| Use of Force (2107) |
Lesson 4 - Deadly Force (pt2) |
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"I've Killed That Man Ten Thousand Times." When police are forced to kill suspects, nightmares, flashbacks and sever depression are normal, say psychologists. Nonetheless, they may destroy careers. by Anne Cohen It has been maybe 20 years since police officer Bob Stone shot and killed a man who came at him with a bottle. Stone, now a supervisor in a large police department, cannot recall what year it happened. What's more, he doesn't want to. "I can't tell you what this man looked like. I remember his age, but I can't tell you the time of year, his name, or the date. And I wish I could forget the couple of things I remember," he says, chewing on the plastic stick he just used to stir his coffee. Stone's story is old, so old that many of his colleagues don't even remember that Stone (not his real name) killed a "mental" when he was a patrolman. Now in his forties, Stone smiles softly, sadly, as he talks about what happened. "We wrestled all over the street," he says. "I went down: he went down. And then he came up with this wine bottle from the street and it was clear to me what he was going to do with it. I tried to warn him. I fired a shot into the ground. That didn't stop him. I fired a shot at his feet. He kept on coming. I could see he wasn't rational. So I shot him." Seldom does anyone mention the incident to Stone anymore. He isn't even sure whether his children know the story. But there are times when another officer shoots someone and needs to talk to somebody. Then a homicide investigator or the watch commander remembers that Bob Stone once killed a man and asks him to help. He is always willing to spend time with the younger officers. "I feel sorry for them, real sorry," the 25-year veteran says quietly. "Because anybody that does that and doesn't suffer, they got some of their screws loose someplace." The shooting "made me a different Bobby Stone," he says, and tries to explain why. "Domestically, socially, I felt kind of dirty, violated - as if I wasn't as high in the eyes of my family as I was the day before. Wednesday, you're this police officer with all this public support, and the next day you don't know if you're a criminal or not. And then you sit around for years and wash the thing over. Was it unnecessary? Did you do the right thing?" There is no way for Stone to avoid reviewing the decision he made that night. "So many things occur that instantly remind you - another shooting, the sight of a bottle in the street." Then the whole thing comes back to him. "I'm confronted with him again but it hasn't been done yet. He's there and I'm there. Sometimes I don't shoot and sometimes I do. Then I see his body fall, like a slow feather." Stone holds the thin strip of white plastic straight up and then gently brings it down to the table. "I've killed that man ten thousand times," he says. In the United States each year, more than 100 police officers kill people in the line of duty. Some of the killings are in self-defense, some are accidental, some are to prevent a serious crime. A few represent deadly abuses of police power. But whatever the circumstances, psychologists who work with police officers say that almost all of those who become involved in fatal uses of force have reactions very similar to Bob Stone's. Typically, such an officer becomes less aggressive in his work and more introspective about his role as a public servant. He has to deal with the stress of his own encounter with death and the pressure of being questioned by the homicide and internal affairs units. Other street officers treat him with a fascination he finds unseemly, while city officials are likely to keep their distance from him publicly, especially if the incident is controversial. His relationship with his family may become strained. He probably will have flashbacks and nightmares, at least in the first days after the shooting. He will wonder if he is losing his mind. Dr. Michael Roberts, head of psychological services for the San Jose (California) Police Department and one of the first psychologists to study post-killing trauma in police officers, draws a dark picture of the officer who has no help in dealing with the emotional impact of his act. "He doesn't know that this is normal," Roberts explains. "So he sits quietly and drinks himself into oblivion." It wasn't until very recently, when he heard Roberts give a lecture on the subject, that Bob Stone realized his own reaction had been typical. But even knowing this might not have made a difference. The emotional stability of officers who have killed a suspect remains uncertain, even where counseling is available. Civilians, and those officers who have not had the experience, cannot understand why police officers should feel guilt or anxiety over the death of those who threatened their lives. But the problem, say the psychologists, is the uncertainty. Officer Stone says he is constantly asking himself, "Did you have to do that?" The guilt and anxiety that most police officers feel when they kill someone is intense, says Dr. Gregory Riede of the Houston Police Department, because "police officers have strong, rigid moral