AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Former New York Police Department officer Vincent Henry can recite every
detail of fellow officer Phil Cardillo's death — the call, the
address, the details of the fatal shooting, the political fallout — as
clearly as if it happened yesterday.
"It's still the subject of discussion among New York cops," he said. "It
happened 40 years ago this April."
Henry found the dynamic of how beat cops and department brass reacted so
intriguing that after 21 years at NYPD, he wrote his doctoral dissertation
on the psychology of how police respond to death on the job. In 2004, "Death
Work: Police, Trauma, and the Psychology of Survival" was published as
a book.
An event like the early morning shooting death of Austin police officer Jaime
Padron on Friday "will become part of the organizational narrative that
will be communicated to young cops there forever," predicted Henry,
today director of the Homeland Security Management Institute at Long Island
University. "This guy is now part of the history of the agency. He'll
be used to teach and train cops for generations."
Police experts, psychologists specializing in working with law enforcement and
former officers said research and experience show that Austin police can
expect to behave in predictable ways in the coming weeks and months as they
process the violent death of one of their own.
The reactions will range from heightened vigilance on calls that resemble
Padron's final response to a North Austin Wal-Mart, to occasional anger, to
what those who have studied the phenomenon describe as an almost obsessive
quest to learn even the most insignificant details of the event in an effort
not only to learn what happened, but also to convince themselves that it
could not happen to them.
"Cops are masters of second-guessing, third-guessing — 297th-guessing,"
said Daniel Clark, a department psychologist with the Washington State
Patrol for the past 18 years.
Occupational distress
Padron's violent death will create an occupational tension among his
colleagues, in which police must simultaneously absorb that everything, and
also nothing, has changed.
"They will find it very difficult to get up in the morning and do a
little soul-searching," said Stan Knee, Austin's police chief before
the current chief, Art Acevedo. "Unfortunately, the job doesn't allow
us to pick and choose what we respond to."
"They'll be playing the ‘what-if' game, so you have to tell them to be
cautious," added Sam Holt, a retired Austin assistant chief, "but
also that not everybody they stop is going to shoot them."
The odds of a police officer getting killed on the job are statistically low.
But the chances of a police officer getting slain on the job compared with
other professions is high. The difference between the two informs how law
enforcement officers view their work.
"Police tend to overestimate the likelihood they will be killed,"
Henry said. "The threat of violence and their own death is never far
from their mind."
Still, occasions for literal departmentwide grieving are uncommon.
Nationally, an average 50 officers are slain in the line of duty each year,
according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. The Officer Down Memorial Page,
a nonprofit organization whose website tracks officer deaths, reports 16 so
far in 2012.
In Texas, which has 75,000 licensed peace officers, about a dozen police
officers have been killed by gunfire in the line of duty since 2008.
Though a law enforcement officer was shot and killed in Austin as recently as
2000 — when parks department officer William DeWayne Jones Sr. was gunned
down — the last targeted homicide victim within the Austin Police Department
was Ralph Ablanedo, who was shot and killed by David Lee Powell in 1978,
nearly 35 years ago.
That means that an entire generation of Austin Police Department officers has
been hired, worked and retired without experiencing a fellow officer slain
in the line of duty.
"I'm lucky; I never experienced it," said Chris Noble, who retired
one year ago as a commander after 30 years in the department.
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