Skip to main contentThe early-morning quiet is shattered by a 40-pound rock crashing through a store window, sending shards of glass spinning across the sidewalk. The smash-and-grab gang springs into action. As two police officers approach the scene on foot, one of the burglars drops his stolen booty and runs deeper inside the darkened store. The rookie draws his gun and gives chase. The suspect suddenly jumps up on a counter and turns toward the officer, crouching on one knee, his hand obscured by his jacket.
In that split second, the officer does not stop to think. He shoots, and the burglar falls to the ground, groaning.
The year is 1966, and the young cop is named Mark Kroeker.
WW has learned that Kroeker, now chief of the Portland Police Bureau, was involved in two shooting incidents in his career, both of them unknown to the public until now.
The revelations come as Chief Kroeker is guiding the bureau through what is arguably the stormiest controversy of his tenure. On May 5, 25-year-old Kendra James, under the influence of cocaine, apparently tried to drive away as she struggled with a cop on North Skidmore Street. Officer Scott McCollister shot her dead with a single bullet, saying he feared for his life.
Next week, when Kroeker decides whether to punish McCollister for the episode, he will do so armed with personal experience.
The clue to Chief Kroeker's past is one of the final entries in a 36-page background investigation the City of Portland commissioned on Kroeker in 1999, when the 32-year Los Angeles Police Department veteran was applying to be Portland's top cop.
"On Dec. 15, 1966, Kroeker was involved in a shooting," the report states. "No disposition is shown for this incident."
Police shootings these days are typically described in stilted bureaucratese, every word vetted by lawyers to strip them of their humanity. But on Monday, in his office on the 15th floor of the Justice Center, Kroeker laid out the episodes in plain English.
The first shooting took place when Kroeker was a rookie patrol officer with less than 20 months on the job in the West L.A. precinct.
A smash-and-grab team had been victimizing high-end boutiques, and Kroeker and his partner chose an expensive dress shop to stake out. They did so four nights running, parked at a gas station in a beat-up old Plymouth with tires laid across the windshield to make it look unoccupied.
Then a car pulled up and three men climbed out, one carrying a huge rock which he promptly threw through the boutique's window.
"I get on the radio: 'OK, this is going on down here, and tell the other units to start moving in,'" recalls Kroeker. "By the time my partner and I ran across the street, they were all coming out with dresses."
"One of them started back into the store and had this jacket on, and I ordered him to stop as he went into a dressing-room area. He jumped on a ledge and, as he turned and faced me, kneeled up on one knee. My assumption was he was a threat to me. He had his hand in his jacket or hidden by his jacket at that moment--that split second, you know? I fired one round. The round grazed his buttocks, knocked him over, and I went and handcuffed him."
The burglar, who was black, lived. Though he proved to be unarmed, Kroeker says the shooting was ruled justified: "Shooting at an evading felon at that time was proper." But he was a rookie and couldn't help wondering if he'd done the right thing. "You always wonder, until everything gets cleared, 'Was everything OK?'" he says.
The second shooting Kroeker was involved in went down in LAPD lore as the crime that gave birth to SWAT teams.
Four years after his first shooting, Kroeker was a sergeant at the Wilshire bureau. At about 4 am, two officers responded to a 911 call of a domestic disturbance at the room of the manager of the High Point Motel. The officers entered the motel courtyard and knocked on the door of a first-floor apartment.
The manager replied with a .357 magnum.
Both cops were hit. Reinforcements had rescued one officer by the time Kroeker arrived and took charge, but the other was lying in the courtyard as the manager, who was white, kept firing.
"I saw him writhing there with bullets going into his body, this guy firing his .357 at him. So I tried to draw his fire," recalls Kroeker.
Kroeker fired four rounds from his shotgun and squeezed off a handful from his .38 revolver. "I couldn't see him," Kroeker remembers. "I fired at muzzle flashes. I reloaded and I shot some more. I was shot at and just missed. Later I found a bullet hole about four inches from my head where I had been taking cover."
Protected by tear gas as well as Kroeker's covering fire, the injured officer was carried from the courtyard. Then the manager came out with his hands up.
"The two officers were badly shot up and retired as a result of that incident, and the guy came out unscathed," says Kroeker.
Kroeker says the incidents illustrate the constant wariness police officers must maintain.
"Police officers live in a state of readiness," he says, "fueled by their own rehearsals, their own experiences, their training. Anything can happen, you have to tell yourself. Don't let down your guard.... Even if you're having a cup of coffee or whatever, you're in this state."
He recalls how a training sergeant drilled him: "What would you do if we pull over this guy and the guy jumps out with a gun? What would you do if you're in a liquor store and a guy has a gun? What would you do if we were suddenly fired at from a distance? What would you do?"
Kroeker says he doesn't have nightmares about the times he pulled the trigger--but such trauma is common among police officers who end up actually killing someone, says Dr. Ronald Turco, a Portland psychiatrist considered a national expert on officer-involved shootings.
Turco says Kroeker's shootings are unlikely to affect how he thinks about the Kendra James shooting and the proposed six-month suspension of Officer Scott McCollister, which Kroeker will decide on as early as July 22.
Cops in nonfatal shootings generally "don't feel much guilt. They just see it as doing their job and that's that," Turco says.
Kroeker says he doesn't know for sure if his shootings affect his views, but he assumes so. He says he empathizes not just with the officer, but with the victims and their families and friends.
"When people look at police shootings, they can either be overly supportive or overly critical," he says. "We love our cops; they can do no wrong. Or we distrust our officers, and nothing they do is right. My job is to not take any of those and go right down the line." DOWNED BY LAW
According to the Portland Police Bureau, there have been eight fatal police shootings in the past three years.
George Waldum: Aug. 23, 2000. Having previously threatened a repairman, the 71-year-old greeted a cop at his door with a shotgun.
Michael Ray Jaquith: Dec. 18, 2000. Tried to drive away in his van while struggling with a cop who, fearing for his life, shot him.
Jose Santos Victor Mejia Poot: April 1, 2001. Arrested for being short of his fare on a TriMet bus, was booked into a psychiatric hospital, where he assaulted an aide and charged two officers, who shot him.
Raymond L. Youngberg: July 9, 2001. Accused of groping a woman, shot at police and was hit with six bullets.
Daniel Cromb: Dec. 9, 2001. Suspected armed robber, while fleeing, appeared to point a BB pistol at two reserve officers and was shot in the back.
Byron J. Hammick: Feb. 22, 2002. Shot while assaulting a child at a Motel 6 on Southeast Powell Boulevard.
Anthony Utah-Zona Beck: April 21, 2002. After breaking into a home, stabbing himself and threatening to shoot the homeowner, emerged onto the porch carrying an air pistol and was shot by police.
Kendra James: May 5, 2003. Attempted to drive away from a traffic stop with Officer Scott McCollister halfway inside the car. Killed with a single bullet.
WWeek 2015