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THIS IS THE FOURTH INSTALLMENT IN OUR YEARLONG PROJECT LOOKING AT THE ISSUE OF FATAL ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN LAW ENFORCEMENT AND PEOPLE.
12 | RN&R |
AUGUST 28, 2014
arren Wilson, the Ferguson Police Officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, the unarmed African-American teenager in the St. Louis, Missouri, suburb has received a ration of hate from around the country. And he may be the only person in the country who knows whether it’s deserved. It’s certainly not as black and white as it was presented in the early rush of reportage. ABC News reported this exchange on Aug. 19 from an anonymous friend of Brown’s: “The whole situation is a tragedy for both Michael Brown and his family, and Darren and his family,” Brown’s pal said. “Both of their lives are ruined. I can tell he’s struggling. I can tell this is really hard on him. He’s been very careful about who he talks to, so he hasn’t spoken much about the situation.” Reno Deputy Police Chief Byron “Mac” Venzon suffered similarly after killing a person in the line of duty, though he didn’t have the hate of 50 million people to compound it. “I was working in undercover capacity, and we had information that a subject, a recent prison release, was up here stalking and trying to lure away a young girl that he had communication with in the past,” he said. “He had become involved in a shooting with a California agency on the way here. We learned of his whereabouts, set up a surveillance, and once we knew he was there, we set up kind of a perimeter. He came out, presented a weapon at me—from me to you away from one another [about four feet]—he presented a weapon to me and then I had to shoot him, and he died.” It was as clean a killing of a known criminal as we ever hear about—cop faced with a gun kills the guy who’s wielding it to protect himself and others. And yet, there is no amount of training that can prepare an officer for the psychological and social repercussions, and Venzon ought to know, having worked as a staff officer at the police training academy and 16 to 17 years in a variety of law enforcement assignments.
“You know you go through a whirlwind of emotions, and as much as you try to prepare for that, until you are there, I know that you can’t,” he said. “Your safety was very, very tenuous at that time, right? So you start to do this whole flashback of ‘I have a kid, what about this? What about that? What will it do to my family?’ And then you start to realize that, ‘Wow, this person put me in a position where I had to do something that I didn’t relish the idea of doing.’ It wasn’t something I set out to do. I think you could talk to every officer in this department, and they will tell you that their preference is that every incident ends peacefully, and you know it’s tough—tough at home, it’s tough on my family. You always worry about civil litigation after that, and there is nothing you can do to stem off the civil litigation that comes from that, so you sit around two years and one day waiting for the civil litigation to come. “It’s a lot of emotion you go through, and it takes some time, and I think what you find out is that you don’t know how you are going to react, and you don’t know how long it is going to take you to get over it. “My first day back on the street I encountered another guy with a gun,” he said. “My first day back from
admin leave, and I encounter another guy with a gun, and boy, that’s something. Emotions right back through the roof.” He says he’s over the experience now, but there was an unexpected catch in his voice when he said so. “The way it has been described to me, when you can talk about it and not feel the emotion, then you know you worked your way past it,” he said. “And so there was some offers of, you know, help with the counselor, and I took up some of those. Those were fantastic, and so it took me about probably six months before I could sit and discuss it with you and not feel emotional about the whole thing.” Sentiments like those are echoed across the nation by officers who’ve had to face that fatal moment. But it’s hard to get some to talk about it—that blue wall that people talk about, that police belief that non-police simply can’t understand what they go through. Still, there’s a commonly understood phrase to describe what happens to an officer who kills in the line of duty: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD. And in Northern Nevada, there are people to help. While primarily a sports psychologist, Dr. Dean Hinitz has helped out on officer-involved
