Another job Rico is glad he doesn't have

Ray Rivera has an article in The New York Times about a brave (and doubtless underpaid) Connecticut state trooper:

In February of 2009, a distraught man armed with a handgun stopped his vehicle on a busy stretch of Interstate 84 in Hartford, Connecticut. State Trooper William Taylor was among the first police officers on the scene. He immediately closed off access to the highway and coordinated communications with other police agencies, “all while keeping the suicidal male calm while speaking with him on the phone,” according to the citation for the Meritorious Service Award he later received.
On Tuesday, Trooper Taylor again found himself on the phone with a suicidal man. The man, Omar S. Thornton, was calling from inside a beer warehouse in Manchester, Connecticut, where he had just fatally shot eight co-workers and wounded two others.
As SWAT teams searched the building, Trooper Taylor sat in a small dispatch center in downtown Hartford, ten miles away. He had started his shift that morning at 7, assigned to supervise the desk staff at Troop H Barracks. Because Mr. Thornton had called 911 by cellphone, it was automatically routed to the Connecticut State Police, and Trooper Taylor happened to pick up.
Trooper Taylor had already answered some calls from the Harford Distributors warehouse that morning— most likely from frightened workers fleeing the gunman— when Mr. Thornton’s call came in between 8 and 8:12 a.m.
The extraordinary recording of that conversation, all 4 minutes 11 seconds of it, provides a rare glimpse not only of the last thoughts of a suicidal killer in the moments after a deadly shooting spree, but also of a seasoned officer bringing his training to bear at precisely the right moment.
As in his conversation with the man on I-84 more than a year earlier, Trooper Taylor immediately struck a calm, conversational tone, displaying sympathy with the shooter’s laments while trying to keep him on the phone, learn his location as well as how heavily armed he was, and urging him to surrender. At the same time, the trooper was forwarding vital information to the State Police’s command post outside the warehouse.
“We’re going to have to have you surrender yourself somehow, here, and not make the situation any worse, you know what I mean?” the trooper told him at one point. Ultimately, the trooper could not persuade Mr. Thornton to surrender, and the 34-year-old delivery truck driver, who blamed racial harassment at work for his shooting spree, killed himself.
But law enforcement experts called the recorded exchanges between the two men remarkable. “In calls like this, it’s almost like a hostage-negotiation situation in which the call taker is trying to slow things down, get as much information as possible, and establish a relationship with a stranger,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit group focused on improving police techniques. “That this state police officer could quickly establish a rapport and keep him on the line for so long is impressive. He immediately understood who he was talking to, and used all of his experience to try to get him to either surrender or, at the very least, keep him talking and not shoot at other people.” The two men, Mr. Wexler added, spoke as “if they knew each other.”
Trooper Taylor, through a State Police spokesman, declined interview requests. The officer joined the force in 1987 and, since then, has been assigned to various duties, most recently with Troop H in the Hartford area. Officials would not release his exact age, other than to say he was in his 40s.
Lieutenant J. Paul Vance, a spokesman, said the department had discouraged its officers from talking about the Hartford Distributors shootings while the investigation was under way. But he also said Trooper Taylor simply did not want the attention. “I know him, and he’s that type of individual,” Lieutenant Vance said. “He’s a good, professional trooper, and he’s a trooper for all the right reasons.” Lieutenant Vance said troopers, even veterans, trained regularly for “active shooter” situations, using classroom instruction, mock situations, and lessons from the numerous American shooting sprees like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. “We’ve learned from history, and our training is centered around past tragedies,” Lieutenant Vance said.
Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina, called the recording “one of the most professional” 911 calls he had heard. “And I’ve heard a lot of tapes,” Professor Alpert said, adding that Trooper Taylor followed all the rules: remaining calm, keeping the gunman on the phone— as long as he was on the line, he was not shooting— and trying to get information on his location and weapons. “I don’t think you could script it better,” he said.