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 Good shoot. But the officer complains of civilian treatment 
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 Post subject: Good shoot. But the officer complains of civilian treatment
PostPosted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 9:35 am 
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Good shoot.

Poor Officer Brady. She was treated just like a civilian would be.
Boo Hoo.

March 24, 2008
www.ForceScienceNews.com
Force Science News #94

One officer's pain is others' gain, as her shooting becomes a catalyst for change

When a 52-year-old man-shirtless, coked up and bleeding from self-inflicted wounds-lunged at Shannon Brady and her partner with a "serious" folding knife in the cramped kitchen of a small adobe house in Santa Fe, she was prepared to react. She shot him dead.

What she hadn't anticipated or trained for was what happened after the smoke cleared.

Once she had a bitter taste of that, she had a mission. "I didn't want other officers to go through what I did," she says. "Changes needed to be made."

* * *

"This is a good example of how negatives that too often accompany officer-involved shootings can be turned into positives, with the right perspective and determination," says Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato. "Instead of lingering as a permanent source only of resentment and anger, this shooting has become a catalyst for the kind of changes that are needed in many departments across the country."

The call that hurled Brady into the first shooting of her career was dispatched as an "ambulance assist."

* * *

The 2 officers were in the kitchen, trying to tend to the girlfriend who was slumped in a chair with a pool of blood widening at her feet, when the suspect-"big guy, no shirt, with visible cuts or stab wounds"-suddenly popped out of hiding, just a few steps from them.

"He raised the knife above his head and started closing toward us," Brady recalls. "There was no place to retreat. All I could see was that blade. It looked huge."

She and Baker both screamed, "Knife!" and commanded the suspect to drop the weapon. "He kept coming," Brady says. Almost simultaneously, Baker discharged a Taser and Brady squeezed the trigger on her Glock-22.

She can't remember firing that round, a fact that still troubles her. The bullet tore through the suspect's belt buckle and exited his body near his rectum. She shot again. This time, "I could see the bullet peel his skin" as it punched in, center mass. I remember his breath against me, I felt his knuckles brush across my hand" as he fell. He was pronounced at the hospital.

Officer-involved shootings in Santa Fe are investigated by the New Mexico State Police, a precaution against accusations of bias. The insensitivities that came to earmark Brady's shooting began during the delay while SP investigators responded, and escalated exponentially.

Brady and Baker were kept at the scene for nearly 5 hours, much of that time outdoors where "I sat on an ice cold curb," she remembers. Her request for a jacket had to be cleared through the chain of command, apparently for fear that complying might "alter the shooting environment" from an evidence standpoint.

Once, she and Baker were driven to a substation about a mile away for a bathroom break. They were put in the caged back seat of a marked unit, "like we were criminals," Baker says). "All they didn't do was handcuff us. It was not an atmosphere where you could get your mind off what just happened and try to wind down."

After about 3 hours, Brady was told to surrender her pistol. "I was left with an empty holster in that dangerous neighborhood" during the time it took to scrounge up a replacement from the department armorer.

The shooting occurred about midnight. It was well after daylight before Brady finally got to her home, an hour away in Albuquerque. She was scheduled to be back in Santa Fe that afternoon for her formal interview in the SP's criminal investigation. "I tried to sleep, I really did, but I was too keyed up," she says.

Because of her probationary status, she was not automatically eligible for legal representation through the Officers Assn., but the union provided her with a seasoned police lawyer, Fred Mowrer, anyway. "He did an excellent job preparing me, and I felt so grateful," she says.

She was able to doze off for about 30 minutes at the SP station just before the interview. Aside from that, she says she had been awake for more than 46 hours before walking in to face 2 hours of interrogation for the most important statement of her career.

Two days later, Brady and Baker had their only contact with the city's contract psychologist. "She took us to a room where she said we'd 'blend in' with people who were testing to become motor transport inspectors," Baker remembers. Brady says, "We had to take an entry-level exam and were given the MMPI [the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a common mental health test]. We were interviewed briefly by the psychologist and declared fit for duty."

She says no inquiry was made regarding how they were feeling about the shooting, no explanation was given about possible critical incident stress symptoms or how to deal with them and no offer of counseling was extended. Through the union, it was arranged for them to talk briefly by phone with a volunteer firefighter who supposedly had training in stress debriefing, but neither felt he could even begin to identify with their situation.

