Part 2 of a 2-part series
By Chuck Remsberg
Senior Police1 Contributor
Sponsored by Blauer
[Editor’s note: A new officer safety-oriented research project from the FBI, titled Violent Encounters: A Study of Felonious Assaults on Our Nation’s Law Enforcement Officers, includes fresh insights into the perplexing problem of suicide-by-cop encounters (read part 1). In Part 2 of our report on this soon-to-be-published document, we continue with observations made in a presentation and discussion period at the recent IACP convention in Boston on this subject by the research team, Dr. Anthony Pinizzotto, clinical forensic psychologist, and Ed Davis, criminal investigative instructor, both with the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, and Charles Miller III, coordinator of the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted program.]
Among the subjects often neglected in discussions of suicide by cop are an agency’s responsibilities toward involved officers after such an incident and tactical considerations that may help prevent a traumatic outcome.
Here’s what the researchers had to say on those topics:
Rx: agency compassion.
When a bank robber is shot and killed, officers bullshitting in the locker room later may say, “I wish I’d been there.” But, Davis says, “You never hear that about a suicide by cop.”
He considers that kind of encounter “one of the worst shootings” an officer can be in. “It’s much more traumatic to be used as a tool to take someone’s life. Every officer wants to serve the community, to protect them from bad people. But here they’re forced to shoot a member of the community they find out is sick with a mental illness. They didn’t sign up to do harm to people who are mentally ill. They feel flim-flammed and used.”
An insensitive reaction by their agency will only deepen their distress. He cites a case explored during the research for Violent Encounters.
Police responded during a day shift to a woman-with-a-gun call at an apartment complex. They established a perimeter and tried to persuade her to put down her weapon. She refused. As a lieutenant stepped out of his unit, she moved toward him menacingly and kept advancing even though he and another officer “begged and pleaded with her to stop and drop the gun.” Fearing for the lieutenant’s safety, the officer shot her in the head and killed her.
She was 16. Her gun, as it turned out, was a plastic replica. She had tried to kill herself three times previously.
Before he got to the station, the shooter was met by his chief, who told him coldly, “Mister, we’re going to look at this incident very closely!”
After some time off, a psychologist recommended that all officers who’d been at the scene be returned to duty. The department assigned them to work graveyard at the impound lot. “If we’d shot a bank robber we’d have gotten a medal,” the lieutenant observed. Instead, they felt they’d “let down their platoon and their department and were not appreciated by the community,” Davis says.
More than six months dragged by before the shooting was presented to the grand jury. The jury returned a no bill and the officers finally were restored to regular duty. Meanwhile, the lieutenant had became so distraught over the whole affair that he contemplated taking his own life. He eventually left law enforcement well ahead of normal retirement age. “The community lost, the department lost and the individual officers lost,” Davis says.
Administrators need to realize that “much of the time, it’s almost impossible for officers to detect that they’re in a suicide-by-cop situation,” says Pinizzoto; that’s often not revealed until after the offender is dead.
Moreover, despite the second-guessing that commonly takes place by both officers and agencies, there’s typically nothing different an officer could have done to resolve the incident other than defend his life or some other innocent person’s.
Says Pinizzotto: “Professionals in the mental health community recognize that when a lot of subjects get to the point where they decide suicide is the answer there is virtually nothing anyone can do to prevent it. Even if you delay it in a given encounter, eventually the subject gets the job done.”
The researchers discovered one case in which a subject failed twice in attempts to commit suicide by cop, even though the police shot him on both occasions. Given that past behavior is often a good predictor of future behavior, he’s highly likely to try again.
Agencies need to show compassion toward their involved personnel, recognizing that in a suicide-by-cop scenario “the officer, not the perpetrator, is really the victim,” says Miller. “It’s a situation that’s forced on him.”
After a “very cursory preliminary investigation shows that the shooting was righteous,” the officer needs the agency’s full support and help, Davis says. He recalls doing a broadcast during which an officer, “obviously traumatized,” phoned in and described a fatal suicide-by-cop shooting he’d been involved in the previous week.
Davis told him, “You did what you needed to do or you wouldn’t be here to call in today. If these people [suicide-by-cop subjects] are committed to having an officer take their life, they may have no care or compassion about taking an officer’s life to make sure other officers will do to them what they can’t do.”
“You could hear that he was so relieved after I said he did the right thing,” Davis says. “Until then, no one had told him that.”
