Every so often a video comes across the desk that answers the question of what this job is actually for. This is that video.
What happened
January 21, 3:02 p.m. 37-year-old John Johnson of Lorain, Ohio robbed a Brink’s armored truck outside the AT&T store on West River Road North in Elyria. He forced the driver into the truck at gunpoint, took an undisclosed amount of cash, and left in a second vehicle.
The car was spotted in Lorain. Elyria police and multiple agencies picked up the pursuit and ran it east on Route 20 into North Olmsted. Speeds went past 100 miles an hour, in snow and ice, with traffic on the road. North Olmsted officers deployed stop sticks that finally ended it at Columbia and Brookpark.
Johnson bailed out on foot into an apartment complex on Clareshire Drive. He took a mother and her four children hostage at gunpoint and forced his way inside with the two youngest. A doorbell camera captured it.
An Elyria Police Department officer was seconds behind him. He went through the door and shot him.
Johnson died. A .45 caliber handgun was recovered inside the apartment. Every hostage came out unharmed. Not one officer or civilian was injured.
In August, a grand jury declined to indict the Elyria officer. The use-of-force review found his actions objectively reasonable.
The pursuit
A hundred-plus in the snow is a different animal than a hundred-plus on dry road. One mistake at that speed and it is over — for the suspect, for a civilian, for the cop. Most pursuit policies would have shut this down.
If there is ever a call that justifies letting it run at those speeds in those conditions, it is an armed robbery of an armored truck by a man who just put a gun on a driver. The alternative is letting him go and finding out where he stops next.
The entry
Watch the officer arrive. He power brakes so hard you can hear the transmission complain, because he understands in real time what just happened — an armed man with a gun in his hand went into an occupied apartment.
Then watch what he does not do.
He does not stage. He does not get on the radio. He does not set a perimeter. He does not hold and wait for twenty more units to roll in. Every one of those choices would have been defensible on paper, and every one of them buys the suspect more time alone with a mother and four children.
He goes through the door.
Why it is the right call
There is no version of waiting that gets those kids out safer. The moment an armed robber pulls hostages into a closed room, the clock is running against them, not for them. Perimeters protect the neighborhood. They do not protect the people already inside.
That officer threw out everything that would have protected him professionally — the slow approach, the supervisor’s blessing, the paper trail — and did the thing the job is actually for. Protect life. That is the whole assignment. Everything else is procedure built on top of it.
Elyria Police Chief James Welsh called him a hero. He is right, and the grand jury agreed.
The standard
People ask what good police work looks like when it is not a slogan. It looks like this: a man who recognized in a fraction of a second that the only acceptable outcome was those five people walking out, and who accepted every risk that came with getting them there.
