In January, the National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) released alarming, record-breaking statistics showing that 378 brave officers were shot in the line of duty in 2023. Forty-six died from those bullets. That means 332 of our brother and sister officers live with newly acquired bullet holes.
As a profession, we don’t prepare officers for what they will experience in the aftermath of getting shot and we don’t adequately support them when they are injured. This series of “Living with bullet holes” articles, hopefully, will bridge that gap.
“We don’t think it can happen to us.”
Former Henry County, Georgia, Officer Keegan Merritt suffered a bullet wound to his right, strong hand, during a SWAT standoff that kept him from returning to duty. The Army veteran now serves his fellow officers as a member of the Georgia Department of Public Safety peer support team. Merritt has provided support to many officers who have sustained bullet holes in the line of duty. “Because we don’t think it can happen to us, we’re not prepared for it when it does,” said Merritt.
That mindset sets officers up for a big fall when they get shot. Merritt knows. He fell hard.
Merritt isolated and pushed everyone away. He sat for hours staring at a blank TV screen reliving the scene and the shooting. He suffered through flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks and an overwhelming feeling of helplessness. He barely slept two hours a night.
“My pride wouldn’t let me reach out for help,” Merritt admits. As a SWAT officer with aspirations of becoming a SWAT commander he thought he could handle anything. “My self-image went down the drain.”
He turned to drinking and abusing pain medication.
Merritt credits his wife’s bravery in keeping on him for sending him down the road to recovery. Merritt wouldn’t seek help in Georgia, afraid someone he knew would find out. He attended a conference in Kentucky where one of the clinical directors noticed Merritt was struggling and got him immediate help and an EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) session. After one session, Merritt was sleeping again. Years later, he rarely has nightmares. He urges officers to try EMDR.
Merritt learned that getting shot was the icing on his trauma cake. That layers from his past led to his meltdown including an incident while deployed in Afghanistan where he was handed a small girl whose family had set her on fire and burned her because she wasn’t male. He had never dealt with that traumatic event.
Officers feel isolated and alone
Most officers receive no training on how to cope after getting shot. Unless a peer support team member who has been through living with bullet holes reaches out to the officer, they find themselves isolated and alone. They have no understanding of why they feel the way they do.
As Merritt puts it: Officers sit in their suffering and sorrow. Merritt has seen it many times. He refers to the aftermath of getting shot as an emotional and mental roller coaster. Stigma and pride keep officers living with bullet holes from seeking help with their complex and confusing emotions.
“Getting shot f&%ks with our identity as a cop,” explains Officer A who requested to remain anonymous. “We feel we’ve failed. We believe we have impeccable safety and survival skills. Then it happens to us, and we feel ashamed. No one gives us a heads up about what we’re going to feel and experience when we get shot. The culture we work in, and return to after getting shot, sets us up for how we react.”
Officer A’s wife added, “When the officer gets shot, the spouse isn’t prepared for the officer’s reaction — their anger, self-blame and grief. Nobody educates or prepares us. I experienced a traumatic event also that I had to deal with and heal from, having another officer come tell me that my husband wasn’t coming home from work that day. I was not prepared for the hospital and workers’ comp hassles.”
Merritt points out that officers and agency leadership don’t understand the mental/emotional aspect of getting shot. “They think you look great. But they don’t see the internal struggle, the emotional and mental aspect.”
“The officer feels like they are on an island by themselves,” Merritt said. “No one prepares us for the emotional stuff.”
The stigma of distrust towards therapy and asking for help becomes further exasperated after sustaining bullet holes. Officers won’t reach out for help because that adds to the shame.
As stated in Part 1 of this series, tactically sound officers, with the best officer survival skills and training, tend to fall the hardest and suffer the most in the aftermath of getting shot.
The biggest obstacle to healing is the officer
Officer A, who has returned to patrol, didn’t understand why he felt the way he did. “Once I was educated and understood my reactions, I could get out of my own way, out of my denial, to allow myself to heal.”
He added, “The hardest part of my healing was acceptance and grief. There’s a shame aspect that is part of both acceptance and grief. I had to accept that it happened to me and grieve that my life was violently changed. I was emotionally and physically injured. I have to live with both those injuries for the rest of my life. Shame aspect comes from the fact that we don’t expect it to happen to us.”
Supporting officers with new bullet holes
Officers and their families need training and education before the bullets are flying. More therapists are needed who understand officer responses after getting shot and why the law enforcement culture is to blame for that response.
The spouse needs coaching on how to help their officer and what the officer needs to navigate through their pain and suffering.
Officer A’s wife adds, “The spouse has to be educated about the trauma response even before the officer is ready to be educated. I had no idea what he was going through or why. I needed to understand that anger was the only emotion he knew how to express. I needed someone to coach me on how to help him through it. Understanding the grief aspect early on, that both of us would embark on a grief journey, would have been helpful. It would have made a huge difference if someone who had been through it had reached out and warned us what to expect.”
Peer support teams need to recruit members who have healed from bullet wounds. Peer supporters must be trained in the grief and shame aspects so they can reach out to officers shot in the line of duty and their spouses and families.
Conclusion
Our streets have become a battlefield for our officers. They are being gunned down at an alarming rate. Law enforcement and society needs to understand the consequences that has on our police officers and their ability to fight crime.
We also need to understand the huge burden and worry that the FOP statistics puts on our officers’ loved ones.
How will your department prepare to support officers shot in the line of duty?
Don’t allow them to suffer, sit in their sorrow, like Merritt and Officer A.
Part Three will address returning to work with bullet holes. Part One can be read here.
Copyright©2024 Barbara A. Schwartz All Rights Reserved.
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