm police. We found that a door had been barricaded and Paul Chase came out. Into the darkness of the barricaded corridor appeared a man holding something long and shiny. What appeared to the officer, a shotgun. I'm police. Drop it. We heard the shot and got a call that there was a man down. So we all went forward and um and here was this this fellow. He was lying there and I spoke to him. He was fine, you know. So no trouble. We got the ambulance and uh and within half an hour we got a call from control and said that uh this fellow died. What had appeared to be a shotgun was in fact a steel exercise bar. the newspaper sort of um attacked us which was probably the right thing to do you know just went on and on every day the paper had it off for months and tap and I who' sent the chaps forward were as much responsible as me who pulled the trigger you know the public reaction was unprecedented New Zealand must not develop a kill first and ask questions later mentality killed for carrying an exercise bar once again the AOS came under intense scrutiny, but support came from the highest office. If I had been this policeman, I'd have shot him, frankly, and I think any reasonable person would say exactly that. After an inquiry, the shooting was found to be justified. But the public outrage put squads on notice throughout the country, and the toll on those officers involved was enormous, even if the impact wasn't visible on the surface. men and well policemen in general I think in that situation show very little emotion and that's also very very scary you know that they just bottle it all up. It was the week after we went home and we went to see some some relations and we had an auntie there called Auntie Eddie and she said um so you shot my nephew. I said I didn't know what she was talking about and she said yeah Paul you shot Paul and I started explaining it to her and she was a lovely old woman old woman. She would have been way 70 80. She was lovely. She put an arm around my shoulder and she said never mind that [ __ ] That took a while to go away, you know. Well, there was no actual need for them to burst into that flat. What should they have done? They should have staked the place out and waited until it was broad daylight. The huge media spotlight on the Paul Chase shooting brought the job into the public eye. And for the wives watching at home who knew their husbands were in the firing line, it made it hard to ignore the very real risks of the role. You're talking about a splitsecond decision. Is it my life or his? Now, we can sit here and review it. Waiting for that knock on the door, you know, and and you just feared, but I mean, you're busy with the, you know, perhaps the children. So, you're busy, but when he was time to come home and he didn't show up, you sort of thought and wondered why. It was easier not to know where he was going or what was happening. Um it was it's a lot easier if you don't know. I always worried about the road accidents that they'd get have an accident on the way to a job or you know um maybe a job 6 8 hours get home at 7:00 in the morning and they've been up all night that they'd have an accident on the way home. I was always confident if there was a so-called shootout that he would be the one in the witness box defending himself rather than the one in the coffin. Drop it. I get called out 12:30, 1:00 in the morning. It' be a short job, local job, maybe just one of those domestic type things. I'd be back home by 5 5:30 hopping to bed and uh she wouldn't even know I'd been out, you know, which was wonderful, you know, because it obviously didn't stress her too much because she didn't know about it, you know. 6 months after Paul Chase was shot in Wellington. And while the inquiry was still underway, an incident in downtown Oakland forced the armed offenders squads into the headlines once again. Joseph Nihana Simpson was the was the offender in that one. Um he'd not long been released from prison. He'd gone down to a sport shop that was in Q2 Square to pretend to buy firearms. Threw the owners out, barricaded himself in the shop and start to fire shots everywhere. In October 1983, the Armed Defenders Squad was called to deal with prison parole Joseph Simpson on a shooting spree in downtown [Music] Oakland. On a number of occasions, he came out of the shop with two shotguns and um was firing them off at random around the place, shop windows and what have you. At that stage um I'd gone through my training. and was a dedicated sniper to the team. So I took up the position opposite the sport shop in the New Zealand building as it was there. I guess this guy should have been shot for what he was doing, but there was an inquiry going on at the time from some other shooting and everybody was running scared. So there's no way in the world they're going to shoot him. In fact, I heard a squad member say, "Well, let's shoot him." And the reply from the other one was, "Well, you shoot him. I'm not going to shoot him." Nowadays, I think they'd blast him to hell and back. And quite rightly, [Music] too. Dogs were there and they were the the less violent means. They were going to be the weapons in which to get this guy. The tension around that truck and I mean, you could smell it. I have never ever been in a situation and never ever wished to be in a situation like that again. You knew that the TV cameras were out there watching it, filming it, and the whole world was watching it. The uh AOS commander thought it was time for the dogs and sent the dog, Luca. Well, the dog was released in bloody disaster. With Luke shot, two more dogs were released. [Music] The dogs in those days had always been taught to run after a moving target. Um because Joseph stood still. The dogs ran past him. They were released and they ran past him now. They just didn't put him down like they were supposed to. He just comes to a standstill. Nothing happens. It seemed like it, you know, was an eternity. Somebody got to do something. From my position by the Air New Zealand building, people were screaming to me. He shot the dog. Shoot him. He shot the dog. Shoot him. Even amidst all the mayhem, Derek still felt there was a chance to resolve the situation without having to shoot Simpson. So when he came out of the shop again and I started to engage him in in conversations, I saw the shotgun coming up and I ducked behind a concrete pillar and he let a shot go. I actually got a ricoch couple of ricochets off the wall in the back of my neck from that. It was building up building up very very close to the time where I suppose we were going to um have to do something far more serious to stop the situation. Fortunately for for him, we could see through our scopes that he never had his finger on the trigger of the shotgun he was carrying. After several hours of standoff, all hell broke loose. A nearby officer tried to disarm Simpson and failed, but Murray Morrisy saw his chance. Where I am, I can get to him and dropped my pistol as I went because it was his baggage. I might have been better off down performing a bit of tackle. You [Music] know, once it was done, of course, they came from everywhere and uh it was all over. My sympathy lie with the handler and Luke because he was put in an absolutely impossible situation. I've never told anyone before and it's never ever been written down. But the handler was was told by a squad member that next time he comes out, you let the dog go and if Simpson brings his gun up, I'll shoot him. Now, secure in that knowledge that was going to happen. The dog was released. Luke received get well wishes from around the country. He recovered from his injuries and was awarded the Silver Medal for Bravery from the SPCA. But it was really only sheer luck that stopped the incident ending in more carnage than an injured dog. It was a stark reminder of the need to have squad members who stay cool under pressure. They looked for people who weren't Ramos, who were reliable. They had to be basically levelheaded individuals. There's no room for cowboys on the squad. There's cowboys wouldn't exist on the squad because you know, you need to know that the guys on the squad, you can trust them implicitly with your life because they're the ones that looking after you. It wasn't an elitism about it, but there was a trustworthiness that, you know, you would look after the public and members of the police so they could rely on you. Squad members are relied on to make the right decision in the heat of the moment. I'm police. And although fire orders warrant them to shoot if they fear death or grievous bodily harm to themselves or others, squad members know that they alone are legally responsible if they use excessive force. The individual that pulls the trigger is responsible for that action of pulling the trigger. They can't fall back on the fact that I told them to do so. They've got to be able to justify the firing of that shot. This wasn't just a collective squad that um you know run to the order of of the senior officer. This was a group of individuals marshaled together under a management plan that really worked. The member will weigh up the circumstances as he sees it and he will apply those fire orders to the scenario as he sees it and understands it and uh he will accept responsibility