I was 23 the first time I almost shot another human being. I and a fellow rookie officer had responded to a bland suburban neighborhood for a “welfare check” on a middle-aged woman who lived alone on a quiet residential street. Her mental health struggles were well known in the neighborhood and to many from my department who patrolled her area. The call had come from a postal worker who had become concerned after seeing a large pileup of mail at the house. Finding the front door open, my partner and I, calling out loudly as we entered, began to methodically search the large two-story home, first searching the ground floor, then the basement before heading to the second floor. As we ascended the stairs, we continued calling out “police officers, is anybody here?” Making our way down the darkened second-floor hallway, we cautiously approached the last bedroom, its door ajar and a light visible from within. Carefully I peeked quickly around the frame of the door and into the room, my pistol held in both hands as nervous sweat dripped from my face.
She was sitting upright on the bed, a rifle cradled in her arms, its muzzle pointed at the doorway. The shock of seeing the rifle caused me to jump back, shouting “gun” to my partner as we retreated from the door. We began shouting for her to throw the gun to the floor, but received no response. Gathering our courage after taking several minutes to regroup, we again approached the door, using a method known as “slicing the pie” to slowly gain a view of the room without exposing ourselves to gunfire. Eventually, we maneuvered into a position where we could see the woman. She had not moved, and her right hand was draped loosely around the grip of the rifle, her finger near, but off of the trigger. In her eyes, I saw no recognition, no awareness of her surroundings, just the blank stare of someone who was catatonic. We eventually entered the room and took her safely into custody after first pinning the rifle to the bed and then pulling it easily from her grasp. Unloading a live round from the chamber, I reflected on how close we had all come to tragedy. A short while after, she was at a local hospital receiving mental health care, and we were back on patrol as if nothing had happened.
There is a scene in the movie “The Departed” where the character Billy Costigan, portrayed by the incomparable Leo DiCaprio, sits with a court-mandated psychiatrist for counseling after he has been arrested for assault. Their conversation turns to her other patients, and he soon learns that she counsels police officers after they have been involved in shootings. In a voice dripping with scorn, Costigan laughingly tells her that “they signed up to use their weapons,” echoing a sentiment that is certainly shared by many, particularly in the racially charged times we live in today. I do not doubt that many police officers do, at least at first, glamorize and mythologize the possibility of having to use deadly force. I know I certainly did. But the passage of time and the grim reality of what those incidents actually look and feel like, both during and after, often eclipses any of what TV and movies portray of police shootings.
In the police academy, new officers are taught from day one that the world they are entering is dangerous, where felons intent on bodily harm lurk around virtually every corner. Sometimes this is not far from the truth. One friend who worked as a cop in a notoriously violent southern city spent his first day at the academy viewing a slide presentation of morgue photos depicting every police officer from his department murdered in the line of duty, accompanied by the lurid details of each killing. He described to me the repeated horror of seeing each smiling academy portrait next to the subsequent grisly death photo. The juxtaposition of the slain officers’ fresh-faced innocence with their bloody death masks was too much for some, and several recruits quit the academy that day. That same friend went on to become involved in four shootings in his career, the first occurring only nine months after he pinned on the badge. The average age of a police recruit when I came on the job was about 21, and most of my 88-member academy class were as naive and inexperienced as that age would suggest. In our innocence, we absorbed like sponges the sometimes deadly knowledge we were given.
Firearms training begins soon after the start of the academy, and the deadly seriousness of it is immediately clear. Recruits participated in live fire target practice on a shooting range as well as simulated combat against live adversaries and “shoot/don’t shoot” scenarios in a large video simulator. After six months of training, we left the academy for field training, where each officer is paired with an “FTO” or field training officer. The average FTO period lasted 16-20 weeks, with officers rotating through various patrol areas and work shifts, each rotation bringing a new training officer. Throughout this period, the necessary indoctrination into the “real world” of policing continued, with the lessons of the academy reinforced over and over, sometimes by the FTO, and often by the job itself.
Released from training to solo patrol after 20 weeks, it is the task of each rookie officer to somehow make sense of the awesome power represented by the badge he wears and the gun on his hip. If he or she is a thinking person, any illusions about the reality of using deadly force will soon be dissipated as experience is quickly gained in the uncontrolled environment they now inhabit, usually alone. Gone are the movie-inspired fantasies of a glorious shootout with an escaped felon or bank robber, with accolades and awards to follow, replaced instead by a more bleak and mundane truth.
The check-the-welfare call I described is one probably all too familiar to many experienced police officers and is far more representative of the types of circumstances often leading to deadly encounters with police. America is in the midst of a mental health crisis, and police are frequently placed at the very forefront of it, often with limited training and resources. I have thought about that woman many times since that day early in my career. By law, I was justified in shooting her, and I am sure some officers might have done so. Perhaps I would have as well on a different day, or with a few small details or perceptions altered. What I am sure of is this; I did not want to shoot her, and I am grateful that I was not forced to. I would encounter many other scenarios over the course of my career where deadly force might have been justified, none however resulted in a shooting, as is the case with the vast majority of police officers in the United States.
Police work is most often about judgment, timing, training, and, unfortunately, luck. Over the years, I was present at several officer-involved shootings, and I have many friends and others very close to me who have been forced to make this awful decision. I have yet to meet a single officer who was glad to have gone through it. Some were able to put it behind them, while others struggled for years with the aftermath of what they had to do. Like a stone thrown into a pond, these events send ripples through an officer’s life that reverberate for years to come. For those still skeptical, the statistics do not lie. The average police officer leaves police work entirely within three years of having been involved in a shooting. Despite what the media or certain critics of police may wish us all to believe, the simple truth is that the enormity of what happens in the aftermath of a shooting is often too much for most police officers to bear.
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