Op Ed Piece Written by Donna Kelly

Donna has written a thoughtful and insightful Op Ed piece from a prosecutor's perspective concerning officers and what they go through on a day to day basis.  It will appear in Sunday's Deseret News.  Attorney General Sean Reyes has joined Donna and will offer his perspective as well.

Our hope is to get it published as widely as possible.  Her desire to write it obviously originated with recent officer involved shootings but it deals with much more than those isolated incidents.  Please take a minute to read it and share it with your officers and others who you feel would be interested.

The national debate on officer-involved shootings lingers in our air like smoke at a crime scene. It is a subject that has been on my mind for more than two decades.

As a new prosecutor I was assigned my first murder case. It was the case no prosecutor ever wants to have: the murder of an infant by his own biological father.

I sat in stunned silence reading the reports when a detective came into my office. “The autopsy is scheduled. Who should go?” Having the luxury of making that call, I opted out and asked him to go.

A week later, I walked into a meeting about the case and there he sat, head in hands, speechless. His necessary attendance had taken its inevitable toll.

Since that time I have observed the occupational damage inflicted on law enforcement officers on an almost daily basis.  “Part of the job description,” they shrug if asked about the personal toll the work takes on their bodies and souls.

At this stage of my career, I do training on the debilitating effects of trauma on victims, who experience the devastation of criminal behavior mostly only rarely in their lives. For officers, trauma is not a rarity but a steady daily diet. We pay officers to be professional trauma victims on every single shift and we have the luxury of standing by complacently as they reel from the blows, figurative but occasionally literal, that are inflicted inevitably while they are just doing their jobs.

How many of us accept as just another part of our jobs screaming, verbal attacks, being spit on, being shoved, being smacked? And how many of us have in the back of our minds as we try to do our jobs every minute of every day the thought that we might be violently assaulted, stabbed or shot?

When I go to lunch with officers, they invariably choose the table at the back and sit with their backs against the wall, just in case. Officers always drive their vehicles separately to meetings, just in case. At normal boring meetings when officers attend they attend with their weapons on their hips, just in case. Many times officers will look at their cell phones (formerly, they listened to their radios) and run out of the room without any explanation. No explanation is needed. I know why they are running.

As I have watched in horror the recent officer-involved shooting events so prominent in the media, I am deeply saddened by the pain and the loss of the families of both officers and citizens. There are no winners in officer-involved shootings. There is only tragedy in abundance.

The national conversation that is taking place about use of force by officers is a painful and necessary one, but cannot and should not take place in ignorance or outright denial. It must take place within the context of the toll that the job takes on officers. They are human, and therefore imperfect, but with very few exceptions those who wear badges are good and decent men and women struggling to manage a Herculean task: to serve and protect while adding no harm.

The national conversation should not be based on distorted “Hollywood” versions of events, on myths about police. And those myths are too often based in a fiction that fails to acknowledge the limits of human ability. Every conversation should take place in the context of knowledge, science and reality.

Less than one half of one per cent of officer calls result in any force whatsoever being used by police. This means that the most common tactic of police in dangerous encounters is “talking down” the suspect. In every situation it is the offender who controls the narrative, not the officer. The officer is trained to react to the given unique situation.

Officers typically have less than 1/4 of one second to make a decision when their lives are threatened. The stakes are high and those decisions have profound impacts, but we must evaluate those decisions in light of the difficulty and enormity of the task.

Our society continues to ask more and more of officers and while giving fewer and fewer resources. We expect officers to deal with the most dangerous, most unpredictable, most harrowing incidents that can be imagined. We not only demand that they do so, but we make those demands while providing too little training and assistance, not to mention too few resources for the secondary trauma they experience on every shift.

In the many years I have worked with officers, I have had the opportunity to observe hundreds of them doing their jobs. I have found them to be passionate, caring, courageous and dedicated individuals.

One officer I worked with had photos of victims he had helped over the years pinned to the walls of his cubicle. One day we had been working on a case involving the kidnapping of a young girl out of her front yard, and the subsequent rape and torture of the girl. “Why do you do this job?” I asked after staring at crime scene photos on his desk. He gestured at his walls. “How can I not?”

Donna Kelly has been a prosecutor for 24 years and currently serves as the Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Resource Prosecutor for the Utah Prosecution Council.