standards that require high levels of performance. They end up suffering a great deal of conflict - unlike a psychopath - because they have such high standards." If a police officer shoots someone in the name of the law, Riede says, and his standards say that shooting people is wrong, it is unreasonable to expect the officer to believe what he did was right just because a coroner rules the homicide a justifiable one. Dr. Martin Reiser, director of behavioral sciences services for the Los Angeles Police Department, says: "In general, we find police officers to be very moralistic, very conscientious, very concerned about right or wrong. They react very strongly." Someone with the same kind of standards - a minister, a nurse, a teacher - would probably react the same way, says Reiser, who, like Roberts, is a pioneer in the study of post-shooting trauma. Psychologists say it is impossible to predict which officers will have difficulty coping with the fact that they have killed. It depends on the circumstances of the shooting - whether the officer or someone else was in imminent danger, whether he was physically close to the suspect as he died, his and the suspect's age, the officer's background, religious training and a host of other factors. How strongly an officer reacts depends on the individual, says Reiser, it "depends on how adaptive he is. the officer who doesn't react at all is someone with severe emotional problems, a sociopath. He doesn't feel guilt feelings, is concerned mainly with his own needs. And that's one of the personality traits we screen out {when selecting recruits}." Reiser said that he, Roberts of San Jose and Dr. John Stratton of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department have compared statistics and concluded that a "very high proportion" of officers involved in fatal shootings ultimately leave their departments because of "stress disability." "The flashbacks occur in everybody," says Roberts, who provides counseling to a number of smaller departments when one of their officers kills a suspect. "The crying, the guilt, the sorrow occur in about 25 percent of the cases. Our preliminary results show the people who are more in touch with their emotions will have a more visible result in the short run. They may have an edge because they ventilate; they let it out. The people for whom it was just like taking a shit, it's eating them up inside and they don't know why." "I'll see officers years later," says Riede, "and the problem is still unresolved. I saw someone recently - it was six years later - and he still has trouble sleeping and recalls things in his work. He has big memories that he'd hoped wouldn't be with him that long." When Santa Monica, California police officer Frank Saunders shot and killed a man who held him at gunpoint and tried to take his service revolver, all the department did for him was give him enough bullets to reload his gun. Saunders today finds this understandable. The year was 1967. Few departments offered psychological services of any kind; no one had ever heard of post-shooting trauma. Saunders was involved in another shooting incident in 1978; shots fired at him by a pawn shop robber ricocheted off a car door and severed the tip of his right ring finger. After this second incident, he thinks, he should have been given some counseling. "These were modern times," he says. "I was having a replay of the two incidents together, keeping it to myself." He got no counseling and struggled through on his own. But then there was a third incident, and that one forced Saunders out of police work. The 44-year-old officer was answering a prowler call in a residential neighborhood when it happened: "Here come these kids out of a window carrying bags of loot; they're 15, maybe 16. They come bursting through the gate and kid number one has apparently stolen a gun. I come around expecting to find a couple of kid burglars and he's trying to figure out how the gun works. I do a backflip into the hedges, thinking, why me?" The youngster was baffled by the mechanics of the automatic he was holding and was unable to load the clip. But he pointed the gun at Saunders, who listened to it go "click, click." The officer fired twice. One of the boys fell, and the other took off at a run. Saunders ran over to the fallen youth, afraid that he had killed him. "To this day, I really don't think I wanted to hit him," Saunders says. "I remember grabbing him by the shoulder and rolling him over. I could almost see the guy from the first scene." It turned out that the boy had fallen down from fright and was not hurt. But Saunders was still shaken. This time, Saunders' superiors realized the officer couldn't handle the strain. He was sent to see Dr. Stratton of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, who told him he should not go back on the street. "I really didn't want to be in the position where I'd have to kill a kid, but I didn't want to get killed myself," he says. In April 1979, Saunders was placed on disability leave. In February of this year, he retired after 15 years on the job. He is philosophical about his career. If he had not been a police officer, says Saunders, "I would never have delivered a baby or pulled a