What can be done to improve safety for police officers?
Article content
Canadians, and many Americans for that matter, are desperately trying to find ways to stop our police officers, our children, and randomly targeted people being killed by people with guns.
My friend Henry Atkinson explained in a letter to the London Free Press why the registering of guns is not the way to go. An angry or mentally deranged person can and often does have a legally owned weapon or collection of weapons. Those who decide to take lethal action but lack a weapon can easily get one. Another friend, a retired police officer once told me you can rent a weapon as easily as rent a car. You may read on, I am not going to rehash all that.
July issue of Scientific American has an item by Ferris Jabr entitled The Brain's Power to Avoid Diversions. It may help us understand why the police officer in Moncton, New Brunswick didn't respond to the family desperately trying to warn him that the gunman was right behind him. My son, Mark who is an inspector with the OPP told me officers in that situation develop tunnel vision. They become focused on what's directly in front of them. Everything else is blocked out. This article reports a study conducted in Simon Fraser University, British Columbia.
The scientists didn't simulate a tense police search. They gave subjects instructions to watch a computer screen for a lone yellow circle among a field of green circles. They were offered a distraction in the form of a bright red circle. The students were fitted with a network of sensors that showed how the brain handled the task. The brain quickly adjusted to suppressing all circles except the one they were asked to look for.
Jabr used the example of a motorist on a busy multilane highway for the first time watching for an exit ramp. All other sights, billboards, hot cars, etc., are ignored. It's not a conscious decision. Our brains have evolved this this way of keeping us focused, usually to make life safer.
If you, like myself, are dependent on hearing aids to keep in touch with the world, you know that for the first while the noise of dishes and cutlery clashing can drive you mad. If you persevere your brain sorts out which sounds to pay attention to, which to suppress. It's not simply ignoring the din, your brain turns it off.
Police officers can be trained to scan broadly as they search. They can be trained to protect their backs by working in pairs or by finding a wall, a car, anything to prevent someone getting behind them as Justin Bourque did in Moncton.
Thorough training takes much time and money. In the atmosphere of austerity we are living in, the people holding the public purse put savings ahead of safety for not only police officers but firefighters, armed forces, consumers who trust that their food has been inspected by real trained personel. Remember the result of trusting packers to inspect their own abattoirs and processing plants?
Recently Canadian authorities decided to let exporters do their own inspections of exported goods. Sensible importers said no thanks. We will not buy your stuff.
The Mounted Police from austerity or from custom do not provide body armor that stops a high powered projectile. This is another area that needs to be addressed if we are to witness fewer mass funeral parades for officers killed in the line of duty.
Maclean's, June 23 edition, wrote, "(The officers) died without fear or hesitation." We may believe they died without hesitation because it was witnessed by many. Who can look into the mind of another human being?
My son Mark, with a long career in the service, tells me he has never gone into a dangerous action without fear. He was head of a TRU team for many years. He said, "Any officer who goes into dangerous action without fear is going to be killed."
Uttering platitudes about the fallen takes the edge off finding ways to protect our officers. Shame on us. We can do better.