• • •
The press always plays up the racial angle on police shootings around here, and that used to affect my thinking about things. I remember this one time before my shooting, a black guy took a shot at me and my partner and then took off running. When we caught up with him, he was walking toward some citizens with his rifle. I told him several times to drop the gun, but he just kept moving. I was about twenty feet behind him when he turned to go into this apartment complex. I yelled, “This is the last time I’m gonna tell you to put the gun down. If I have to shoot you in the back, I’ll shoot you in the back. I don’t want to shoot you in the back, but I’m gonna shoot you in the back right now!” As soon as I said that, he threw the rifle down.
The whole time I was telling him I was going to shoot him, I was thinking, “They’ll crucify me on the news tomorrow if I shoot this black guy in the back.” That was all it was gonna be: “White cop shoots black man in the back.” That was gonna be the extent of the story because that’s just what the press preys off of.
The racial thing even came up with my buddies after my shooting. I grew up in a very diverse area, so I’ve got a lot of black friends and Mexican friends from where I grew up. After my shooting, one of my Mexican buddies said, “Tell me the guy was white, because if not, I’m gonna have to go to the news station and tell ’em you’re not a racist white cop.” That issue even crossed my mind. I thought, “God, that sucked. I had to shoot and kill somebody, but thank God it was a white guy.”
That thought should’ve never gone through my mind, and it wouldn’t now. Now I just ignore the media for the most part, because the press always changes the facts to make stories cater to their views. The one thing I do look for is stories about officers getting hurt, because I want to learn from what happened. But I’ve noticed lately that when officers are killed and I see it on TV, I get really depressed for three to four days. It usually takes me a few days to pull out of it and get dialed back in. So I’ve found that the less newspapers I read, the less news I watch, the happier I am.
Psychological Services
Most police departments across the country are aware that officers can experience negative reactions in the immediate aftermath of shootings. Consequently, it has become commonplace for law enforcement agencies to give officers who have been involved in shootings a short paid leave to gather their thoughts and to send them to mental health professionals (MHPs) for an evaluation prior to their return to duty. Many large departments maintain in-house psychological-services units that can conduct this checkup, whereas other departments contract post-shooting mental health services to outside sources.
Whatever their affiliation, MHPs who debrief officers in the wake of shootings have a tough job, because several factors conspire against successful counseling sessions. Police officers are notoriously insular and suspicious of outsiders. They also tend to distrust police administrators and are fearful that their supervisors are “out to get them” (or are at least willing to sell them out if it will benefit them).3 Unless an MHP has a solid reputation among the rank and file as a stand-up professional, officers sent to them for duty fitness evaluations will likely withhold information out of fear that any hint that they are having difficulties will get back to their superiors, who, in turn, will punish them. Indeed many of the officers I interviewed told me that they had lied to the MHP about how they were doing for this very reason.
Conversely, many officers had high praise for the MHPs to whom they were sent. The stories that follow include tales of both positive and negative encounters with MHPs, starting with a visit to a clinician who has the reputation of being one of the best police psychologists in the business.
• • •
The first few days after the shooting, I had this sense of sadness. I knew that what I did had to be done, but still I had taken somebody’s life. It’s mandatory in our department to go see someone down at psychological services after a shooting, so about three or four days after, I went to see Dr. Steadly.
He asked me general questions; then he asked me how I felt about the shooting. I told him I felt bad for taking somebody’s life. Then he asked me to put what happened in some perspective. He asked me what alternatives I had. I told him it was either me or the guy. Then he asked me if I would give up certain things to bring him back. Would I give an arm? A leg? I said, “Well, no. I wouldn’t.”
Then he said, “Look at what you just said. It’s not like you shot some ninety-year-old lady pushing a grocery cart who has just won the Citizen of the Year award and was just standing there. The guy was trying to kill you.” He told me to look at the situation, to look at the facts. When I did that, it helped.
• • •
The first few days afterward, I had this sense of elation. I was pretty satisfied with the fact that I was just involved in a very high-profile operation where I reacted in the way I was supposed to. I was placed in a situation where I could’ve gotten shot, and I was very satisfied that I reverted to my training and that it had helped me get through the situation without getting shot. None of the good guys got hurt. We did exactly what we planned to do, what we were trained to do, so I was very elated.
Before I could go back to work, however, I had to see the department’s psychological-services people. The guy that I met with wanted to know what my feelings were. I basically ran the scenario down for him and expressed my satisfaction with the way it went. He asked me, “What do you know about the guy you shot?”
I said, “I don’t know really anything about him other than the information that was given to me by the case agent.”
He asked, “Does he have kids?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
He asked, “Well, does that concern you that he might have kids and that you might’ve destroyed his family and his life?”
I said, “No. Not at all.”
He said, “That doesn’t bother you at all?”
I said, “No. Not at all.”
Then he said, “Well, what if he has a family? What about their feelings?”