for that act. We accept that there is a a burden of responsibility on our staff. In fact, it's a high burden and to overcome that we I believe anyway we select the best from within New Zealand police. The importance of selecting the right people soon becomes crystal clear when new members find themselves lining up an offender in their gun sites. The ultimate decision to shoot or not to shoot is a constant stress point for AOS members. This 14-year-old kid um had run away from over here in Christ Church somewhere. He'd stolen a vehicle which had a couple of loaded firearms in it. had gone bush with one or more of the firearms. And we put a helicopter up to see if we could spot him through these bush roads. And myself and another guy were lying on a garage roof. I looked through the scope and here he was with the rifle up pointing it at the helicopter. And I'm, you know, it went through my mind. If he pulls the trigger, then I have to. And it doesn't matter what he's done. I'm going to get in deep crap because I've shot a 14-year-old kid. And that's what goes through your mind. Thank God he didn't pull the trigger. I didn't need to and he got taken out by by a police dog. If you make a mistake, then you're the one who has to face the consequences. So, um I'd be the one standing in the, you know, the defendant's box in a courtroom. If that's what happens, we just have to deal with it and we have to deal with the fallout and the procedure that obviously you go through in the police if something like that ever happens and um just hope for your sake it never does. It's either justified and you have a legal defense to it or not. So, at the end of the day, it's up to the individual police officer um AOS member who's on the spot and you have to be justified in law and you have to be u responsible for your actions. The only thing that bothered me was the fact that I may have had to shoot a 14-year-old kid for no other reason um than he may have been showing off. But I'd like to [Music] think that if I have had to, I would have. That was what I was there for. The armed defenders squad are ordinary police officers who prepare for the worst case scenario. They come together for training knowing they will be forced to make life or death decisions in a heartbeat. Simply doing their job could mean having to take a life. And making the wrong decision could bring death to the innocent, a squadmate, or even themselves. Dave Hlett and Derek Webb know the score. Our intelligence section had a uh information about an Australian, a top Australian crim that was living in the uh Hanbay area and he was very dangerous and armed. And the decision made was that uh rather than appeal, it'd be best to do a covert entry into the premises and um capture him while he was still in bed. Three squad members silently entered the flat to take the offender by surprise. We were armed with 357 Magnums and as we went into the living room, there was a figure on the couch and this figure reached down and picked up a long barreled object and start to bring it up and point in our direction. On a Christurch call out, Dave Hlett had a similar moment when he was confronted by a man with what looked like a gun. I had my 357 Magnum pointed at his face from a couple of meters away and he was making moves like he was going to um bring this firearm up. I would have killed him without a doubt. As you squeeze the trigger on those weapons, the barrel rotates and makes a bit of a clicking sound. Very, very faint, but just a clicking sound. I could hear these three revolver barrels starting to turn, which meant that trigger pressure was coming up. One of us hit the light switch with our elbow. Wrong flat. The person on the couch was an old man who was sleeping on the couch. He thought his house was being broken into. He'd reached out to pick up his walking stick to defend himself with. Drop it. All of a sudden, the dog handler was there. The dog just roared past me and attacked him. Turned out he had lump of wood. I believe that he wanted me to believe that it was a firearm. If he pointed at me, I would have shot him. It would have been another pull chase shooting. Whatever the offender does, you have to manage. In some cases, they do orchestrate their own demise. whether they whether they um shoot themselves um or they they place themselves at risk of being shot by the police. As the 1980s wore on, the squads nationwide were attending hundreds of call outs every year. Steve Rdsdale was acting as coverman for a dog handler as they tracked an armed offender across Fungare farmland at night. I'm pretty pretty new and thinking u yeah this is pretty scary cuz I was um I mean dog handler is the one man in the front but I'm right behind him you know and um in our tracking team he picked up a track and we tracked through a few paddics through an orchard came across some plane cars and uh we could see footprints obviously it was pretty dark but we kept finding these playing cards And then 10 meters on, we'd find another card. And we we found, I think, about three or four, maybe five cards just in one paddic, you know. Um it wasn't it was a full deck or anything. Um but yeah, it was enough to make us think, you know, that perhaps this guy wants us to follow him. Is this guy going to ambush us? You know, heard the sound of someone climbing over a fence. you know, the wire [Applause] pinging a muzzle flash and a large bang and hit the deck pretty pretty smartly. No one was hit and despite the danger and very real risk of being ambushed, the men pushed on. As it turned out, after he fired the shot, uh, he continued to run through the paddics and actually went back to his house where he was apprehended. It was a good result in the end, but certainly one that the policeman could have been shot quite easily. In tense situations, some squad members find that the best coping mechanism is humor. There is a survival aspect to part of it. It's actually I think that filters all the way through the police when you've got the humor and the black humor and particularly in serious situations. Some of the worst humor comes out, but it actually alleviates the stress of the moment. Many a time that you've been at a in a call out in the middle of the night. Um the voice appeal's not worked. So often it just comes down to getting the offenders's attention by throwing something on the roof. Grapefruit through the window at 2:00 in the morning. Bound to get most people's attention. you'd always be able to identify which house had been an AOS call out at be the one with all the fruit on the roof or the kids toys or the firewood or something. The offender was um holding 22 bullets and a pair of pies and banging them with a hammer and setting them off all over the place. When we called in the house and finally did a voice appeal and called him out, he came out and he jumped up on a swimming pool fence and the power lines where they went into the side of the house. He grabbed hold of them and he's threatening to come any closer or you I'm going to put these in my mouth and and it was funny. It was comical in the end because I think it was a telephone wise he was putting in his mouth but yeah he was a little bit loose. We would be training with um CS gas um tear smoke and uh you'd finish, pack up the gear, go home, dump the gear in on near the laundry, and uh the wife would um would do the washing the next day. And of course, as she's putting it in there and stirring things up, but she'd come out um suffering from tear smoke. My wife threatened me with physical violence. If I ever stuck if I ever stuck that dirty, filthy gear out again to be washed, there'll be trouble. Yeah, she went crook on occasions. The boss would always start a debrief by saying, "Look, the first thing is there's not to be any tear gas thrown during the debrief." And uh so you'd actually during you know that during the debrief you'd always have your hand on your on your gas mask because you know at some stage it's uh someone's going to throw some tear gas into the middle and then normally halfway through one of the briefings you'd hear the can hit the ground and the hiss of the gas leaving and the boss would be cursing someone who'd leave it off because inevitably he wouldn't have a gas mask so he'd be the first off. bastards. When they were first established, the squads had set up in the major centers. But it was soon apparent that the provinces like Nelson, Northland, Hawks Bay needed an AOS presence. Isolated from their big city counterparts, the provincial squads often felt unmanned or undere equipped, but they quickly learned to make do with what they had. Sid Edjetton's West Coast squad had one of the longest beats. Our region was like um from Oakland to Wellington in length and you had seven guys to cover it and on a on a good day we were lucky if we could must have five BS for a call out sometimes we be away with three or four normally where you would have two people on a cord if you didn't have them you had to get get by with one I did actually venture in I was going to do some sergeant exams and uh I sat down to this paper and and they said you're a sergeant and such and such and you've got this guy this guy this guy, this guy, and this guy, and this guy, and this guy to go and deal