1972: I had just made sergeant, but I still liked to go out on the street with my old partner from the detective division rather than sit in the office and try to act like a boss.
I liked working with him because he was also former military and we kept to the standard of not staying too close together when approaching someone so it would be hard for one guy to take us both out. At about 1:30 AM we spotted a guy who was just begging for a field contact-would not look at us-two big guys in an obvious unmarked squad car. We pulled ahead of him got out and started our approach. We were about 4 feet apart, I was getting a really bad feeling and was reaching for my weapon when my partner started shooting, put all 6 rounds from his old registered magnum in a palm size pattern on the guys' chest. DRT(dead right there). I did not see a gun on the guy, and his hands were in view and empty. I was completely stupified, asked ***? Partner said "he had really bad eyes". Checking the corpse I found a cocked 1911 in his rear waistband, an old S&W "lemon squeezer" .32 in his left pocket, and a High Standard 2 shot in his right sleeve, all fully loaded. I never knew how he knew, but he bet his career, pension and freedom on a gut feeling. I thought the guy was hincky also, but not enough to start shooting.
The kicker was that when the paramedics arrived, they found a live grenade taped to the guys' left leg where one might pack a leg holster. The grenade was the baseball type then in use in VN, and was LIVE! The pin had been straightened to make it easier to pull out.
Even though both of us were entirely compentent to handle the grenade we and everyone else blocked off the street till the bomb techs got there and removed it.
The moral of this little story? Pay attention to "feelings" and also do a really good serach-even on someone who is DRT. Was my fault, I was doing the search and was distracted by all the other stuff I found.
Have had bad feelings about folks since, and most of the time I was right, although not so dramatically.