drowning kid from a pool." His marriage has suffered since the first shooting. He and his wife go through what he calls "periodic split-ups," and they are now living apart. "I don't know if we'll ever be able to organize our lives," he says, his voice tightening. Tim Miller is much more bitter about the failure of his department to give him psychological counseling. Miller (not his real name) is an officer in his mid-twenties who then worked for a small department where officers rarely even draw their guns. Miller killed a man several years ago, after he interrupted a theft that would have netted the dead man exactly $20. The thief fired first. Miller can describe the shooting in detail. He remembers even the milliseconds between the time when the suspect's gun went off and he realized he would have to shoot. His shots hit the man squarely in the chest. When he fell, Miller rushed over and started doing cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on his victim, yelling, "Breathe, you son of a bitch, breathe." "I came pretty much unglued after the shooting," he says today. "I was doing a lot of crying and a lot of vomiting. I was totally withdrawn and had crying spells the first five days. I'd sit watching TV and I'd just start crying. The first five weeks after the shooting, I was basically numb, although I felt a lot of remorse over having had to kill somebody. But I never was scared until later." What scared him was that he started drinking heavily. "The fifth month after the shooting I woke up and said to myself, You're going to be an alcoholic,' and I stopped." But Miller continues to have nightmares about the shooting. "The nightmare I still have is that I confront a guy with a gun on the street. He just comes out of the mist. I hit him. Six righteous hits I get on him. I reload and hit him six more times. Now I'm out of ammo and he keeps coming at me." Miller stops talking for a minute, then continues: "I used to dream that [the man I killed] was standing at the foot of my bed, and I couldn't get to my gun. Now it's just a faceless black man." Mike Roberts says that one of the biggest problems facing officers who have used deadly force is the disintegration of the "hero myth" - the notion that a shooting will be showdown-at-the-OK-Corral affair, pitting a well-trained police officer against a well-armed and cleverly evil criminal. "The reality is that most of the people police officers end up killing are losers in a last-ditch effort to salvage themselves," says Roberts. "The officer may be given no choice - people will take on a cop so that the cop will kill them - but that doesn't make the cop feel any better." That is something Tim Miller knows painfully well. "It wasn't in a corral or over a broad or for each other's honor," he says. "It was all over $20. I can't believe he was killing to die or risk being killed for $20." Months after the shooting, Miller still sounds shocked. Bill Clark, a San Jose police officer now on disability leave in part because of the stress of a shooting five years ago, calls the idea of having to shoot a suspect "numero uno" on the list of things police officer think they might do. "Driving around, you think, What if this would happen?' Most cops go through it every day. Finally it happens to you and a lot of things you thought would happen don't. You imagine a blazing gun battle [after which] you go over and roll him over with your foot and blow the smoke from your gun." Instead, what Clark did was shoot a man to death while the man was stabbing Clark's partner with a ten-inch knife. Clark had to pump four rounds into the assailant with his .357 magnum before the man dropped. Instead of blowing the smoke from his gun, Clark grabbed some gauze from the first aid kit in his cruiser and tried for 15 minutes to resuscitate the man. "They had to pull me off the guy," Clark says. Police who are involved in fatal shootings learn that there is seldom anything heroic in it. One officer recalls with sorrow having to kill a man who was "too drunk and too pissed to have the good sense to know he was dead." But that officer and others like him are nevertheless regarded with awe and special respect by their fellow officers, who still see such shootings through a haze of movie westerns and television police shows. Bob Stone hated all the adulation. "All these clowns slapping you on the back and the officials holding - their motivation is shallow. Except for the people who experienced it themselves. The rest of these people, they don't know." Miller agrees: "You can't really talk to someone who hasn't been there. They want to hear the gory details, not about your problems handling it - because it's heavy and it reminds them it could have happened to them." Psychologists say Miller is close to the mark. Dr. Reiser of the LAPD believes that the awe and respect directed at the officers who have killed someone may be part of an "apprenticeship type of feeling." Reiser says most officers are actually terribly afraid that they might have to shoot someone. So they are anxious to talk to an officer who has, hoping that whatever gave him the moxie to pull the trigger will rub off on them. The officer receiving all this attention "may openly