Police Must Stop Beating Themselves Up: The Toll of Trauma

By: Joel F. Shults

There is nothing but regret in the Chauvin case. Regret that the officer didn’t get George Floyd medical attention earlier. Regret that the looters and arsonists think they had a hand in achieving justice. Regret that the shadow of the threat of riots can never be separated from the guilty verdict. Regret that this event is represented as evidence of routine abuse by police officers. Regret that Floyd’s criminal activity was disregarded as irrelevant and minor, not even justifying an arrest. Regret that the science of forensic pathology is inexact enough to send someone to prison with conflicting assumptions about a cause of death. Regret that the public fails to see the multiple millions of contacts and arrests by police officers in unfathomably complex situations that are accomplished flawlessly.

We like to ask angry and confused citizens to wait for the system to work. Now we question whether the system worked. Many, if not most, police officers were just as disturbed by the Floyd video as other citizens. But they have all had to deal with arrestees screaming bloody murder for the crowds. Officers watch these videos with vicarious adrenaline as they relive their own struggles with drug-infused suspects who don’t feel pain, can’t think straight enough to stop resisting, surrounded by bystanders rooting for the arrestee while filming the event with the intent to post it with their own vile and false narrative. We want to accept the jury verdict, but we also know that perhaps, but for the grace of God, there go I.

Would Chauvin have been criminally charged without the civilian video and outrage? We want to think so, since we know an in-custody death would have been closely investigated. What we do know is that the assumption that this kind of thing happens a lot and is generally swept under the rug behind the blue wall of silence is not our experience. Cops get in trouble. They get sued. They get charged. They get fired. They lose their careers. They get chastised by their peers and admonished by supervisors. The old days of attitude adjustments in the alley have passed. We’ve gotten so much better, but in the era of community policing we somehow plowed ground where adversaries planted seeds of mistrust and separation. Maybe all the familiarity bred contempt. Maybe in making everyone Officer Friendly, we did a disservice to the public by masking the reality of being an armed government agent confronting genuine evil and chaos.

Nothing should change solely because of George Floyd and Derek Chauvin. It was a case for a jury, and a jury spoke. We give it due solemn regard and take from it the lessons it offers. The case should not be the center of the universe for whatever gets labeled as police reform. I was asked to comment on what changes in training should result from the verdict. My answer is that this was a human performance and decision error. It was not a training or policy failure. No one teaches prolonged neck compression, and no one teaches delaying medical care when a person in custody is in distress.

If an agency proclaims that it will be changing training and policy, it is tacitly admitting that what happened in the Floyd encounter was normal police behavior. It is like answering the question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Were trainers’ eyes suddenly opened to make them stop teaching neck-knee techniques and to ignore signs of medical distress? No, because we’re already there. Agencies are well-advised to state that their policies were reviewed, and to make those policies public. What the public needs to hear is the truthful statement that this highly publicized event was an anomaly, with statistics and documentation to affirm this reality. We are much better served by each agency doing their own research into their interactions with the public to assess their department’s training and culture and apply corrections where warranted.

This is not a call to disregard the verdict or the events that led up to it. We acknowledge the trauma that the nation has vicariously suffered. But like any other trauma, we cannot measure all future encounters by the emotions stirred while in shock. We sort out the real threats, the real solutions, the real perspective, then we stop living in our trauma.

A retired police chief Joel Shults is an award winning writer, college professor, trainer, and first responder chaplain. He is the author of several law enforcement related books and numerous articles. He serves as a municipal judge and a coroner’s investigator in rural southern Colorado. He can be found on twitter @chiefshults, and online at joelshults.blogspot.com and streetsmartforce.com