I said, “I have a family too, four kids and a young baby, so I’m not thinking about that at all.”
He said, “OK, we’ll be giving you your release. You can go back to work.”
I said, “All right. Thanks.” And I left.
When I was in there, I felt like, “Why in the world is he asking me this stuff?” I was never really angry about anything that happened about the shooting, but if I was a little pissed at anybody through the whole deal, it would’ve been this guy, because he asked me those questions.
• • •
The PD sent me to the fit-for-duty interview that they send everyone who kills someone to. It was really strange. First, when I got in the elevator to go up to the guy’s office, two beautiful women got on with me—really hot, maybe sixteen or seventeen. They got off with me, and we all went into the same small waiting room. The room was set up so you have to flip a switch to tell this doctor that you’re there. I flipped my switch, and then these two chicks went and flipped another switch. I didn’t want to stare at them because we were in a shrink’s office, but I couldn’t help but look at them. Then it hit me that they were transvestites. It made me feel a little uncomfortable, like the PD thought like maybe I was messed up and confused like guys who want to be girls. I was thinking, “Oh, my God, what’s going on here?” I found out later that the guy I was going to see shares an office with someone who does pre- and postop counseling for transsexuals, so that’s the answer to my question.
Then, when the wait was over and I went in to see the guy who worked for the PD, the first thing I noticed about him was that his glasses were falling off his head because the temple going back to his right ear was missing. He was a younger guy—not some doddering old Sigmund Freud—probably about my age. There were boxes and other stuff piled up to the ceiling all over the place. His sofa was all tattered. It had foam and some other stuff sticking out of the cushions, all messed up.
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When I saw all this, I asked him, “Gee, are you moving out of this office, or did you just move in?” He replied, “Neither. Why?” And I thought, “Oh, man, this is going to be a circus sideshow. This is the guy who’s going to certify me as being fit for duty?”
When we talked about the shooting, he was cool about it, but it was just a joke. It struck me that anybody who had any wits at all could pass that interview because it’s obvious what the answers to the questions are supposed to be. I think the only way someone might fail is if they were just a raving lunatic. The guy might be able to pick that up. I felt like it was a waste of my time and a waste of the city’s time. If there really was some officer who needed help after a shooting, who shouldn’t go back to work, I don’t think this guy would be able to catch it. I don’t know. Maybe I was just so OK with what happened that he was just kind of being real mellow about it. I don’t know how successful he is in his practice or what the city’s standards are to hire someone like that. But I talked to other officers who had to go see this guy, and they said the same thing, that it was a strange experience. And these guys didn’t even get to see any transvestites.
Then, about a year and a half later, I got in another fatal shooting, and the PD sent me back to see the same guy. He wasn’t wearing his one-armed glasses, so I asked him, “Hey, you got contacts on?” He replied, “Yeah, how’d you know that?” I told him not to worry about it. His furniture was still all in tatters, but most of the boxes were gone, and there were no transvestites to be seen. So it was a little bit better, but it was still pretty bizarre.
• • •
I had to go talk to the department psychologist because the guy I shot died. They make everyone who’s in a fatal shooting go talk to the shrink before going back to work. It was no big deal, pretty much just a matter-of-fact thing, but he did bring up a couple of neat points about talking to other people about it. He said that a lot of people were going to ask questions about the shooting and want to talk with me about it. He said to go ahead and talk with other policemen if I wanted but that I might want to think about handling it different when I was around people who aren’t police officers because they don’t think like me; they probably wouldn’t understand it in the same terms cops do. So he said it’s up to me, go ahead and talk to noncops if I wanted, and then he gave me a suggestion about how to deal with questions if I didn’t want to talk. He said I should just say, “Hey, you know how every once in a while you have a bad day at work and you don’t really like to talk about it, you would just as soon forget it? I’m sure you’ve had days like that. Well, that was one of the worst days I’ve ever had at work.” He said that people usually understand that.
The other thing he talked about had to do with my son, who was five at the time. He asked me if I had told my son about it. I told him that I hadn’t because I felt like he was too young. He asked me if I thought that later on some other kids who heard about the shooting might tell him about it. I told him that was possible. Then he asked me if I thought he’d rather hear it from me. I said that I guess he would but that I still wondered if he was old enough to understand. The doc replied that he should be able to if I explained it to him in the right way. Then he encouraged me to tell my boy when I got home.
So I did. I went and I told him about it. Just the basics. It went pretty well. The only question on his mind was he wanted to know if the man that I killed had a son. I sure wasn’t expecting that. I was kind of curious why he wondered that. But I didn’t ask him about it. I just told him that I didn’t know but that I didn’t think the guy had kids. Then I asked him if he had a problem with anything I told him. He said, “No, Daddy. I don’t have a problem with it,” and that was it.