tolerate it," Reiser says. "But inwardly he cringes. He may [even] say, 'You guys don't know what you're talking about, and I don't appreciate this kind of glorification . . .' There's a big gap between the locker-room ethos . . . and the realities of what an officer's feelings involve." Officers who have killed say they just nod when colleagues treat them like heros. Says Stone with some resignation: "These are people you're connected with socially, and will be tomorrow. So you just smile and say, 'yeah.' " Officer Greg Brown of Cincinnati, Ohio, has had a particularly hard time dealing with the adulation of his fellow officers since he killed a teenager in 1975. Brown and another officer were on a stake-out at the home of the youngster, who was accused of viciously raping a two-year-old girl, when the suspect suddenly walked up to the door. Something flashed in the youngster's hand and Brown fired. "A click and flash was a gun to me," he says. What the 17-year-old was holding was a bunch of keys. Although he sees the shooting as a legitimate response to the suspect's action, Brown was not particularly proud of the killing, despite the charge against the suspect. But his fellow officers treated him like a hero. He no longer tries to discourage them. "If you try to reason with them," he says, by telling them that the killing was not a pleasure, "they'll call you a liar." Even before the shooting, Brown had been treated with some awe by his colleagues because he had fought in Vietnam with the U.S. Army Special Forces. But, though he killed many men in combat, Brown and other war veterans who have killed in the course of their police duty insist that the two situations are very different. In war, they say, the enemy is identified; his weaponry is equal to or better than yours; he is as skilled in combat as you are. To compare war with a fatal police shooting is "comparing apples and oranges," says Detective Dan Sullivan of the Santa Barbara (California) Police Department, who killed a man two years ago and who served in Vietnam. "In a war, that's what you're there for - to wipe them out. Police work isn't like that. You're certainly not on a search-and-destroy mission. Vietnam and the 1400 block of Gillespie Street in Santa Barbara, they're just not the same thing." "In the military," says psychologist Riede, "the guy you're shooting at doesn't live in your town. He's a bad guy. All the guys are shooting. He may even speak another language. The role is so well accepted and shared. A cop feels responsibility [for what happened]. It's not Congress that made this situation. "In Vietnam, I killed people," says Greg Brown. "I knew I killed people. In the army, when you're fighting, it's clear cut; you know your guys, you know their guys." More upsetting to Brown than his colleagues' congratulatory remarks was the sense of isolation he felt after the shooting, which occurred three months after he became a police officer. "I felt as alone as I ever had in my whole life. They take you out of a group and make you stand alone. No one would throw in with me. These [were] the same people - the mayor, city council, the police chief - who put the gun in my hand and said I was qualified." The shooting received a lot of publicity, and Brown was frustrated by his inability to answer comments and innuendoes made in the media. One television station broadcast a photograph of the dead suspect taken when he was 14. He was "a fluffy-headed little kid," sighed Brown. "You couldn't believe he'd do anything wrong . . . I would have liked to go down to Fountain Square [the center of town] and tell my story." Brown thought about quitting. "Everybody does," he says, "but that would be like saying I was wrong." Increasingly, officers involved in fatal uses of force find themselves before grand juries and even trial courts, charged with homicide. Legal proceedings make the job of psychologists more difficult, because an officer will become preoccupied with the legal ramifications of the story he has to tell, rather than the emotional ones. "You're not worried about your emotions," says Bob Stone, "when you're afraid they're going to throw your ass in the penitentiary." One officer who got embroiled in legal proceedings was Officer Mike Oetzel of Cincinnati. The grand jury failed to indict, but a $3 million civil suit is still pending against him and the city of Cincinnati. For that reason, his lawyer lets him talk only about what happened after December 1, 1978, when Oetzel killed a 17-year-old suspected auto thief. No recent police shooting incident in Cincinnati has been more controversial than the one involving Oetzel. The officer says he doesn't think about quitting, but the experience changed his attitude towards his job. "I felt pooped, drained," says Oetzel. "I would have just liked to have gone out - not necessarily to a bar or anything, just somebody's basement - and had a couple of drinks. I was more fatigued than anything else, but I didn't want to go to bed, go to sleep. There was too much going on in my head." Now, says the introspective 33-year-old, "I don't get involved in people's personal problems. I used to go out of my way to help. I liked being a policeman. Now, it's not that I don't