Agencies should also do what they can to educate the media on suicide by cop, the research team says. Enlightened about the dynamics, conscientious reporters may be less likely to focus on a subject’s age, gender, or lack of a workable weapon without describing the offender’s behavior that made him appear to the officer as a clear and immediate danger.
Tactical considerations.
The scope of the FBI’s study did not include recommendations on training or field tactics. More needs to be known about the subtleties of the suicide-by-cop phenomenon before these issues can be thoroughly addressed, the researchers say. But their research does offer a few practical suggestions to Police1 members, based on what they’ve learned so far.
• Encourage dispatchers to play an active role. Typically a suicide-by-cop confrontation begins in one of three ways, Davis says:
1. the subject draws police attention by driving erratically;
2. a third party alerts police of criminal activity or pretended criminal activity, often a gun call;
3. the subject himself calls 911 and alleges criminal activity.
Especially with #3 and sometimes with #2, depending on the caller’s relationship with the suspect, the complaint taker may have an opportunity to probe for more information that would be useful to responding officers. Is the subject under medical and/or psychiatric care…what psychotropic medications, if any, have been prescribed…have they been taken according to schedule…has the individual ever attempted suicide in the past, and so on.
While the initial dispatcher tries to keep the subject on the phone as long as possible, another dispatcher can attempt to reach the subject’s doctor for more information and to advise of the current crisis. “It’s important to equip officers with as much information as possible so they have the best chance of understanding what they’re dealing with,” Pinizzotto explains.
Also remember that dispatchers may “experience negative emotions when they find out that a person died as a result of suicide by cop,” Pinizzotto says. “We sometimes forget about dispatchers after a traumatic incident because they are ‘just voices,’ but they should be included” in the department’s compassionate outreach after the event.
• Look for “motivation cues” at the scene. Often subjects will let you know what they want from you, like the suicide-by-cop suspect in Oregon recently who called a tv station to say that police were going to kill him, text-messaged his daughter “I forgive whoever gets me” and then urged officers to “shoot me” before thrusting his hand inside his coat as if to draw a firearm while charging them.
Other times, the situation is not so clear-cut. In such cases, “the actions of the offender may be revealing,” Miller advises. “Is he intent on escape—or on confrontation. No one in his right mind wants to deliberately confront the police, especially if there’s more than one officer. If the subject doesn’t take an opportunity to get away, a red flag should go up.”
• Watch your tongue. In dealing with would-be suicides, officers sometimes try to convince the subject that any problems they have or any anti-social behavior they’ve exhibited is “not serious,” as a means of persuading them not to take their life.
That kind of dialog “may be the last thing that snaps” a suicide-by-cop subject into violent action, Davis warns. “They view their situation as a very serious problem, the worst of their life, and their reaction may be: ‘Not serious? I’ll show you how serious it is!’ And they kill themselves or shoot you.”
Pinizzotto agrees. “The worst thing you can do,” he says, “is to tell them they shouldn’t or can’t end it all. That will probably only escalate the situation.”
Rather than deny what they are experiencing, and thereby lose your credibility, “try to get them to talk about why they are upset. If you can learn that, you may be able to get them to talk about what might be done about it, and this may allow them to see—and choose—other options.
“It’s a delicate dance between emotions and cognition in these situations,” Pinizzotto says. “The subject’s emotions are in overdrive, they’ve hijacked the cortex of his brain, and if you approach with strictly cognitive statements you’ll lose him. Finding out what his emotions are and why he’s feeling them is a better avenue of approach.”
• Remember: You are at deadly risk. Forgetting the potential life-threatening jeopardy they’re facing, some officers fall into what might be called “social worker mode.” They lay down their gun, hoping to get the subject to relinquish his; they move into can’t-miss range, hoping to better establish rapport by being within touching distance. “They forget how quickly a subject who supposedly wants to die can change his focus and become a danger for them,” Pinizzotto says.
Davis adds: “No officer wants to kill someone, but we all need to keep in mind the reality of dealing with an armed offender,” even if we think he only wants himself to die. A suicide-by-cop confrontation “shouldn’t be regarded primarily as a mental-health issue. It’s primarily a law enforcement safety issue. An officer has to protect himself first so he can protect the community.”
Note:
One copy of the Violent Encounters report will be mailed to each law enforcement agency that contributes to the UCR program.