with the situation. I looked at I thought, "Well, [ __ ] I'd send half them home, too many staff. I don't know what to do with them all." And um because you just you got by, you know, the only issue was the wet weather gear. It still defies me to this day that you can trial wet weather gear and give it to somebody in Oakuckland. You what's suitable in in uh the dry comforts of the of the city. just done cutting the mustard on the on the the we bit of drizzle we used to get on the coast. If you were lying on the ground, it actually absorbed water like a big sponge. Was hopeless stuff. Hopeless. They might have seen themselves as the poor cousins, but the call outs the rural squads attended were no less dangerous. Sid Edertton's squad was pursuing a gunman who had abducted his 9-month-old daughter from its mother when they cornered him in a culde-sac. The guy got out of the vehicle and he was standing in this cold stack and he had the nine ninemonth old child held across his chest and he had a the doublebarreled shotgun on his left sort of wasn't pointed threatening or anything at that stage just held down and I'm standing there sort of caught cold right out in the open. I thought well not much of an option here. So I just picked the weapon up lined up on the on the end of his nose with the crosshairs and I'm looking through the scope thing and rifle in the town built up area. This is going to be a bit dodgy. We were yelling at him and peeling for him to put the kid down, put the shotgun down. And he was taking no notice of us. And he sort of started waving it up towards the the AC who was tucked behind a pole over to my right. And I'm looking at him thinking, well, if that points right at him, I'm not going to be left with too much option here. And at that stage, um, the dog hander released his dog and he was a big big dog, big German Shepherd, very angry one. And, um, he was charging straight for this guy. And I thought, "Oh no." Because police dogs attacking people, you know, they just go straight for the front. And I thought, "This dog's just going to jump up there and this poor bloody baby's going to get ripped to bits by a very angry German Shepherd. And so that's running through my mind. I'm thinking, god forbid. To this day yet, no one knows. No one can work out why. But old drum, the dog that was doing the attack, he um he peeled off to one side and come around and come straight on behind this guy and latch straight into his hamstring. That the guy dropped the shotgun. That gave us the opening. Yeah. suddenly put her in able to sedue and get the weapon clear, get the child clear and fantastic result. Call outs in towns and cities across the country meant the squad's exploits were becoming well known. But away from the public eye, a highly secretive arm of the AOS, the anti-terrorist squad was training to deal with the very worst international incidents. There were a lot of incidents happening around the world. Uh terrorism, airplanes getting blown up, hostages shot, the powers that be suddenly realized that um we weren't prepared. New Zealand wasn't prepared for that sort of incident taking place here. And it was decided that the police would form a an anti-terrorist squad as it was known in those days ATS. Certain members were selected from AOS and sent for specialist training. The training I went through was as a sniper and at that time there were six of us throughout New Zealand who went and did the course with the army and spent two months uh training as snipers. The other part of the team were obviously the assault teams and they were they were trained through various different people on assault techniques and special tactics and what have you. The first real terrorists the ATS dealt with were the French spies charged with bombing the Rainbow Warrior in 1985. Major Alan Mafar and Captain Dominic Priier arrived at court amid heavy security. On this occasion, the ATS simply acted as bodyguards. But in 1986, with no international terrorists in sight, the anti-terrorist squad was sent into action on the lawless East Cape. These rusters, they um were living in in the bush from Gisman, right in land from Gisman. And they'd been operating planting um you know um cannabis. They had cannabis farms in there and you know quite a big way. And they'd upset the farmers by they'd go down to the beach to get seafood and that and we just cut the fences and walk through. That's how it all started. And then they killed the fell. They chopped Kaga Arasa's head off and put him in put him down a big well and the body was in the well and that's how we came to hear her. So Gisbon asked us to come up and you know to help out. So we went up there and we took an Eric helicopter for the air force and we spent oh a small week just you know with the helicopter going over the whole area. Of course the the gangs went to to ground and you couldn't find them in the bush. Drama began here in the early hours of Tuesday morning when armed police surrounded this hut in which three fugitives were sleeping. While they were trying to talk them into giving themselves up, they seized a policeman as a hostage, took his firearm, and rode off into the bush. They haven't been seen since. One of the the Gizman was taken hostage by the Westerians. They took him along on horseback into the mountains kind of thing. And that was a situation when when I was called in. I'm not sure. Uh we don't know where when you talk they were in there. Um whether they were in the area that we'd search for first time, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Taking the ATS up there, we had more equipment. They had far more equipment than the standard AOS. Be able to get a hold of the um the Air Force with the helicopter was a huge advantage to get through there. They recourse would take a a section and and land them somewhere and they would, you know, sort of patrol through the bush looking for signs, looking for anything by then they'd release the police officer. But I mean, we still had to find the four who were the main offenders. How do you see the situation being resolved? A shootout perhaps? No, hopefully not. Hopefully not. the media were on our backs, you know, so why haven't you caught them? And um and you know, what are you doing? The cost of this operation is going up and up and up. How much longer do you think it can be kept up? That's that's not my problem. That's that's a problem for my superiors. But the pressure soon came on Taff and the ATS as headquarters issued a deadline, 48 hours to find the rusters or be forced to withdraw empty-handed. The locals had all coming up supportive of the of the raers initially, but then as the police pressure came on, they were sort of telling us, you know, why don't you go and look up here? They're probably down there, you know. And then on Saturday afternoon, we called one and we picked another one up on Saturday evening and we picked one up on Sunday morning. But by midday Sunday with only hours till deadline, one armed offender was still on the run in Rutoria. Just after lunch on the sund deck, they saw the fourth guy. So we got the four of them just before we flew back, which was which was really satisfying. Success. But the ATS were yet to be truly tested under fire. Their chance came soon enough. You just constantly waiting for that shot to ring out. It was like a sniper paradise. By the late 80s, the elite section of the armed defenders squad, the anti-terrorist squad, had emerged from the shadows. [Applause] When the Commonwealth Games came to New Zealand, it was the job of this highly specialized team to ensure security was tight. for all of '89. We did a lot of preparation, a lot of training for the Commonwealth Games. So, we were away one week per month for the whole of 1989 and doing training for for that. Peter and I were both anti-terrorist squad members in those different cities and and we would meet up say whenever there was some national training, we'd meet up and do the national training together. And so, that was pretty unusual to actually have your brother on the squad, too. And it was that was great. we got a new batch of MP5s and so once again you had the um you know pretty much the latest technology in terms of weapons. I never in my wildest dreams thought that the New Zealand police had any sort of capability like this. So that was a real eye opener but also very sobering and the fact that I had so much to to learn. The games and later VIP visits passed without incident but the anti-terrorist squad were about to face their greatest test. I was the shift inspector in town and I was in control. 