* * *

Meanwhile, the dead suspect's girlfriend, recovered from her injuries, claimed through the media that the 2 officers had tackled her boyfriend and pinned him to the floor while Brady summarily executed him with her 2 rounds. In the absence of a thorough debriefing for all personnel, rumors flew through the department regarding the circumstances of the shooting and about Brady and Baker personally.

They were heartened when Chief Eric Johnson publicly declared his complete confidence in their actions. Johnson released 911 tapes of the event, which provided an audio documentation of what happened, down to the shots being fired. A captain sat with a reporter from the local newspaper and "went second by second over the recording," Brady says. The resulting article "was very favorable and saved my reputation."

Still, it was some 5 weeks after the shooting before a county grand jury finally exonerated the officers of any criminal wrongdoing. And only after that, Brady says, did IA investigators get around to interviewing her and eventually declaring her clear of any departmental violations, as well-an infuriating lag that seemed to unnecessarily prolong the stress of the ordeal, especially considering that an IA investigator had sat in on the SP interviews just hours after the shooting.

* * *

Mark Barnett, who became president of the Officers Assn. just a month before the shooting, and members of the union's board have become Brady's staunch allies, joining her in lobbying for more humane on-scene procedures and investigative practices, easier access to psychological counseling and debriefings, and better training in survival tactics and post-shooting coping skills. Brady supplied articles from Force Science News on proper post-shooting procedures to buttress the arguments for change.

A significant achievement, in Barnett's view, has been getting the cooperation of SFPD's command staff so that the union can remove involved officers from a shooting scene expeditiously. "As soon as reasonably possible," they're taken to "some neutral place where they can feel comfortable" and where they can be with a "buddy" of their choosing, protected from the media and from curious, uninvolved officers who may have intrusive questions and comments.

"They can call home, calm down and begin to collect their thoughts in a peaceful atmosphere," Barnett says. "Psychologists have told us this is one of the best things we can do."

* * *

"The difference between the handling of Shannon's shooting and mine was night and day," he says. Among other things, besides the immediate post-shooting expediency, he was allowed time to be fully rested before sitting down for the SP's official interview....


Last edited by kimberman on Tue Mar 25, 2008 9:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 9:47 am 
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Excellent, yet infuriating post. What are the odds following a self-defense shooting that we would be allowed to be "...in my recliner...eating a ham sandwich"?

To me, this means that we need to revive the Stand-Your-Ground bill next session, especially the clause that prohibits automatic arrest following a self-defense incident.

You're right, it was a good shoot. That said, somebody should point out that she just got a taste of what she and her fellow officers would have done to any of us.

-Mark


Last edited by mrokern on Tue Mar 25, 2008 1:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 11:21 am 
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Still, it was some 5 weeks after the shooting before a county grand jury finally exonerated the officers of any criminal wrongdoing.


I could only dream of justice so swift. Of course Treptow was settled in what, 3 weeks? :roll:

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 2:51 pm 
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...Chief Eric Johnson ...

Good man...

Oh, cause that's my name. :wink:


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 Post subject: Re: Good shoot. But the officer complains of civilian treat
PostPosted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 5:17 pm 
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kimberman wrote:
Good shoot.

Poor Officer Brady. She was treated just like a civilian would be. .
I'm digressing a bit, and I may move this to another topic, but it occurs to me that somebody who doesn't really rate a mention in this topic -- Generaladmiral Scott Knight -- might be asked, at some point, why the IACP recommendations for handling an officer-involved shooting ought not be applied to civilians engaged in an act of self defense . . .

Hmm . . .

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 Post subject: Re: Good shoot. But the officer complains of civilian treat
PostPosted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 5:44 pm 
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joelr wrote:

I'm digressing a bit, and I may move this to another topic, but it occurs to me that somebody who doesn't really rate a mention in this topic -- Generaladmiral Scott Knight -- might be asked, at some point, why the IACP recommendations for handling an officer-involved shooting ought not be applied to civilians engaged in an act of self defense . . .

Hmm . . .


I can imagine his reply would be that civilians should not be engaged in that kind of behavior. It should be left to the new black gun toting department.

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