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.