3 to 11 was the shifts and um the news. We always had a TV company in control and you watch the news and this came up. 10-year-old girl and a 62y old man are in Duneden Hospital tonight. They were shot by a man who police say has gone berserk with a gun in the small township of Aramana about 20 kilometers from the city. Police say a local house has also been set on fire. I was at home and it come on TV. I said to my wife, I said, "We should be down there." And within an hour of that, we got a phone call. The telefanist just put out a call. Would any ATS members call the TFA? So, I gave her a ring and she said, "Oh, there's been a um there's a call out for ATS." And I said, "Are you sure it's ATS, not AOS?" And she said, "No, it's definitely ATS call out." And we'd never had an ATS call out before. I'd never been the subject of an ATS call out. [Music] Shortly after, the ambulances started bringing out the first victims. We we got there at approximately midnight on arrival in Deneden. Police used the time to organize their forces and worry about a colleague they feared was among the victims. We learned that a one of the local sergeants um Stu Guthrie had been killed and uh and obviously other people within the um within the little township had been killed as well. So um you know this was it was really something quite serious. Christ Church ATS members knew this massacre was the biggest test they'd ever faced. But without their Wellington reinforcements and without night vision gear, all they could do was sit tight and wait until morning. By dawn, police were expecting more action and they got it. When their helicopter made its first flight over Aramana, it drew more shots from the gunman. Daylight had not brought an end to the horror. The Wellington team, they arrived about, you know, midm morning, late mid morning. The briefing was a bit of a mess cuz nobody really knew much about our morning. The locals had all come out. The police had got them out the night before. And we talked to them and some of them said, "Look, as soon as you guys front up, he'll just go down. He'll lie down and cry, you know." And others said, "Oh, he's got all sorts of military weapons and he'll shoot all you guys." The commissioner of police had arrived. um the the minister of police had arrived. You know, there was there was police everywhere and um you know, everyone was um on edge. The commissioner and the minister of police were sort of keen that we should get forward. News media were all sitting around. What are you going to do about it? Then we load ourselves into um some vehicles and um drove in the long shingle road all the way into um into Aramana. And then our job was to search each home. As that would done, the armed defenders would cordon the block. So therefore you could more or less grid search the village. We put snipers up on top of the hill which is about 800 yards away. But with their telescopic sights they could see the whole village and see the fires that he had lit. Their briefing was to keep see if they could find him. You're feeling pretty vulnerable just walking through pretty much open country. So it was a real relief to get in amongst the trees. You cannot operate invisibly, you know. So you'll use what there is. Trees, ditches, houses, whatever you think will give you cover, have sufficient time to move quickly so that someone won't be able to get a bead on you. The plan was formulated there that we would um we go and clear Grace Batch first. As we moved forward, we we came across these the some of the bodies, you know, some of the people that had been shot. We could see the, you know, the dead bodies on the ground and we could see the the the kids in the back of the youth. Once again, that was just very sobering. I was thinking, you we're just going to have to be really really careful, you know, in terms of patrolling through and and keeping our drills as tight as we possibly could. I don't think anybody was scared. I think training took over. You just doing what you had to do. You weren't thinking on, oh, what's going to happen here? You know, how am I going to do this? Where am I going to go? Anyone who's in a situation, if you if your child falls into the off the warf in front of you, you don't think, "What am I going to do?" You just jump in. So, we we patrolled through um a couple of properties to um to get to Grace Beach. We went into this house cuz the door was open and um I remember the lounge had low windows. If you looked out the window, you could see um Gray's house, which was only 100 yards away, just straight opposite. There was one guy obviously dead lying in the lounge. There was somebody else sitting under the table with his leg legs sitting up like this, just sitting under the table against the wall. So I called to him and I didn't want to be too noisy cuz I didn't know where Gray was. And uh so I crawled around the room and when I got like you know a few yards away from I could see that he'd been shot and he was dead you know but he just slumped up against the wall and that was quite disturbing. This poor old guy you know just yeah so anyway there's nothing we could do about that. You sort of felt you should cover them up or why aren't we getting these bodies removed or something you know but um we couldn't. We just had to move on. The man prepared to enter David Gray's house knowing he'd already killed a dozen people in cold blood. And then we crossed the road and just got to the bushes right in front of his property. And I just fired some tear gas rounds into his place and we just waited for for any reaction. There was no reaction. And then the uh the next thing was to do an entry. So we just used some stun grenades and threw them in first and then went in through the door and and started to clear his place. I thought he'd done a murder suicide as I was convinced that someone had done such horrendous things couldn't live with himself. [Music] But Gray was nowhere to be found. Once we cleared that and found that he wasn't there, we thought, "Okay, we just got to knuckle down and um and the next thing we're going to have to do is start to clear the whole town." Aram Moana is a small settlement, but the gunman could be anywhere. The squads would have to move street by street, house by house, until they found Gray. What we tried to do was one get one group ahead quickly while we covered him just, you know, and the snipers were covering from the top and they would check the next house out and we were just moving from house to house like this. We found um Stu Guthrie and um and once again once again very sobering, even more sobering than seeing the um the other bodies and uh so we saw him in his police uniform there and um and that really just hardened our resolve. That was quite disturbing. Sergeant Stu Guthrie went into Aram Moana armed with a 38 against a man with an AK-47. He put himself in a position very very early in the piece totally in harm's way to protect the public and he got killed for that. It just made us pick our game up even more. you just constantly waiting for that shot to ring out. And there was a lot of cover for for Gray to um to use. There was sand dunes. There was um bushes and trees and outuildings and and just the whole place was just a as someone said, it was like a sniper paradise and it really was. With Gray still at large, the men had no option but to carry on with the painstaking process. We searched 29 houses. Very stressful, very tiring. In all honesty, I think our jaws started to slip. We became casual and and and probably too too relaxed because you just can't keep up operating at that level all the way through. It was starting to get late, you know, it was getting towards 6:00 and it was this night's upon us. What are we going to do now? I think we were only about halfway through the through all the houses in Arana. I was pretty sure we were going to have to do this again the next day if we hadn't found them. The very next house, we found another house with the window smashed. We went forward to this window and um my my team leader told me to throw a stunning against this window. So I threw the stunning against the window and it immediately bounced out onto the ground. We went back around the corner and um he he told me to clear the clear the rest of the glass [Music] out. From within there was just just this huge amount of fire just going boom boom boom straight down towards my head. My team leader was on my shoulder and he just returned fire straight in back into the window. Still unseen. The curtains are still pulled. [Applause] We're just absolutely stoked that we hit our man. Next week, if he just come out and put his hands in the air, no matter what he'd have done, no matter how much loathing you had for him, you could not shoot him. The AOS enter the '90s with casualties. It was really frightening. If he sees me, he's going to shoot me. And drug crazed crims run the squads off their feet. Drug abuser armed, fires shots, is mobile. We needed to bring it to an end as the men and women of the armed offenders squad put themselves in the line of [Music] fire. Since 1964, the Police Armed Offenders Squad have been the last line of defense when lives are under threat. A lot of what the AOS do probably goes unrecognized. As violent crime surged in the 70s, the squads would be tested under fire time and again in the very worst situations. I'd be a liar if I said at the time I wasn't terrified. In the 80s, the anti-terrorist branch of the squad came out of the shadows. I got exposed to things that um I never thought I'd ever get exposed to in the police force. In November 1990, the anti-terrorist squad played a deadly game of cat and mouse. Not against a foreign terrorist, but in Otago's tiny seaside town of Adam Moana against a man named David Gray. You constantly waiting for that shot to ring out. It was like a sniper paradise. [Music] Heat. Heat. From within there was just just