like my job - I can't think of anything I'd rather do - but something's missing." "It's important to people when they call a policeman and it was important to me, too. I was the guy who wanted to help them. Now, if I can get someone else to help, that's okay. I'm not saying [I tell them to] go to hell, but most of the jams I've gotten into were when I was trying to help people." Bill Clark, on disability leave from the San Jose department, is convinced he could return to street patrol and do his job well. "But it's not worth all the bad things that happen - going back and taking the harassment and the garbage with the possibility of having to kill somebody," he said. "I was a proud police officer. But this whole thing about being a cop has turned into a bummer." Clark and Oetzel have both found some comfort in religion. When he is "looking to God, looking for guidance," says Oetzel. "It's weird, but it's there, and I don't have to go around feeling so bad." Officers who have killed people, says Houston's Riede, "are looking for answers they don't find in routine circumstances. They can't look to friends and say, 'I need to talk about death.' But the church spends time dealing with death. I don't think the guy who's killed someone, who has people congratulate him for that, he can't say to those same people, 'But I'm sorry I did it.' In church I think he can." Another source of consolation for the officer who has shot someone is other officers who have been in that position. After all, says Dr. Walter Lippert, a Cincinnati psychologist who has worked with police, "there is no other question in your or my life like, 'How does it feel to kill a person?' " One Cincinnati officer who had killed a man a few months before Oetzel did brought dinner to Oetzel's home after he killed the suspected auto thief. Oetzel, in turn, often offers other officers a chance to talk when there has been a killing. "I try to explain to them, not in any great detail, what they might expect," he said. "The attacks of depression, the flashbacks." Bob Stone says he will be forever grateful to some veteran detectives who had been in shootings and helped him deal with his incident, especially one now-retired officer. "I guess I was kind of giving myself to him. He knew what was going to happen to me and I didn't . . . I consider myself part of a class of people other people don't understand . . . Maybe we should have a club," he suggests without sarcasm, "like coin collectors." Psychologists often recruit officers who have previously been in shooting incidents to help their colleagues. But Greg Riede is wary of holding scheduled group therapy sessions. "A group is okay if the guys who've been through it can show him a way to resolve it. But I want to be careful not to teach him a bad way to handle it." Riede also worries about creating a group that looks from the outside like an elite force. "Other officers might say, "Wow, what do I do to get in there - that's better than SWAT,' " frets the psychologist. Roberts says that individual police agencies should encourage peer contacts rather than merely allow them to take place on a casual or even furtive basis. Police departments should also mandate totally confidential contact with a psychologist or psychiatrist within the first 24 hours for all officers involved in shootings, he believes. Roberts and other police psychologists say that confidentiality is very important because the officer has already had to tell his story repeatedly to homicide detectives, investigators from internal affairs and perhaps to someone from the district attorney's office. He will certainly have also been questioned by at least one curious assistant or deputy chief. Riede says that when the officer finally sits before a psychologist, the meeting should be a "low pressure decompression for the client." Los Angeles County's John Stratton says that sometimes the assurance of confidentiality isn't enough. "Some guys will still be hesitant. So I'll say, 'I'll tell you some of the things that have happened to others,' in order to give him a way to be able to talk about it." Roberts, too, thinks it's important that an officer get at least three days of paid administrative leave and an opportunity to continue doing real police work, but off the street, for a short while. A psychologist working with such police officers must have credibility. Dr. Marshall Saper, who counsels Kansas City (Mo.) officers who have either fired at suspects or been fired at, went through the police academy and is a member of that city's police reserves. In Cincinnati, Walter Lippert, who donates his services to officers who have killed suspects, also handled debriefing for the SWAT team and for more than ten years led workshops on police-community relations. Dan Sullivan of Santa Barbara was not initially upset when he killed a man. Nevertheless, he was ordered by his captain to have a counseling session. Sullivan asked to see Stratton, whom he had met at a hostage negotiation workshop. "I knew Stratton [wasn't] somebody who'd make noises under the desk while you talked about your sex life," Sullivan says. "After I went, I was glad I did. I felt better for having a professional tell me I was okay." Sullivan