Looking Down the Barrel
4-minute read
Hoopfest is the largest three-on-three basketball tournament in the world. You read that right. Spokane, Washington, the heart of my 509 Crime Stories, turns into the center of the basketball universe the last weekend of every June.
According to the Hoopfest website, each year the event spans 45 city blocks, features over 24,000 participants on over 6,000 teams, 3,000 volunteers, and 250,000 fans. That’s a staggering number of people when the City of Spokane’s official population is roughly 229,000 according to the 2020 census.
Each team is guaranteed three games. If they lose a game, they drop to the loser’s bracket. If they lose a second game in the losers’ bracket, they’re out of contention.
There are referees, but players call their own fouls. Some of these games can get heated (especially if the temperature is near or above 90 degrees).
Hoopfest’s economic impact is tremendous. It’s estimated to bring in roughly $47Million to the region. Once while dining at the Downtown Red Robin (do you love their fries? I do!), I asked the manager how much business they did over the weekend. She said that for the Hoopfest weekend, they were the number one Red Robin in the entire chain.
With that many people coming into the region and that large a financial impact, you can imagine how much attention is paid to it by the police department.
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During my fourth and fifth years with the Spokane Police Department, I worked in a liaison position with the unenviable title of Special Police Problems. It was a silly name but a pretty good gig for a guy so new to the job. I wore plain clothes (slacks, shirt, and tie), had my own cubicle, and drove a take-home care.
In my role, I interacted with the state’s Liquor Control Board (before its duties expanded to cannabis) and the Gambling Commission. I worked closely with the city’s tow truck companies and the industry’s licensing wing of the State Patrol. I was assigned to check out threats made against City Hall and its politicians.
The time with the liquor control board was the most fun because that concentrated bar checks on holidays like St. Patty’s Day, Halloween, and New Year's Eve. We once monitored a private party at a local bar where Snoop Dogg was going to be in attendance. There were some concerns about gang clashes. I was paid to attend Snoop’s concert (which was fun) and check the temperature of the crowd (which was laid back).
Frank Zafiro and I highlighted this job in our books, Never the Crime and Badge Heavy (books two and three in the Charlie-316 series).
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During my roughly two-year stint as the Special Police Problems officer, I worked three Hoopfest weekends, a quirk of the calendar. We conducted bar checks on Friday and Saturday nights, from 9 p.m. until a little after 2 a.m. I worked with agents from the Liquor Control Board and the fire marshal on these nights.
On these nights, members of the department’s Tactical Team (SWAT adjacent) were patrolling. Members of the Tac-Team were trained in crowd control and riot response. They were more heavily armed than a regular patrol officer. They were drastically better armed than the Special Police Problems Officer.
I was in plain clothes those nights, although no one would mistake me for anything but a cop. I wore a light jacket over my ballistic vest, blue jeans, and comfortable combat boots. A radio was clipped to my belt, and a microphone was tucked into my ear. My badge dangled by a chain around my neck. I thought I looked so cool.
On Hoopfest weekend, every downtown bar and dance club was packed by 10 p.m., and patrons waiting to get inside queued down the block.
Friday night was usually calm. The folks visiting the clubs smiled and were genuinely amicable. Hoopfest would begin the next morning, so most attendees throttled back their drinking.
Saturday night had a completely different vibe, a cocktail of aggression, frustration, and too much sun. The aggression is from the tournament itself. Hoopfest is fun and full speed, which will ramp anyone up. The frustration is carried by those players who lost two games on Saturday and were knocked out of the competition. Why even play on Sunday when it’s for nothing?
A shooting occurred downtown three years in a row on Hoopfest’s Saturday night.
The last one happened a few blocks from where I was. A victim was down and a shooter was on the run, pursued by members of the Tactical Team. The call came through the microphone tucked into my ear.
“There’s been a shooting,” I said to the members of my bar check team and took off to join the pursuit.
With my Glock held in both hands, I ran at full speed, trying to cut off the shooter.
When I rounded the corner of a building, a tactical officer spun around with an AR-15 tucked into his shoulder. “Got you,” he said, then whirled back in the direction we thought the shooter would appear.
It was then that I remembered I was in plain clothes. Even though my badge dangled from the chain around my neck, it wasn’t as easily identifiable as our uniforms. Joining the chase without alerting anyone was an awful choice. It could’ve ended horribly.
Luckily, that tactical officer and I had worked together on a team earlier in my career. He and I once rescued a guy from a burning building (a story for another day). I’m extremely lucky that it was him staring down the barrel of that long gun and not a rookie I had never met.
I patted his shoulder, and we moved through downtown until we got word that the shooter had been apprehended. I thanked him for not shooting me and returned to my bar check team. The rest of the night seemed very tame after that.