We’re Failing Kids and We’re Failing Cops

Police officers get called on to do a lot of different things. They direct traffic, act as family mediators, take reports for stolen lawn gnomes, and occasionally get shot at. It is absurd that we collectively decided that a single level of government employee should take on the myriad situations that police officers respond to. This situation is dangerous for the public and for the police.

In Rochester, NY, police officer body-cameras captured officers pepper-spraying a handcuffed nine-year-old girl in order to get her into the back of a police car. The girl was hysterical, crying for her father, who she seemed to believe had been stabbed by her mother. In other words, she was very understandably upset.

I don’t work with kids — I’ve never worked with kids. I don’t know the best way to control a child who’s having the kind of breakdown that this child was. What I do know is that all across the country, nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers, and parents manage to do just that without pepper-spraying kids in the face.

For a domestic violence call, where someone may have been stabbed, and where further violence is possible, we need an armed government agent to respond. But we also need a properly trained social worker to respond as well, and to take the lead on the call. We need people who are trained on how to calm down a child who is having a panic attack, and how to de-escalate a parent who might be making the situation worse.

That isn’t police officers.

The officer who pepper-sprayed the girl was defended by Mike Mazzeo, president of the local police union. Mazzeo, said that the girl wasn’t injured and could have been hurt worse. (This logically doesn’t make any sense.) But when asked about the psychological trauma that the girl received, Mazzeo said something interesting. He redirected and asked about the psychological trauma that officers face in responding to all these different kinds of calls.

Mazzeo’s lack of concern for the child notwithstanding, he is accidentally making an important point here. Officers do incur terrible psychological damage from their jobs.

Police stress is a unique and destructive affliction; officers incur higher than normal rates of cardio-vascular disease, sleep disorders, PTSD, depression. Police officers have a higher risk of suicide than any other profession. They are three times more likely to die of suicide than from a fatal injury on the job.

In the January 6 Capitol attacks, three police officers died; two from suicide.

Police officers are human beings, and they are being continually abused by their departments. We put an enormous amount of strain onto a collection of heavily armed government employees, and then we continue to send them into the public, often into more stressful encounters. It is no surprise that situations like the one in Rochester, NY occur.

As Mazzeo said, this isn’t TV and it isn’t Hollywood. We’re not policed by a bunch of James Bonds and Jason Bournes. When we look at pictures of police all in riot gear, covered in armor and bristling with weapons, it’s easy to forget that those are stressed, flawed human beings. And under stress, they can easily make bad decisions. They might make a bad decision in the middle of a police action, or they might make a bad decision the next day when they’re at home. They might start to believe that they’re a warrior and that everyone they see is their enemy. This is dangerous for everyone involved.

This is the fault of people like Mike Mazzeo, who resist tooth and nail the kinds of reforms that are needed to help this problem. This is the fault of police leadership (for the same reason). This is the fault of city government, which is not taking the lead on restructuring our public safety model. And it is the fault of all the rest of us, for electing representatives who consistently fail to enact meaningful change.

We deserve to have a public safety system where a struggling child is given help, not sprayed with a chemical irritant. We deserve to have a public safety system where responding agents have the best training to address the problem that they are responding to. We deserve to have a public safety system where officers are not undergoing severe psychological trauma just to do their job.

That won’t happen by accident, and it won’t happen without a dramatic overhaul of our entire public safety system.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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