I do my best through all of them, but I keep coming back to ask how much training I would want to have in order to feel prepared to intervene confidently and appropriately in some of the situations I encounter in the simulator. I imagine cops have to mediate between exes having loud confrontations all the time, and I also imagine that, say, someone with years of conflict resolution and psychological training would have a pretty clear road map for how to best resolve a situation like that without having to make an arrest, use pepper spray, or god forbid, unholster his weapon.
“There’s an old saying,” retired NYPD cop turned author Steve Osborne once told me, “that in police work, a cop`s mouth is his greatest weapon. To go into a chaotic situation where everybody is yelling and screaming, sometimes there`s alcohol, there`s drugs involved—to be able to talk everybody down. When you see a real experienced cop do that, it’s a magical thing.”
But as true as that is, the fact is that most cops are going to encounter these scenarios with little more training than I did—and I talk for a living! The typical cadet training involves sixty hours on how to use a gun and fifty-one hours on defensive tactics, but just eight hours on how to calm situations without force.
It made me think of the stories I’d heard from soldiers about the high-water mark of counterinsurgency in Iraq, when General David Petraeus (to much acclaim) took over the mission. He attempted to orient America’s occupying soldiers toward cultivating political alliances and building the new state’s governing capacity. Readers of American news outlets were treated to an endless stream of photos of camo-clad soldiers sitting on rugs with Iraqi men drinking tea and listening to them air their grievances.
Some of the soldiers I spoke to enjoyed this work, believed in it deeply, and felt they excelled at it. Others felt the whole thing was ridiculous. But the brute fact remains: soldiers aren’t judges or mayors or bureaucrats who have the experience, language skills, or basic relationships of kin and country to be able to navigate the extremely fraught local politics of a place they’ve never set foot in until their deployment.
Sure, there were many incredibly talented, humane, creative American troops who managed to improvise, listen and learn, and play some kind of constructive role in the area to which they were assigned. But there was a fundamental mismatch between what the military as an institution is created and trained to do and what this military in this moment was being asked to do. The military exists to use violence to destroy enemies. That is its essence. It can also do many things that aren’t that (build dams, deliver relief, develop technology), but to ask twenty-year-olds in a war zone to play cultural ambassador underneath fifty pounds of gear in 110-degree heat while not speaking the language is, well, a stretch.
And as I navigated scenario after scenario in the training room, it felt like it’s in many ways the same for cops. We ask police to be social workers, addiction counselors, mental health workers, and community mediators. We wouldn’t hand a social worker a gun and have them go out into the streets to apprehend criminals, but we do the opposite every day.
So what happens when police officers are called upon to handle a volatile person in the midst of terrible psychological torment? It happens all the time in America, and many police, whether through luck or accrued wisdom or basic empathy, handle it with grace. But many don’t, or worse. In March 2015 a maintenance worker in an apartment complex in the Atlanta suburbs saw twenty-seven-year-old Air Force veteran Anthony Hill naked, banging on neighbors’ doors and crawling on the ground in the throes of a bipolar episode. The worker did what many, maybe most, of us would do: he called the cops. What else would you do? This is precisely the type of disorder we look to the cops to resolve. (Another woman who saw Hill called 911, hoping to get medical personnel to respond.)
The police arrived, and in less than ten minutes, Hill, who was black, was shot dead. He had been unarmed and, his family says, suffered from PTSD after a deployment to Afghanistan. The officer who shot him claimed that Hill charged him, and he was convinced he was on some drug that would’ve rendered his Taser useless. That officer was charged with murder.
But take a second and ask yourself why this was considered something for the police to handle to begin with. “If a mental health unit with paramedics, nurses, or even doctors had been sent to help Anthony (instead of an officer with a gun) he would still be alive today,” local activist Asia Parks told Think Progress. “Mental illness should not be the reason a person is condemned to death or prison.” According to statistics compiled by the Washington Post, in 2015 a full quarter of those shot and killed by police were suffering from mental illness.
None of my scenarios in New Jersey involved people suffering from mental illness, although I was hardly in a position to make that determination. (Again: how would I know unless I had been trained to spot it?) One simulation stuck out, however, probably because it ended with me getting shot.
I show up in response to a complaint that a man is revving the engine of his motorcycle in his garage. When I ask about the noise, the man stops revving the engine and responds, “Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me! Again?!” I stand in the driveway looking into the garage, where the man and his wife take turns arguing with each other and cursing at me. I try to control the situation, but after maybe thirty seconds of this kind of back-and-forth, the man and the woman start arguing more strenuously. Then suddenly, someone starts firing a shotgun at me. I am hit before my hand even reaches my sidearm. Despite being shot, I manage to draw my gun and fire wildly, but by that point I am (virtually) dead.
Carifi approached me and asked me how many people were in the scenario. I said two, the man and woman arguing. I had managed to entirely miss a third man who’d entered the scene and been the one to pick up the shotgun. To add insult to injury, he noted the screen that marked where I had returned fire: my constellation of misses hadn’t even come close to the man actually trying to kill me.
“Your shots were all over the place,” Carifi said. “The scenario ended at this point because he got off multiple shots with his shotgun. Most likely you’re—”