this huge amount of fire just going boom boom boom straight down towards my head. My team leader was on my shoulder and he just returned fire straight in back into the window. There's fire going both ways past me. I just pulled away as quickly as I could down to the edge. I I didn't even look for any holes. I just knew that I was okay. I was I was great and I felt great. We're just absolutely stoked that we had our man. Roger. Just keep your hands. I went round to the front with Ash and we just um held on the front doors of this place about 12 m out on on the boundary. Fired into the house, fired high to keep him down. I did hopefully there was no one else in the house. So I fired high, let him know that we were here. He wasn't gunning down women and kids. Come out, David. Please. Then Pete and I called on him to come out. You know, put your weapon down and that's part of our call. So that was done. You could hear this call going on. By this stage, I'd thrown some tear gas in. We had a gas mask on and we were yelling out to him to come out and uh and eventually he did. He came out the front door. If he'd just come out and put his hands in the air, no matter what he'd have done prior to that, you couldn't shoot him. No matter what you thought, no matter how repulsive, no matter how how much loathing you had for him, you could not shoot him. He came to the front door and unlike the movie, he sort of just slked out the door. And I sort of describe it like a rat leaving a um leaving a ship, you know, just trying to slink out. Call police weapon. I wasn't even sure, and this is how bizarre it seems. I wasn't even sure this is the right guy. How bizarre is that? I couldn't see the gun for a start off. And then as he turned, he had the gun on the inside between him and the door as he slunk out of the door. Straight away, I called on him, yelled out, "Stop police, and um straight away he just started bringing his gun up, shooting towards us. We opened up on him and he was shot five times and he dropped and then he started screaming, "Kill me. Effing kill me." Kicked his weapon away and then just tried to apply the handcuffs and I pointed my weapon, which is a MP5 machine gun, at his head and I seriously thought about killing him for a second, but I didn't. because I'm not a murderer. We have he has been injured. It's quite serious. He was still struggling and and it was a real effort. You know, we were kicking him and trying to trying to subdue him to to get the to get the handcuffs on and finally we got the handcuffs on. He'd been shot in the head and there was blood everywhere and there was mucus all over his hand and he pulled his hands out of the handcuff. He must have been extremely strong. The record was arrived pretty quickly with medical staff on board and he received medical treatment really quite quickly. He died at the scene. After such a harrowing 24 hours, the ATS squads walked back out of the village. As we walked out along along the road on the way out, the a lot of the people had come forward to get back into their houses and they sort of lined the road and and we sort of walked through the middle and they just they clapped clipped us. Yeah. I thought how strange. I just went home and and tried to put it out of my mind. Everyone has dealt with numerous situations. You have to move on. You can't dwell on it. If you dwell on it, then you finished. The next morning I got up quite early and my my youngest boy was the only one still at school. He was at high school and and I was at the kitchen table. I was reading the paper was reading through all this stuff and he comes out and I thought you know what am I going to tell him cuz he all want to know about these things. So he grabbed his lunch which was in the fridge and he went to the door and then he said um you could have been killed there. What about us? He walked out. I thought you're probably right. And that sort of um made me think about being in the squad and I thought [ __ ] Then you start thinking about things like that, you know, which you don't you don't ever think you'll get hurt. None of us ever thought we'd get shot, you know, why would we get [Music] shot? Armed Defenders Squad call outs don't need to have a high death toll to be devastating. The West Coast's Ken Foreman recalls one offender trying for suicide by cop. Jimmy was going to go out in a blaze of glory. He had the two firearms, the 800 rounds, and yeah, the next thing I see is Jimmy Malone coming over the back fence at the property. There was a horse paddic and around the outside of it, it had a fence. And with all this gear that Jimmy was carrying, I knew that he would have to stop at that fence and put something down to get over it. He got to the fence and then he climbed over and that was when we challenged him. Police, if he reached for either of those firearms, then it was going to happen. Back away. Back away. on your knees. That is as close as I've ever come or ever want to come to pulling the trigger. That's when it all sort of started. I started to get the shakes and I thought I'd lost my bottle. I thought, you know, you've got to leave the squad. you're no good to them anymore if you're going to do this. And you know, it was only very brief. It was probably only for five minutes and then I was I was as good as gold. But I really thought that I'd lost my bottle. It scared me. It scared me that that I'd reacted that way. And I reacted in a way that I didn't understand. Every time I think of that we fence, I think it saved Jimmy Balone and it certainly saved me. And Jesse and I when we were driving back to Greymouth, we went back together. And Jesse looked at me and he said, "You could have shot him." I said, "Yes, Jesse, I could have. But you and I wouldn't be driving back to Greymouth right now. We would be hauled off somewhere until we were interviewed. I said, "We can do without that. We need to get back and have a couple of beers." Land across the other side of the road here. At the back of the address is a large football field. From the beginning, the armed defender squad was male-dominated. In the mid '90s, Sasha Haskell became one of the first females to join the squad. Seeking a new challenge, the former territorial soldier and national rep footballer arrived at the police college for her AOS selection course. Fortunately, because I had been in the army, there was a little bit of street cred, I suppose, having done something that was actually on the face of it a lot more um regimented in military than than the AOS's. And people like Sasha and and a number of others have proved that uh they're more than capable. There were some women constables that were just outstanding, left the BS in the shade, and there were some policemen who were outstanding, you know? I mean, just all people. It didn't make any difference. I was small, physically smaller than everyone else. So, I'd always end up sort of getting pushed into ceilings and through little manholes and things like that. So, I sort of ended up sort of playing that kind of role. So, they sort of like, oh, we're such a we just chuck her up there. When you've got a female offender, it's certainly nice to have a female officer dealing with her. A lot of the gang places that we go to, there'd be females there. So even though I was in total black and no one would know that I was a woman, I kind of ended up looking after females just was an added protection. So if there was accusations later on about, you know, inappropriate behavior, it kind of took that out of the equation. There's one squad room and everyone gets changed in there. So unfortunately for them, they got to see me in my underwear, but um not for long. Like everyone was sure not to look at me. I was sure that I didn't look at them. You know, the overalls weren't really conducive to to the female anatomy. So you'd be dying to go to the toilet. And the zippers sort of have a zipper at the top and a zipper at the bottom. So you'd have to get almost completely naked to go to the L. So if you're a boy, it's sort of a little bit easier. His girlfriend had warned them he had a gun and ammunition and that he was unstable. One of the most dangerous jobs on the squad is searching buildings and facing offenders on their own patch as the Christurch squad was reminded on an August morning in 1991. The information was that there is a um a person with a gun and like a big twostory bedset place and our brief initially was do the cord and contain. and I was I got positioned in a house uh right next door to where the offender's bedroom was supposed to be. We went up the stairs, made sure the hallway was clear, and the offender was located in the room. Instead of coordinating the whole house, knowing that there was numerous little beds within there just to cordon just that one room. So that that was their brief and and they went up. There was voice appeal made to the offender which he refused to answer. And after a period of time, I got the instruction, well, stuffed ash, kick the door in, and then went to the left hand side of the door and peered through. And I just exposed the smallest part of my body as I could, which was my hands and part of my [Music] face. And then I was shot with a shotgun. All I heard on the over the radio was Ash had been