mitigate the damage

In his book on unheralded work done by federal employees, Michael Lewis drops this nugget:

“Police officers who had just come from an emotionally fraught situation — a suicide, or a domestic abuse call in which a child was involved — were more likely to use excessive force. … ‘Dispatch sent them right back out without time to decompress,’ said DJ [Patil].”

Cops are human. Cops are as human as anybody else. When they behave badly they do so in a human way, not an alien, unknowable, monstrous way. For those who study human behavior, what leads a human to act violently? It can be something as simple as this. The officer was stressed out. He saw the world as a damaging place, looked at people and saw hurters. He took out on the next person the hurt that he’d just seen. Perhaps he didn’t consciously consider how his outlook had been affected by what he had to witness (or worse). Given a rest after a traumatic experience, given a chance “to decompress,” perhaps to talk to someone, express his shock and look over the hurt that had settled in him, dealt with that hurt some, he would be less likely to become one who causes pain.

Police officers should be well rested. Most of the time on the job is probably dull. But when it isn’t, bad shit can pile up on you. It sounds like requiring downtime after traumatic events would be good policy. We don’t want those who work in public safety to become dangers themselves. We don’t want them to become dangers to themselves. 

source:

The Fifth Risk

by Michael Lewis

2018. W. W. Norton & Co., New York

Kill a Dog, Run a Country

When Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, bragged in her autobiography about shooting a pet dog for misbehavior — and because she wasn’t competent to train it well — her luster as a possible vice presidential pick for Donald Trump dimmed somewhat. Whether Trump ever really thought of her that way, the felon does seem to have approved of Noem’s treatment of dogs, likely seeing it as a good model for the treatment of human beings. After the felon took back the White House he moved Noem over from South Dakota to the Department of Homeland Security. 

Well after the election I finally skipped through an October issue of The San Francisco Bay Times, a free paper for the GLBT community that I sometimes bring home. In her “Fortnight in Review” column Ann Rostow highlights another instance of Republican dog killing. 

“Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and what The Advocate calls ‘the architect of Project 2025’ … beat his neighbor’s noisy dog to death and told several people about it back in 2004. According to The Guardian, one of Roberts’ former colleagues at New Mexico State remembers the event:

‘[Roberts] was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty .. that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly, and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem.’

… The neighbor [told The Guardian that his dog], Loca, vanished during the same time period. … [Ann Rostow adds: T]here was a time when a strong rumor like this one would lead other news organizations to investigate and possibly cause a scandal … These days it’s just water under the bridge.”

I don’t remember having come across the Roberts dog-killing story before I saw it in Ann Rostow’s column, not at the time she wrote about it, nor in the months since.  

I have been driven mad by a neighbor’s barking dog (and a dog named “Loca” would be a crazy-making dog, you’d think). I sympathize with anyone who suffers the experience. Tempting as it is, however, killing is not the appropriate solution. It really isn’t. You have decisions to make in life. The person who chooses to beat a dog to death with a shovel is not a person one should trust. The person who brags about it? He does not have good judgment or a good heart. 

And here we are. Kevin Roberts wrote the blueprint for the destruction of the US government. I don’t know that Elon Musk with his Orwellian Department of Governmental Efficiency is following Roberts’ blueprint or just attacking at whim, but the two men are kindred. I haven’t heard about any dog killings by Musk. Is that just because I haven’t been paying attention? 

This is a link to the article at the Guardian (they even include a picture of Loca): 

“Project 2025 mastermind allegedly told colleagues he killed a dog with a shovel”