Wearing a Badge in a Volatile World

“There is no question: There isn’t a briefing room today or over the next few weeks where officers getting ready to go out on their next shift won’t be discussing what happened in Dallas,” said Joe Balles, an FBI-trained law enforcement professional in Madison, Wisconsin, who consults with departments throughout the country.

The events that have unfolded over the course of this past week are a tragedy — from Baton Rouge, to Minneapolis, and now Dallas, he said.

“We cannot afford to have police on one side and community on another,” said one law enforcement official.

“What’s really sad is we need our police and our communities to come together. These are the principles we were founded on — the public are the police and the police are the public. We cannot afford to have police on one side and community on another,” Balles said. “Somehow or another we’ve got to get past this.”

Balles and others in law enforcement understand the frustrations many feel about two fatal officer-related shootings this week alone. He said it’s a challenge: With more than two million police officers in the United States across 17,000 police departments, there may be some in the ranks who “probably aren’t best suited to be police officers.”

But 99.9 percent of the time, people are called into the line of duty for the right reasons, he said — which is to protect and serve their communities. He hopes there is broad understanding of how challenging and dangerous a profession police work is.

“Am I worried? Yes. Every cop going to work today is worried until this gets behind us. How many others are out there fantasizing about doing something similar? This guy intended to go out and kill police officers last night,” said Balles of the sniper, who has since been identified as 25-year-old Micah X. Johnson, who served in the Army Reserve in Afghanistan. After a standoff with police, he was killed by a robotic device that was detonated by police.

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“Every time you put the uniform on and the bulletproof vest and go out the door, you never know,” said Balles. “Usually there are about 150 officers killed in the line of duty each year. Unfortunately, a similar percentage take their own lives every year. A lot of times, the things officers have to deal with in their jobs, the stress, what they see — nothing can prepare you for that.”

We’ve got a lot of work to do — both community and police — in order to come together, he added.

Related: Anti-Police Rhetoric Turns Deadly

Balles added, “We live in a country where the police have been the backbone of our democracy ever since we founded the country — and people need to respect the rule of law. We can’t have protesters out there who are basically telling people, ‘You can’t trust the police, you can’t not obey what they say.’ You can’t be saying, ‘Kill the police.’ You can’t have that because people on the fringe of our society — it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge. Then none of us have any control over that.”

He shared another concern: These events will keep good people from entering the profession.

“We need to be able to attract really great people into police work. We need the best and brightest to think about being police officers — men, women, Asian, black, Latino, white, whoever. It’s imperative the police look like the community they serve and we’ve got to be able to recruit and pull from that. So long-term, I want to make sure people really see police work as something very noble, a calling.”

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John Vanak, a retired lieutenant from the San Jose Police Department, told LifeZette it’s tragic, but he’s already seeing good people leave their locations or get out entirely because of the escalating dangers.

“They’re moving to areas where they believe there is more support for law enforcement,” Vanak said. “It’s not just their own concern that they might go to work and get shot — but their families’ and their children’s concern, too. For every one person who goes to work, there is another one or two or 10 in their family who worry if they’ll come home, or if they’ll need to make a decision within a split second and be put on the line and have people who weren’t there pass judgment on their actions.”

Among the officers he’s talked with, there is a tremendous amount of anxiety, he said.

“It’s a very difficult time to be in law enforcement. It’s never been like this. Clearly there is a great sense of hostility between various factions in our society today,” said Vanak.