was lucky. "When I came on," the 30-year-old detective said, "I was completely convinced I could spend 20 years on this job and never shoot anybody. I really don't feel guilty about what I had to do. It's not as if I executed him . . . Sometimes I think about it. The shooting itself was not so traumatic for me, not as bad as a lot of people tell me it should have been." In some ways, the shooting has changed Sullivan's life. "It pointed me in the direction I should go. I transferred [out of uniformed patrol] back to detectives. I got my bachelor's degree. I hate to say it refined my priorities in my career, but it did. Even with counseling, time off and administrative support, an officer may just not be able to deal with the fact that he has killed. When Bill Clark - who killed to save another officer's life - returned to patrol in San Jose, a colleague told him that seven of ten officers who have killed people leave policing within seven years. "That's me," Clark remembers saying then. "I'm that 30 percent. I love it." But today, Clark helps his wife manage a motel in Washington State. He is still waiting for word on his request for a disability retirement. His claim, he admits, is based not only on a bad back, but on the shooting he can't forget. "I've never had any hard feelings over the fact that he tried to kill me," says Tim Miller of the man who was willing to die for $20. "But I'm mad as shit that he made me kill him, and I resent the trauma he brought to my life." He also resents the congratulations of his fellow officers. Miller was stunned when, the day after the incident, an officer from another jurisdiction came up to him, shook his hand and announced: "You've done what all of us would like to do - kill a nigger before we retire." "The bottom line," says Miller, is that an officer who has killed a person "needs somebody who'll listen to him, someone to say, 'We respect you for what you did. You didn't miss, and you didn't run, and you didn't get killed.' But don't come up to me and tell me you wished it could have been you that 'killed the nigger.' Because you can have it." As we told you previously, at times after a police shooting or serious incident there occurs a Post Trauma Shock. Sometimes there is a sense of unreality or denial of events that have occurred. Subconsciously, these events may be denied or restructured to meet idealized expectations of what should have happened or of how the officer should have behaved. That is to say that sometimes the officer denies the situation, completely blocking it from his mind, or the officer "rewrites" the internal script of what really happened during the incident. At times a normal, solid officer becomes:
Delay - The Secondary Reaction: Some officers appear to be handling the shooting well and do not need assistance. They return to work and function well. A month, year or several years later they may develop difficulties such as:
They also second guess; such as, "Could I have done something else?" Furthermore, they experience:
Flashbacks: These occur when the officer is awake, not asleep. The past event flashes before his eyes. Emotions associated with the incident return. Officers experiencing flashbacks may appear disassociated or distant from their surroundings. They may exhibit physical reactions to what is being seen. After a flashback, the officer may be visibly upset: shaking, fearful or weeping. Note: If you have an experience like this or you see another officer having one, you must be aware that you or the other person are in a crisis. Don't be critical! There is nothing wrong with expressing one's emotions. You can't help what you feel!! In fact, it is healthier to express your emotions rather than to hold them inside and perhaps deny the feelings. Get help and start getting well. There is nothing wrong with asking for professional help! Depressive Symptoms: Depressive symptoms are typical after a crisis incident; they include, but are not limited to:
Sex Drive Decreases
Withdrawal: Withdrawal accompanied by feelings of being alone (i.e., "No one cares what happens to me.") We hope you can see the danger in this attitude. When a person reaches a point where he has lost hope and he feels helpless about correcting or making his life better and more productive; he is in a very critical situation. Let's try to identify some results of helplessness. How about alcohol? Do you think that you might become an alcoholic? Or that the other officer might become an alcoholic? Well . . . could be. Nearly 1/3 of the total number of police officers in this country are alcoholics. How about becoming suicidal? A person becomes suicidal when he loses all hope and feels that he has no control of his life. AND suicide is the number two killer of police officers. Of course, the number one killer is heart disease. The point is that one can recover from Post Trauma Shock. He may need assistance, but there is a great degree of recovery and it is available if you only ask for help. Considerations For Police Friends of Officers In Trauma: It's helpful if the police friend knows how to deal with the officer suffering from post trauma syndrome. He should also recognize the fact that an officer involved in an incident will