He was assigned to represent them before grand juries and under questioning by fellow police. Most officers are devastated when they kill someone on the job, even if they’re convinced they had no other choice, said Bill Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, a coalition of police units and associations from across the United States.Īs a prosecutor in Miami, Johnson worked with officers who’d used deadly force. The higher your heart rate, the more you get cognitive deterioration.” You won’t hear your partner yelling things. You’re going to lose your peripheral vision. “You have never experienced the kind of stress you feel when you’re in a real fight when somebody’s trying to kill you. “I was in a gunfight in a hallway,” Glennon said. “People think we’re all karate experts, that we can use the Vulcan death grip and knock somebody out without hurting them,” he said. Glennon said few civilians understood what it was like for cops to make split-second decisions when they felt threatened. “We pull people out of wrecked cars, we hold people’s hands when they’re dying, we talk to 5-year-olds when they get raped, and one cop puts a chokehold on somebody and all of a sudden we’re all racist killers,” said Glennon, who owns Calibre Press, a company that trains police officers in the use of force. “Police officers are very, very upset at what’s going on now, and the way that 700,000 of us are being painted with a broad brush of racism and ill-intent and malevolent motivation – that we just want to go out there and hurt people, when it’s the exact opposite,” said James Glennon, a retired police lieutenant from Lombard, Illinois, referring to the number of police working in the U.S. Hackers, for example, threatened to release the names and Social Security numbers of police in Ferguson, Mo., where white officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown, a black teen, in August. They also worry about identity theft and so-called doxxing, in which an individual’s address and contact information are published online as a form of public shaming.

Officers and their families are concerned that antagonism toward police might make them targets of violence or retaliation, Pasco said.

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