shot and um they couldn't recover him. And um I thought he'd been killed and like Ash was a was a close friend of mine. I'd been shot in the face. It was just like being smacked with sort of a [Music] hammer. I then attempted to shoot the offender, but I couldn't because my revolver was jammed with pellets, but also both my hands were split open. And then another shot fired. Then a big hole appeared in the hallway wall. I thought, "Oh [ __ ] he's just going to come out here and shoot me now cuz I was virtually defenseless. [Music] Someone threw tear gas in. But of course, I had no mass, so I was coughing up tear gas and bleeding and my hands didn't work. The offender had jumped out the uh side window. So, he was caught by our guys further down on the on the back or on the backyard of this property. So, that that was all taken care of. So, I came down from the house and and came out to see what I could do to help Ash. I actually went to a window and yelled out to get me a ladder. I did actually swear at the time. I think it was get me an effing ladder. They didn't get me an effing ladder. They assisted me down the stairs where I very romantically chunded on the footpath. [Music] He's pretty shot up in the face and shot up in the hands and myself and another one of the guys just joined up and we just um carried him down the road to the to the ambulance. Constable Ashton's hand caught most of the blast, but three pallets hit him in the head. One went through his throat and lodged near his spine. He was okay, but it was a close call. I got this one for being shot and I got this one for shooting at someone. So, I can tell you it's better to give than receive. Our top story, a huge police operation on the Coramandal Peninsula in the hunt for four dangerous prisoners on the run. The four two of them convicted murderers escaped from Oakland's medium security prison at Perema on Monday night. In 1998, a very highprofile call out brought the armed offenders squad onto TV screens throughout the nation. Operation escape, seeking four dangerous escapees from Pereos saw AOS teams from all over the North Island descend on the town of Tyoua. The camouflage looks military, but they're not soldiers. These men are police officers. For two decades, this unit was known as the anti-terrorist squad, but in the early '90s became the Special Tactics Group. The name change was because their job was now much broader than guarding against terrorism. For many AOS members, joining the STG is the pinnacle of their career. To be asked to join their group was quite an honor. I got exposed to things that I never thought I'd ever get exposed to in the police force. They asked if I wanted was interested uh joining the STG and um I had no idea what the STG was. So I said yes, absolutely. That's what I'm here for. I'd love to join the STG. In Tyru, the STG worked alongside armed defenders squads. Their training and tracking saw them sent deep into the rugged hills of the Coramandal. There was a lot of bush walking to do and and clearing and every single report that came through in regards to Taylor and his his group would be um handed to us and each unit would be sent off whether by vehicle, by helicopter or by foot. Let's make no bones about it. The the individuals concerned were uh were violent criminals. You know, they were a serious threat to the community. They had been disturbed in this um address just slightly south of Tyra in a very very lovely home. Because we didn't know if the offenders were in there or whether they'd left, we knew there were firearms involved. The decision was made to cord and put a tight coordinate around the building, wait for some daylight so we could see better um and then start voice appealing uh where we could control things better. And as the sun was coming up, um, another guy and I were crouched at the level of the concrete and in front of us there was an object uh, 3 or 4 feet away sitting on the concrete. And as the light came up, it sort of came into focus and we were both staring at it. And then we could see a wire running out of it and heading off towards the house like a bomb. And all night we'd been sitting there with it right next to us. So we sort of tapped the boss on the shoulder and said, "Hey, look at that." We had to put a staff between the bomb tech um and the house and I guess I was one of the new guys and that was me. It was a long day. No food, really hot, stuck out exposed and your black gear with your ballistic helmet and your armor on. So, it's pretty long day. They had taken firearms from the house. They had broken into the firearms safe and and we saw later in the bedroom where they'd actually got a hacksaw and sorn the barrels off some of the weapons and the barrels and all the filings were all sitting on the floor in the bedroom of one of these houses. So that sort of heightened the whole situation. Police have just told us that they found guns and ammunition on a beach near this luxury hideaway house. At first light, the squads made their move. At low tide, we walked around the rocks to the area where they had um last been seen and then we deployed. I looked ahead up into the scrub and there was something there that just was out of place. and I scoped and then I realized it was a person and then I challenged him um and put his head up and I knew it was um Arthur Taylor handcuffed him and then we proceeded down the hill. He looked pretty pretty tuckered, I'd have to say. I think he'd been in the bush for a day or two and he looked pretty pretty bugged to me. The three remaining prisoners were recaptured over the next few days and Tyruer returned to normal. Armed offenders call outs have always been a media magnet. But by the mid '90s, as news reporting got faster, often the first information from the front line to the wives at home came via the TV. The drama at the police station caught the quiet Wakato farming town by surprise just after lunch. As the siege unfolded, armed police converged on Morrenville from all over the Wakato region. The one time that I really feared for him was the Morrenville shooting. That was the one of those jobs that you just knew it was the real thing. The situation was bizarre, if you like, a kidnapping and a hostage taking in a police station. You're holding seven people. That's right. Have you got a gun? Explosives. What kind of explosives? Explosives. All right. Just take it like that. The homes program had been contacted by Larry Hammond. And so the phone line in and out of that police the Mville police station was was locked um to the homes program. He's uh busy wiring up uh explosives at the moment. Do you know this fellow Larry? I've only spoken to him once. He's claiming that uh microchips were put into his head and has been suffering electrical shock treatment ever since. He's got a crossbow in his hands at the moment. When we called in the building, I was a sniper or a marksman on the squad. So, I' i'd picked a fire escape looking down on the police station and I remember thinking, I wonder if this guy's got the arm safe open. It was a logical thing, you know, there's a police station there. Uh there's weapons there. Has he got the um safe open? And could he be lining me up with a rifle? And and I moved because I felt too exposed. Get away. Get away. Get away. [Music] Oh, my heart just sank and I just thought, "Oh." Because they said that someone had been shot and that a police officer had been hurt. And I knew it was their squad that had gone to the call out cuz it's their area. Anybody here? Everyone's out. All right. Real fear it was. Actually, I really did start to feel a bit panicky when I heard what had happened. And within probably 5 minutes of hearing that breaking news, he phoned me and said, "Don't worry, it wasn't me." The offender was shot. A police officer was shot by the offender with a crossbow bolt. Um and uh when the scene examination was done, the explosive devices were capable of detonating. So it was um you know a serious situation. Family man and Oakland squad commander Tim Masters has dealt with many call outs in his time, but one in particular is burnt in his memory. My granddad, your granddad? Yes. Shot my brother. Your granddad shot your brother? Yes. and I think he's going to shoot me. Linda had secreted herself in a cupboard at the family house and um she had heard Brian Slater had come looking for her and she had the presence of mind to hide and she'd also got onto the phone. Where's grandad? I don't know. He's probably here or looking for me. He's either looking for your mom or he's looking for you. So as the police AOS operation unfolded, they realized how serious the situation was as they came across bodies in different parts of the property. The problem was we didn't know where Brian Slaver was. It was a priority to get Linda out of that house, you see, cuz they couldn't leave her in there because possibility that Brian Schla would come across her and kill her by lunchtime. And still no sighting of Brian Schlaer despite the police using infrared technology in the search. If Brian Schlaer does hear uh any of this news broadcast, please contact us and let us know where we can make a safe approach to you. Don't hang up the phone. Leave the phone off and you come back as soon as you