be in crisis and crisis means that the usual coping mechanisms aren't working. Also, the traumatized officer should not be treated as either being weak, or as a suspect, but as a victim who needs some sensitive handling, caring, and support as do other victims. Within the last several years, the psychological community has indeed determined that officers become victims of shootings and other major incidents due to the magnitude of physical and emotional anguish they experience. What we need to realize is that when we take another human being's life, it is very serious. It's not locker room bragging trash! It is critically difficult at best. Officers should minimize additional trauma by keeping post event interviews short. They should also adopt a helpful rather than a harmful attitude. Goals of the Police Supervisor: The goal of any supervisor with an officer who has been involved in a traumatic event should be to provide:
Light duty assignments that allow a gradual reentry into the mainstream might be helpful for the officer. Administrative Leave An officer involved in a shooting incident needs time to think about the experience. An officer should meet with a psychologist and an attorney and perhaps he'll want to talk with a member of the clergy.The officer and department are subjected to community and media pressure. These pressures and the need for time to think places the department under some obligation to temporarily relieve the officer from the challenges of law enforcement duties. Many departments do not recognize this need, while others that recognize it stigmatize the officer by placing him on "suspension." The term suspension carries a negative connotation. It's like the department is blaming the officer. When an officer is suspended pending an investigation, the media, the public and officers see this as a disciplinary reaction to an incident. To avoid this stigma, yet provide the officer with a few days of paid time off, administrative leave is recommended. Post Shooting Services: Departments should provide their officers with legal assistance and guidance. Litigation arising out of police use of deadly force can occur many years after the incident. It is important to prepare a defense of an officer's use of force immediately after the incident occurs by compiling relevant documentation. Procedures After A Police Shooting: All personnel involved in a shooting undergo self-examination of their moral and ethical conscience. If property controlled, this "soul-searching" can be a beneficial and healthy experience. Some personnel involved in a shooting incident mentally crumble under the strain of soul-searching after a shooting. Psychologists working with personnel involved say that almost all of these people go through similar experiences after the use of deadly force. Personnel involved become less aggressive in their work. Officers become more introspective about their role as public servants. Other officers treat them with fascination. City officials are likely to publicly keep their distance from the personnel involved. The officer's family relationships may become strained. The officer will probably experience nightmares and flashbacks. A very high proportion of officers involved in fatal shootings ultimately leave their departments because of stress disability. Departments should encourage religious or psychological counseling to all personnel involved following a shooting incident. Where these services are provided, the results seem positive. The family of the involved officer also faces stress and often times is completely forgotten by the department and the officer. This isolation is psychologically unhealthy and must be overcome. The psychologist and clergy can assist by providing professional services to both officer and family. Each department has its own procedures for investigating an officer involved in a shooting. Most agencies have extensive investigative requirements in such circumstances. Typical Procedures: (Keep in mind: These are just suggestions. You must follow the policy of your department!)
Internal Affairs: Each department has its own policy and procedures concerning internal affairs investigations. Officers should be aware of these practices. Where these is the possibility of criminal charges being filed, many departments will conduct separate investigations. Garrity vs. New Jersey, 385 U.S. 493 (1967) ruled that evidence gathered from an employee under threat of dismissal was not admissible in a criminal trial. During an administrative investigation, officers may be compelled to answer questions, participate in a line-up, or take a polygraph examination. If the officer is warned of possible consequences of non-cooperation, he may be disciplined. This information is not admissible under Garrity vs. New Jersey. If an officer is under arrest or is a suspect in a criminal investigation and any answer sought by the investigator (or any information derived from such answer) is intended for use in a criminal trial, the officer must be given the Miranda warning contained in Article 15.17 and 38.22 of the CCP. Texas statutes provide guidelines for investigations.
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 © 2006 Shannon White |