What It's Like To Be A Cop Involved In A Mass Shooting

The anger. The numbness. The flashbacks. Mass shootings such as the one in San Bernardino, Calif. this week can haunt, for years, the police officers who are often first to the scene. It is a trauma that Sergeant A.J. DeAndrea of Arvada, Colo. knows firsthand. He was one of the first to enter Columbine High School in 1999, searching for the gunmen who killed 13 people and injured 21 more.
“When you walked out of the building, it was like, ‘Holy shit. What did we just experience?’” he said of Columbine. “It was surreal. People didn’t know what to say … you felt like you were on an island.” Though he said it never got to the point where he could not do his job, images of victims would appear in his mind without warning long after the shooting. To this day, an unexpected trigger can resurface a memory. “Anniversaries are always hard. They get easier in time, but these things stay with you,” he said.

Cops are trained to confront tense and life-threatening events every day, but the sheer scale of mass shootings, like the one in San Bernardino on Wednesday — in which 14 people were killed, and 21 wounded, making it the deadliest mass shooting in nearly three years — are different. “These incidents have the power to render a person nearly defenseless emotionally,” said police psychologist Jack Digliani.
The ensuing media coverage and national attention can also make it harder for officers to move on. “The media was so brutal. All of the so-called experts coming out saying how we could have done things better,” DeAndrea said. “After the first day, I quit watching.”
In San Bernardino, soon after police cleared the crime scene, a group of mental-health professionals arrived at the San Bernardino Police Department to help officers process what they had just seen.
“We do a lot of psychological first aid,” said Nancy Bohl-Penrod, director of the Counseling Team International, a private practice that responds to crisis incidents in Southern California. Bohl-Penrod and her team — comprised of chaplains, counselors, and fellow officers — began preparing officers for what might lie ahead: difficulty sleeping, hypervigilance, anger, isolation, and flashbacks. “There are parts of the event that get stuck in your memory. It keeps replaying on a loop: you smell it and see it and hear it.”

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