can and see me. The grandfather has gone outside to try and kill the father who's working out in the garden somewhere. She hasn't seen him for about 15 minutes now. I went out with um with three or four or five other members and a member of the St. John ambulance at the time to get her and and bring her out. We had deployed snipers out in into the area, so we had cover when we went out there to get Linda back. Um, and of course, we had to be aware that he could be anywhere on the property. Your senses were certainly heightened. Behind any tree or building, he could be there, you see. So, uh, we're we were aware of that and our tactics, uh, going out to the house had to take all that into consideration. We've had six murders committed and we're desperate that there's no more. For Tim's wife, Linda, hearing this tragedy play out live on air was very worrying. It's on the radio. You're at work and you're you've got half an ear on that. And for other people, it's just another normal day at work. And you'll think, "Yes, but um you know, is there going to be someone come home tonight or not?" Just stay where you are. All right. You just listen to the instructions very very carefully. All right. Yeah. Don't you unlock the door? Yes. when we got her and the relief on her face definitely, you know, when again without emphasizing what she had witnessed and had been through. Yeah. We were just glad to get her out of there. Coming back out, our sniper at the time, Linda just stuck to him like glue. You know, you couldn't have put a cigarette paper between the two of them. Yeah. You could see what she perhaps witnessed and been through edged in her face. Less than an hour later, it was all over. The gunman's body was found on the family farm. Ryan Schleer suicide. His wife, three sons, daughter-in-law, and grandson murdered. For the police, it was a massive operation of the saddest kind. He comes home. [Music] He lay down in the doorway and went to sleep. And I knew that that was the mental stress of the day. So I just left him there to sleep. And eventually he woke up, go to bed as normal. And nothing said, but sometime in the middle of the night he'd wake up and that's when he'd start talking about it. So you just learned that there will come a time and you wait for the time. You don't push it. So much of the mental stress of being on the armed defenders squad comes from a heavy responsibility borne by the members. The responsibility to make the right call every time. Sasha Haskell, Sid Ejertton, and Derek Webb have all been painted into a corner by the actions of offenders. It started here at 5 3. Sasha's squad had been called to a domestic in Wua Marta. Police got a call. A man was armed with a 222 pump-action rifle. Shots had been fired. He said that he would come out of the house and shoot anyone that he saw and that he was going to walk down to the police station and kill everyone in the police station. And there was a fence separating his house from where I actually was. I was with a colleague and we were um lying on the driveway. When you sort of looked through the fence, you could actually see in in between gaps and you could I just started seeing him walking walking down. It was really frightening. You know, if he sees me, he's going to he's going to shoot me. Yeah. Come on, boy. On the west coast, Sid Edertton was called to back up a colleague being stalked by a gunman. Come on, Jo. We came screeching around the corner and um he's just the offender was walking up. We recognized him cuz we knew him before. threw the old Commodore into neutral and just sort of dragged the handbrake on to let her slow down. And we bailed me out one side, him out the other, and put a challenge into him to to let him know we're police. He sort of bought a shotgun round towards me and I had mine lined up on the back of his head. At that stage, everything just seemed to have slowed up. Coming out, Derek Webb found himself looking through his sniper scope at a man threatening his squad with a rifle. A number of emotions go through you. You're watching through the scope. You're watching his face. You know what he looks like. You know the actions he's going on about. He's you're watching his body movement. So, there's a bit of how can I put it? Intimacy there. You really have to assess every second in it on on its own merits because he may have very easily just dropped the the rifle on the ground at any given moment. So, you're constantly thinking about your justification. Drop it. It's just amazing how much the brain's computing in seconds or less than seconds. You know, it's just all happening and it's all going. I could see it all. Police officer shoot me and back and that would have been the sensational news item of the night and it's going through your mind and I'm thinking, well, there's no other option here. He was then called on to to drop the firearm and um he turned around. The police dogs were released on him and he shot at one of them. The person sitting next to me did shoot him and and I didn't. I had their safety off trigger being pulled as he pulled the shotgun back around and put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger, which was a pretty traumatic result. Very, very quickly. In a matter of a split second, he pulled a rifle up and he took a shot at one of the guys. And fortunately, uh, he missed, but he reloaded and start to take aim. And so it was necessary at that stage to um take the shot. We went forward. We um obviously tried to give him first aid. We called an ambulance and uh rather unfortunately he died. He has been shot. Repeat, he has been shot. Can I get an ambulance there? Immediately over. It was something that I played over in my mind over and over and over again. I probably felt at the time that I'd failed in some respect. Did I do the right thing? Uh could I have done this in a less um violent manner? And it was something actually that I thought I was going through on my own, but I spoke to a couple of people that had actually fired. They said, "Oh, I felt like a failure." And I was like, "Wow." You know, they're going through exactly the same thought processes, but we we did different things. Luckily enough for me, it was just taken out of my hands at the last moment. Yeah. If he hadn't have done that and I'd have squeezed the trigger, God knows what would have happened from there. She would have been a full-on investigation and um someone that has all day and every day for the next 2 years can make a decision as to whether or not I'd made the right decision in that much time. After any fatal shooting, AOS members are investigated by homicide detectives, the coroner's court, and the independent police conduct authority. Every shooting is treated like a a normal homicide. Um, and our members are subject to enormous amount of investigating involving both the responsibility of the shooter, responsibility of the the section as a wider group and obviously the police operation. um that led to that call out. I had a discussion with my supervisor at that stage. I actually said to him, "Does this mean I'm off the team?" Uh and I I think I voiced an opinion. If if I'm off the team, I'll feel as though I've done something wrong. It took a year and a half of investigation for Derek Webb to be cleared after firing that fatal shot. So, anybody that thinks, you know, that um you live happily ever after after one of those things is um you know, you don't you're in limbo for quite some time. It is a world in which you don't know what's going to happen to you. The intense media scrutiny after a shooting prompted members to pull on their balaclavas less for the warmth than for their anonymity. If I was in the unfortunate position to be involved in a shooting like that as the shooter, then I wanted to protect my identity and that of my family for as long as I could. We did an operation on a on a gang pad. When we got in there and took over the place in their living room, they had a dart board and on the dartboard was uh lo and behold my photograph taken from a newspaper article. So in protecting your identity, you also protect your family's identity. The balaclava also provides another way to protect life. Val clavs are intimidating and there are times when um you need to confront an offender and he needs to know that you that you mean business otherwise there may be a different result. If a police officer regardless of what he's wearing blue or black if his presence is intimidating enough that dominates the the offender into into giving himself up surrendering or doing as he's told then then then you're halfway there. Often at briefings, you'd be told that this offender, there's no way the police will take him alive and he'll he'll shoot the first copy sees. Please don't move. When you dominate them and they're faced with guys in black gear pointing weapons at them, the bravado is just lost. They're not so brave. If it's intimidating, no apologies. But sometimes the covert approach is the most effective. One of the biggest local news stories of 2002 was the abduction of little baby Kahu. The 8-month-old girl was grabbed from outside her lower hut home, launching a massive police search. It gets increasingly more disheartening as time goes on. To stack the odds in their