Family Matters
As demonstrated by the preceding story, the personal impact of shootings does not stop with the officers who pull the trigger. Shootings also have ramifications for the families of the involved officers. Those close to officers can be strong, uncertain, and fearful as they watch and participate in the post-shooting process. They can be supportive, indifferent, and even antagonistic toward officers as they try to make sense of what has and is happening. And these various responses can, in turn, affect officers’ adjustment as they traverse the post-shooting landscape.
The stories in this section address the twin issues of how officers’ loved ones reacted following shootings and how these reactions played themselves out in the lives of the involved officers. One thing that stands out is the key role that intimate partners can play in officers’ post-shooting adjustment—for both the good and the ill. Some partners provided officers a safe harbor for working things out, whereas others were a thorn in their side. For the most part, the difficulties that officers experience in this connection stem from their spouses’ fears about the dangers of police work, fears that are brought painfully close to home by shootings. Such was the case for the wives in the initial stories that follow.
• • •
My wife took it much harder than I did. She was pretty upset for a while. A day or two after the shooting, the gravity of what had happened hit her. She’d never really thought about me getting hurt or killed at work; then she answered the door one night, and it’s this sergeant telling her that her husband just capped a guy who stabbed him. She said that prior to the shooting she understood on an intellectual level that something bad could happen, but she never worried about it. Then, when this happened, it made her realize deep down just how real the danger was. So the shooting gave her cause to think about what I do for a living more carefully and in much more detail than she really wanted to.
• • •
The shooting made me take my job a little bit more seriously. I’ve always taken it seriously, but the shooting pushed me to an even higher level. I played college baseball, and it’s the fine little things that make the difference on the diamond. I think the same thing applies here in SWAT; it’s the little things that make the difference, and the shooting just reinforced that. I realized that if I’d been a fraction of a second slower, the guy could have gotten a round off at me, so I started paying even more attention to what I do when I train, and I spent even more time on job-related stuff.
This didn’t make my wife too happy. I wasn’t a cop when we got married, and she’s reminded me more than once that she didn’t marry a police officer. But this detail is a little bit more than just the job—here, I’ve got all these guys who depend on me for their lives—so I feel that I always need to be at the top of my game. I know that I put a little more into it than my wife would like, especially my spare time. For example, I just now got a good computer at the house. It’s better than the ones at work, which can’t run a lot of the software I like to use, so I do a lot of my work stuff on the home computer. That’s time she wishes I’d spend playing with the kids and things like that. And the time stuff is on top of the general concern she has about my safety. If I left police work tomorrow, she wouldn’t blink an eye; she’d be happy. She’s not too thrilled about me doing this job, but I don’t know if any wife would be.
• • •
My family was real supportive, all but one sister-in-law, that is. She was nineteen or twenty at the time, really into the liberal scene. We were having a family dinner a short time after the shooting, when she asked me if I minded talking about it. I said no, so we started talking about it. I was being real mellow about it, just describing what happened. When I mentioned how I shot the guy five times, she went off. “Five times! Five times! Why did you shoot him five times? Isn’t that pretty excessive? Didn’t the first one kill him?” and all this other stuff. Just went on and on about how I shot too much. That just set me off. We went around and around and around. It led to a big argument about police brutality and the whole business. But what set me off was her saying it was excessive when she wasn’t there.
But that was awhile back. We get along now. We just don’t talk about the police. I’m very interested in what she is doing. She’s a great kid.
She’s going to law school, and she actually went down to Mexico to help out with the Chiapas deal. She went down there and was almost put in prison. I mean, she’s a great kid but she’s just—let’s just say our values are different.
• • •
Talking to my dad about what happened, I learned some stuff about him that I’d always wondered about. He was a captain of a fighter squadron in Korea, but when I was growing up, he never talked about any combat he’d been in. Us kids would ask him about his time in the military, but he only talked about things he did in training with his buddies and some of the fun things they did in their deployment. I never understood why he wouldn’t talk about combat, but I found out after my first shooting. I was going through some tough times, and he told me that he’d gone through some tough times, too.
He told me that one day they scrambled his squadron for ground support of some troops who were pinned down. As they were running out to their planes, he was given the coordinates. They jumped in their planes, went to the coordinates, and dropped their bombs. Later on, they learned that the guy who had written down the coordinates had them wrong, and they had bombed and killed three of their own soldiers. He told me that they sent his squadron to counseling and that they were told to deal with it by putting it in a vault, shutting the door, and locking it. They were told, “Don’t bring it out. Don’t do anything. Keep it locked in that vault and don’t think about it.” That’s what he told me that they told him, and that kind of explained why he would never talk about his combat experiences.
• • •
I called my wife at her work, told her what had happened. Now the guy ended up living, but at that time if anybody would’ve bet me that that guy was going to live, I’d have lost a year’s wages. In fact, everybody who was at that scene would have lost a lot of money ’cause we all figured he wouldn’t make it.
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