Excerpt from 13 Minutes...

I don’t see the hand but I can feel it. In the darkness and confusion, Pat doesn’t see the left arm move either. He only knows that the suspect we are wrestling is incredibly strong. Pat delivers three to five palm strikes to areas on the suspect’s arm, stunning nerve endings. I turn to grab the left hand, Pat says to Hunter, who is just standing there, “Mace him, mace him...” When I thought about this later, it made me wonder even more about Hunter, a sworn police officer standing there doing nothing while his fellow officers struggled with this suspect who they were obviously having difficulty placing into handcuffs.

At that point I saw Officers Hodge, Lawson and Sellers arrive on scene. I start bringing my arm out from under Owensby’s forehead as Hunter sprays the suspect’s face with mace. I trap the left hand and bring it up. I kneel with one knee on the top of the suspect’s shoulder by the top of the arm socket, my right foot planted firmly on the pavement. I see Sellers standing behind Pat, watching what is going on. We are still having problems with the right arm. So I hold the top part of the wrist and bend it. Applying pressure, I lock his arm against my right thigh. At this time a small crowd was forming, Officer Lawson is keeping the crowd back. Hodge is working to get the right arm out with his nightstick, and shove it in correctly. Hodge takes over and levers it, the right hand comes out, we bring the palms together, and Pats’ handcuffs go on him.

We hear sirens approaching...

our little words send chills down the spine of every law enforcement officer:

Died in police custody.

In New York City, we’ve seen it time and time again. Given the right set of circumstances, the death of a suspect — regardless of its cause — can result in rioting in the streets. And it doesn’t take much to make it happen. Add a death in custody to some distrust between a segment of a community and its police, mix in some self-appointed activist, top it all off with a slow news day, and you can set a city or town on the road to disaster. When these elements combine the chaos can be as unstoppable as a force of nature — and the results as tragic.

In Cincinnati, Police Officers R. Blaine Jorg and Pat Caton chased down a drug-carrying suspect who resisted being cuffed. He’d served time before and apparently decided he wasn’t going back to prison. They chased and tackled the suspect and, using academy-taught techniques for gaining compliance, they cuffed the suspect and placed him in a cruiser. Moments later, the suspect lost consciousness and died, despite efforts to save him.

Often, as in this case, when the smoke clears and the facts are closely examined, the death is found to be no fault of the arresting officers. But investigations of this sort take months to complete while ratings-driven hyped news reports hyped and front-page tabloid headlines serve to inflame misguided passions.

Events like these frequently cost good, honest and hard-working police officers their careers even when they are guilty of nothing more than doing the job by the book. City management — police chiefs or elected officials — often look to decrease their future liability for the future by putting an officer involved in a death-in-custody in a non-patrol status. Those with no conscience or loyalty to the brotherhood of policing will even relegate such an officer to a job so undesirable that they quit in disgust.

His experience led Jorg to write a book called “13 Minutes” about how a death-in-custody following a by-the-book arrest blew the top off the city of Cincinnati, cost him the career he loved and forever altered his life. It is a story of mismanagement by a mayor and a police chief who, for the sake of so-called community peace, sacrificed two honest and hard-working police officers and still failed to keep the peace. But most of all, it is a bold and wrenching account of the devastating impact this 13-minute event had on the life of a cop with an unblemished service record who was also a training officer.

While much of the book reads like a 49, what really hit me was the searing emotional pain and trauma that officer Jorg had to endure. He wrote this book as part of the therapy that he was undergoing in an attempt to get his life and psyche back in order. The plight of this dedicated officer is so palpable that the reader feels he is experiencing it himself. It’s hard not to see yourself in Blaine Jorg’s shoes.

His riveting account is truly worth reading. For more information about the event or to buy the book, visit www.13minutes.org.