Officers Face Stress Fallout From Gunfight

Flush from their televised takedown of the North Hollywood bank bandits, Los Angeles police officers involved in Friday’s shootout now face another test: a crucial six-week period in which they will probably suffer flashbacks, anxiety, depression and, perhaps for the first time, cope with their own vulnerability.

“The crash is going to come,” said LAPD psychologist Kris Mohandie, coordinator of the department’s Behavior Science unit.

For the moment, the officers who exchanged gunfire with two robbers outside the Bank of America branch seem exuberant in public, exchanging jokes and munching lasagna donated by grateful residents. But their emotional high is quickly fading.

Mohandie’s unit is warning officers at police station roll calls to watch for early signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, and psychologists will hold a series of debriefings this week to encourage officers to release feelings of anger, frustration or fear that they may experience as a result of being outgunned.

Police officials also have taken steps to mute potential echoes of the shootout, asking a crew from the television show “High Incident” to call off plans to film a scene involving machine gun fire on Oxnard Street, not far from the bank, on Wednesday.

But there is already evidence that officers face a difficult road to recovery.

For Officer Eddie Guzman, who ducked for cover behind his patrol car as one of the bandits sprayed it with gunfire moments after emerging from the bank, it wasn’t until he returned to his vehicle Friday night and found it punctured with eight armor-piercing rounds that the incident began to wear on him.

“I realized how close I really was,” he said softly as his eyes welled up. That night, he couldn’t fall asleep until 3 a.m.

The next night, he was at home trying to relax with his wife and children, who were watching an action film on television. The rattle of machine gun fire and calls of “Officer down” suddenly screamed from the TV.

“That type of thing just takes you back,” Guzman said, choking up.

Officer John Goodman rushed to the bank as calls of a robbery in progress came over the radio. He ran up to a car parked about 60 feet from the bank entrance to warn the driver to take cover. Something told him to look up. His eyes locked with a man in body armor carrying a machine gun, and he dove for cover as the van next to him exploded into glass and metal shards. While pinned down, he saw four officers fall in a hail of gunfire. The image still haunts him.

“It plays every time I open my eyes,” Goodman said.

Within a week of the incident, the rush of adrenaline that swept over most officers at the battle scene will ebb, psychologists say, forcing them to confront the fact that they were in a potentially deadly conflict. The next four to six weeks are a cooling-off period in which it is normal for officers to replay the incident in their minds and even have trouble sleeping.

Officers involved in shootouts and other so-called “critical incidents” often second-guess themselves in the weeks afterward, Mohandie said. Others may doubt themselves the next time they drive by the spot where the shootout unfolded, confront a suspect or have to draw their gun.

Some officers remain skeptical of even their own department’s psychologists, Mohandie said. And in trying to comfort officers involved in the shootout, psychologists must overcome a paradox: Police officers trained to conceal fear now must openly display it to recover.

For Officer Loren Farell, who was in his patrol car across the street from the bank Friday morning when he saw a husky man toting a machine gun walk inside, one emotion has risen above all others in the wake of the event.

“Anger. You know why? None of us got to fire a round. We were pinned down. We were in no way, shape or form in control,” Farell said. “It just reminds us of our vulnerability. I feel there’s nothing I can do about it. The bad guy always chooses where and when.”

Farell said he plans to run “a couple miles” to begin relieving stress, but said he does not expect any long-term effects. “I’m not one to get a syndrome,” he said.

To work out their frustrations, officers must find ways to accept and vent their emotions, through talking, exercise and even maintaining a healthy diet, without turning to alcohol or abusive behavior, said Officer Kevin Kirsch, who oversees the LAPD’s peer counseling program. Dozens of the department’s 220 peer counselors, many of them officers who have lived through shootings, have met one-on-one with officers who participated in Friday’s bank shootout.

Other law enforcement agencies have developed a wide array of strategies to help officers deal with on-the-job trauma.

At the Laguna Beach Police Department, officials replace the uniform of every officer involved in a shooting to remove any reminders of traumatic events. At the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, officers who fire their weapons at suspects are removed from fieldwork for five days, and psychologists interview them within 24 hours of the incident, following up two weeks later and then six months later. They also meet with peer counselors. In training, deputies watch a department-produced video about how the partners and friends of Deputy Nelson Yamamoto, a deputy killed in 1992, dealt with his loss.

“There’s a whole romanticized notion of what a cop should be, that they should be invulnerable,” said Michael S. Broder, stress manager for the Philadelphia Police Department. “We try to teach them in the academy that this is a very self-defeating attitude. The reality is, no one finds a situation like that [North Hollywood robbery] easy.”

Audrey Honig, director of employee support services for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, said that about 33% of officers involved in critical incidents suffer memory loss of some portion of the event. Between 14% and 33% suffer some kind of acute reaction, such as repeated flashbacks.

For many officers, the most arduous part of the recovery comes after they have finished their initial debriefings or counseling sessions and they must return to the streets.

“That is the hardest part of the job--to get back in a radio car and go back to the same area,” said Sgt. Rock Pattullo, a sheriff’s deputy peer counselor who has been involved in five shootings. “I tell [fellow deputies], ‘Hey, when I had to put back on my Sam Brown, my chest was just thumping out.’ They realize it’s OK to have that anxiety.”

Part of that anxiety comes from the forced realization by law enforcement officers that a badge and a gun mean little to better-equipped criminals, experts say.

“You come on the job, you’re given the power of life and death, citizens have to follow your orders,” said Georgette Bennett, a sociologist who helped the New York Police Department develop its psychological services unit. “Now here you are in this situation, absolutely humiliated, where your authority doesn’t mean a damn thing. To be trained to be in authority and then finding out on the street it means nothing--out of that comes a lot of the extreme behavior.”

On-the-job stress is a major reason why police have disproportionately high rates of suicide, alcohol abuse and divorce, studies show. Still, LAPD officials say only a fraction of retiring officers, about 15 a year, retire on stress-related disability pensions.

Police Protective League Director Dennis Zine, who did not witness the shootout firsthand, said he went to church Sunday and found himself envisioning police officers in coffins.

“Without God’s mercy, we would’ve lost some cops,” Zine said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some officers quit.”

But most stay to face the streets again.