Preventing Officer Fatalities and Coping With Tragedy

Dealing with the aftermath

Brown says that he had a lot to learn when it came to managing the mental toll that the deadly ambush took on his department. “People have these misgivings about what they did. Did they do enough they can do? Cops are really hard on themselves; they really are. For them to be well, they need a path to being able to say ‘I need to talk to a peer or professional,’” he says. “That needs to be an open offering with no stigma attached to it. We want our officers to be OK on the other end of this. We want them well for their careers, but we want them well for their families as much as we want to them to come back to work.”

An after action or debriefing can benefit those involved by serving as therapy as well as improving tactics and training. “Most of the time we all have nightmares and are reliving and thinking about what we could have done better,” Brown says. “You’re second-guessing yourself.”

He pointed out that while efforts taken by a department to review an incident can improve response times and officer safety, there may be some pushback. “You’ve got to start with we can always improve. You can’t think about ‘I don’t want to critique what we’ve done because of civil litigation or because I’m afraid internal affairs is going to suspend me because I didn’t do something right.’ You’ve got to look at after actions and debriefs as No. 1, therapy for those involved but also, more importantly, this can improve training and tactics, which will lead to officer safety.”

Having attorneys involved in the after-action process can help protect a department from litigation and internal affairs because they have a role to play in looking at and sharing what could have been done better. Brown says they also add a layer of privilege that overcomes FOIA and other obstacles to obtaining to a clean critique that benefits the organization and everyone involved so everyone can be safer the next time they deal with it.

Training to de-escalate situations

Both officials spoke of the need for agencies to train officers in de-escalation in order to slow a situation down. Brown compared the mentality of some officers to the Wild West and the quick draw. “It’s the fastest out of the holster, that’s who wins. If you’re slow out of the holster, you get shot and killed. That’s the worst-case scenario, he says. “You never want to put yourself in a quick-draw scenario where the fastest draw wins. A lot of dynamics can happen where you’re at the wrong end of that draw.”

Brown stressed that officers instead need to give themselves enough time and distance to make decisions. With most high-profile deadly force encounters being captured on tape that is then edited, he says that it is crucial for officers to give themselves enough time to make the right decision. “The more time you take in resolving these deadly force encounters, the more likelihood of your surviving,” says Brown. “Slowing things down, creating time and distance creates a higher probability that you will survive that deadly force encounter because you have time for cover, you have time to get officers there to assist you, you have time to talk people out of doing what they are trying to do.”

While officers on the street need to give themselves distance, Brown says that the same goes for those in leadership positions. He notes that leaders often make the wrong decision because they are rushed for political reasons or they are rushed because they haven’t dealt with that type of scenario and they don’t know that with just a few more minutes of time, that they will likely make a different decision.

Countering ‘Defund the Police’

Brown, who joined the Chicago Police Department in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, says that going from Dallas to Chicago has been quite a transition. “My first week we buried three officers who died of COVID-19. The impact reverberated throughout the organization. It’s been a chilling effect on officers who are brave and courageous but don’t want to take something back home to their families. Officers often draw the line when it comes to their families. They are willing to risk their own lives, but don’t want to bring COVID-19 home to their families.”

One month later, George Floyd was killed during a confrontation with Minneapolis police officers and a video that subsequently shared on social media triggered outrage that across the country and was followed by calls to strip law enforcement agencies of their funding. “So much of what we’ve talked about this year in law enforcement has been how we respond and how we regain our legitimacy with communities. I think that when you hear the cry to ‘defund’ the police—a rallying cry we’ve all heard loud and clear and many places have seen and felt—when you get down to talking about what you need to effectively manage a big department, or a little department for that matter, you need money to train and do all sorts of things.”

Brown says that the initial “defund the police” discussion was, as he describes it, “a pendulum swing that went too far.” He says that the current conversation has swung back more toward the middle and that cities that followed the narrative early on through budget cuts have deep regrets for doing so. Brown stresses that cities must build up social service networks and resources while still funding the police. “Who will take the 11,000 guns off the street that Chicago police officers have taken off the streets this year? Social services can’t do that. When you have extraordinary gun violence, we can’t put social service workers in harm’s way to do their great work. There’s a role for police, there’s a role for social service workers and thank God the pendulum has swung back more toward a sensible discussion about this.”