Then they went to the door.
As deputies attempted to breach it, 29-year-old Anthony Cusati allegedly fired multiple rounds from inside the house, straight through the door. Deputy Jonathan Allion was struck in the arm. Sgt. Scott Lewis, an 11-year veteran, was hit in the upper left leg and in the center of his body armor. One of the rounds struck his body-worn camera. The deputies did not return fire because, according to Sheriff Al Nienhuis, they couldn't see the man shooting at them. Both deputies survived and were eventually released from the hospital. Cusati was taken into custody and faces multiple charges, including attempted murder of law-enforcement officers.
There is a lesson in those few seconds that every cop understands.
The door is the most dangerous part.
Not every door, of course. Most doors open and nothing happens. I stood in front of more doors during my police career than I could possibly remember. They belonged to houses, apartments, hotel rooms, businesses and places that probably shouldn't have qualified as residences at all. Behind them were victims, suspects, frightened children, angry husbands, crying wives, drunks, people having mental-health crises, people who didn't want the police there and people desperately waiting for us to arrive.
Most of the time, somebody opened the door.
That's precisely what makes doors dangerous.
Police work teaches you to recognize danger, but repetition teaches you something else. Do something a thousand times without being hurt and the extraordinary begins to feel ordinary. A domestic becomes another domestic. A disturbance becomes another disturbance. A welfare check becomes another welfare check.
And a door becomes just another door.
Until it isn't.
A closed door creates one of the fundamental inequalities of police work. The person on the inside may know considerably more than the officer standing outside. He knows the layout of the house. He knows where the furniture is. He knows where the hallway leads. He knows whether there is another exit. Most importantly, he knows what he intends to do when that door opens.
The officer may know none of those things.
The person inside may be watching through a peephole or a window. He may hear the officers talking. He may know exactly where they are standing. He may be frightened. He may be hiding. He may be destroying evidence. He may be holding a telephone.
Or he may be holding a gun.
The officer outside gets none of those answers from looking at the door.
That's why good police tactics begin with respecting the unknown. Officers can avoid unnecessarily standing directly in front of a doorway. They can use available cover and distance. Partners can position themselves so they aren't presenting one convenient target. Officers can pay attention not merely to the door but to windows and other places from which somebody might observe or attack them. They can gather as much information as circumstances permit before making contact and communicate what they see, hear and know to one another.
Sometimes the most important tactic is simply slowing down.
A radio call is only the information available when somebody transmitted it. The situation encountered by the officers belongs to them. Something heard through the door, movement behind a curtain, contradictory information from a neighbor or simply circumstances that don't fit what dispatch originally reported can change the problem. Good officers continually reassess what they are actually dealing with rather than stubbornly proceeding with what they were originally told.
And when circumstances allow it, sometimes the safest decision is not to go through the door at all—at least not yet.
None of that eliminates the danger.
The Florida shooting demonstrates that particularly well because these weren't inexperienced officers casually walking up to a house. They were SWAT personnel conducting a planned warrant service. They had equipment, preparation, multiple officers and advance knowledge that they were entering an environment associated with suspected criminal activity.
They still had to deal with the door.
Training isn't magic. Body armor isn't magic. A ballistic shield isn't magic. Experience certainly isn't magic. All of them can improve the odds, sometimes dramatically, but none gives an officer the one thing he would really like to have at that moment: the ability to see the future.
In fact, experience presents a danger of its own.
A rookie can be afraid of every door. Everything is new, and everything therefore looks potentially dangerous. Twenty years later, the problem can reverse itself. The experienced officer has knocked on thousands of doors. Almost all of them opened without somebody shooting through them.
That experience is invaluable. It can also whisper something dangerous:
You've done this before.
That's where professionalism has to overcome familiarity. The objective isn't to make every officer terrified every time he walks onto a porch. Fear isn't a tactic. The objective is to maintain enough respect for uncertainty that the thousandth door receives the attention that might save you when it happens to be the wrong one.
There is another uncomfortable truth here. The only way to eliminate the danger completely is not to approach the door.
Police officers don't have that option.
Somebody has to answer the domestic disturbance. Somebody has to check on the elderly woman whose neighbors haven't seen her for three days. Somebody has to investigate the screaming coming from an apartment. Somebody has to find the armed suspect. Somebody has to serve the warrant.
Somebody still has to go.
That means officer safety can never mean eliminating danger. Policing itself makes that impossible. The professional objective is to identify foreseeable dangers, reduce unnecessary exposure and improve the odds while still accomplishing the job society has sent the officer there to do.
Then comes something else I've come to appreciate about police shootings and body-camera video: afterward, everybody gets to see through the door.
Investigators eventually know who was inside. They know what weapon he possessed. They know where he was standing. They reconstruct where the bullets traveled. Attorneys can examine the evidence. Supervisors can replay the video. Reporters can interview witnesses. People on social media can freeze three seconds of footage and study those three seconds for three days.
All of that scrutiny has a legitimate place. Police decisions should be reviewed, and bad decisions should not be excused merely because policing is dangerous.
But hindsight gives the rest of us something the officer standing on the porch never had.
The cutaway view.
Imagine the scene as a painting. It is nighttime. Two officers stand beneath an ordinary porch light. One is positioned beside the door. The other raises his hand to knock.
Now remove the wall for the viewer.
On the other side is a disheveled man staring through the peephole. He has a shotgun in his hands. He knows exactly where the officers are.
We know what's coming.
The officers don't.
Position matters. Cover matters. Communication matters. Training matters. Experience matters. Each can move the odds in the officer's favor, and sometimes one small tactical decision is the reason an officer goes home.
But none of them can remove the unknown from the other side of the door.
Eventually, somebody still has to knock.
And that's why the door may be the most dangerous part.
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