favor, police employed the crack surveillance skills of the special tactics group, sending them to the King Country on the strength of a tip off from locals. We'd managed to narrow it down to a house in Tam Renu. We're involved in observation of an address for um a couple of days, a property that we wanted to um either roll in or rule out of the of the inquiry. There was no sign. There was no noise coming from it. And the offender had gone away that that next day. So we thought we can't wait around any longer. Time was a was a critical factor particularly when you when you when you're talking about a baby. The decision was made that we we needed to do take some positive action to either um confirm or deny that this property was involved or this person was involved. Moving silently, the team entered the house. Clear through the kitchen. There's nothing there. Then carried on clearing down through the hallway. We just came into this room that was lined with plywood in one corner. Here she was, baby cow, who just sitting in a cot. And it was just overwhelming to see her there. And to see her, she was alive. She was the room was warm. She was she seemed good as gold. You've probably never seen a bunch of BS smile so broadly before, you know. One job that really affected him was probably the baby cahoo story. A lot of the the people involved thought that um the baby would be dead and so they were preparing themselves for that and then the fact that they found her and she was alive then that was fantastic. It felt you know quite a lot of emotion coming across me at that stage because I had kids [Music] myself. to the guy I was um I was I was working with, he just pushed her out of the room, out the hallway, out the back door and um into a van and they just took off and then it was sort of okay, now what do we do? So we were kitted up and driving around with a little baby in the back. Got directed to the um base hospital and you know there's couple of sitting in the back with this little baby thinking what do we do? We did um thought maybe we'll give her something to play with but obviously didn't don't generally carry um things for kids on us. So gave her low stick which which you break and um got all sorts of chemicals inside it. And just as we gave it to we thought well hang on maybe that's not the best thing to give a little girl little baby. So took that off her and we knew that the offender is probably likely to come back that that late that afternoon or late that night. So we had to set up a plan to capture him. a matter of hours afterwards. Um he's obviously unaware that the the child had been recovered and um returned back to the address and yeah, we were waiting for him. [Music] He was just monstered face down on the ground, handcuffs applied and that was it. Handed over to the CIB investigators and job done. Another job resolved without a shot being fired. But with violent crime on the rise and a new drug culture sweeping the cities, the stakes are getting higher and higher. As the new millennium wears on, violent crime in New Zealand is constantly in the headlines. The job of policing in this country has never been more dangerous. Having been overseas for the last sort of five or six years and coming back, New Zealand's incredibly violent. The nature of the call outs, um the level of violence, um the frequency of firearms and the unpredictability really of some of the offenders meant that some of the AOS tactic tactics had to become more assertive, more aggressive if you like. Chap in front of me, um he would have been about 17, 18 years old. He had a box cutter. Pulled the box cutter out, flicked the blade on, turned at us, and decided he was going to have a go. And as opposed to shooting him, I decided to put the the butt of the shotgun through his jaw. And it dropped him in a hurry, but um you know, under those circumstances, you get about half a second to decide what you're going to do. And uh I chose not to shoot him. Reasons for the increased violence are well documented. Although hidden PE labs were being raided as early as 99, now police are busting hundreds of labs per year in Oakland alone. This marks a new era for the AOS. It's had a huge impact. Huge impact. You'll find labs out in the country these days, labs in industrial blocks, labs in homes where the kids are playing around. Most of the jobs the squads attend. P's a feature in there somewhere. Methamphetamine. there's um inevitably gang involvement. Um firearms are involved. So, you know, AOE are involved in the majority of operations. The squads are now honing new skills and training to meet the changing demands of this dangerous new world. Comply without instructions and you will not be harmed. These evolving tactics were tested on an Oakland motorway in 2005. Let it wh criminal propensity for violence, drugs. Police patrol had tried to stop him earlier on that ended up in a car chase. Police followed him here to St. Luke's shopping center where the man shot at a patrol car. Fired shots at police with a highowered semi-automatic rifle and then he managed to carjack a uh an Asian family. We just headed out to the general area where the pursuit was going on and uh and we only reference spawn the media helicopter that was above it. Let's get all of their vehicles to pull back. Drug abuser armed, fires shots, has hostages, um is mobile, is heading back in towards the city. We needed to bring it to an end. We had to confront the offender. There's no other option. We were going to do that by way of non-compliant vehicle stop. It's just forcing the vehicle off the road and confronting the offender um and giving him no option. The vehicle stopped. It was just lucky that we' carried out that training with the armed defender squad only two or three days prior to that incident. There was certainly a fair number of AOS cars involved. And in fact, during the course of that chase, he he not only lent out the window and and pointed that firearm at police members, he'd also fired shots at them as well. He's right out the back window and pointed directly at us. We fired a shot over. They carried on. The motorway was completely clear. it had been blocked by um the traffic units. So, we were in a pretty good space to resolve it. As we got into position, the directive was given that sort of on a countdown that we would uh stop the vehicle. And that's it. Now, the car is down. The car is down. Paul by that stage had bailed out of the vehicle. He couldn't have got out of the vehicle any quicker or any closer to the ground. And that's the whole intention is to sort of shock the offender. separated him from his gun. That was secure. The uh the hostages were safe. Uh very much shaken up and traumatized by the whole event, but otherwise everything went according to plan. In 2009, on the same stretch of motorway, the armed offenders squad making headlines once again. The tragic shooting of a courier driver on Oakland's Northwestern motorway was the first shooting of an innocent bystander in the squad's 45 year history. While investigations ultimately cleared the squad member of criminal negligence, the pressure on the AOS intensified. And while TalkBack radio was still running hot, the city of Napia was shut down for 3 days by a gunman killing a police constable and shooting up the neighborhood. Gunman Yan Molina. According to a friend, he's wellarmed and prepared to die in the face of incredible public pressure, putting themselves in the line of fire on every operation. What drives these men and women to do this job? Some people would just stand there and shake their heads and say, "Why? Look at the commitment that it's putting upon you and in in your job. Look at look at what it's asking of the family. It's doing right for good people. That's why I love doing the job. That's why I got out of bed at 2:00 in the morning when the pager went off. That's why I was away for days on end times. How many other jobs can you say people will get out of the bed at 2:00 in the morning, spend 4 hours, and then go to work for the day? This is the police. They do it for love or they do it for service. They don't do it to get paid because they're not reimbured for what toll that takes on someone's life. You know, there's a lot of people that are alive today because of their actions. Not dead because of them, but alive because of them. That must be the most successful armed response unit in the world in terms of the number of call outs attended and had to resort to the ultimate force on very very few occasions. The police officer is there as an agent on behalf of the public at large, the community and uh the responsibility at the end of the day has to be shared by the beneficiaries and that is the public at large. We put in there and that responsibility is ours each and every one of us. It's not good enough for the public to put the whole blame the whole responsibility if you like for shooting or killing on the shoulders of the officer who pulled the trigger. The whole of the squad that was involved, the whole of the police service and the whole of the community that's responsible for the police have to share that burden. It's a terrible burden. You can't just place it on one person's shoulders. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music]