By Khalida Sarwari
Her right arm wrapped in a red cast, Vera Hill stepped confidently up to a gray line separating her from a large screen. Then, turning her back to the screen to face San Jose police officers Steve Spillman and Ian Cooley, she asked, “Do I look like a real badass?”–her question eliciting chuckles from the group of students sitting in a row behind her. “You don’t even know how I got this,” Hill continued, jokingly.
Moments later, the joking subsided and Hill was facing a life-and-death situation. She was in a bar and attempting to subdue an intoxicated man. There was some yelling and threatening, and then guns were drawn. For Hill, it seemed as if time stopped. Crouching down, she fired shots at the gunman. Seconds later, as a rush of adrenaline flooded her senses, Hill said she couldn’t remember how many times she’d shot at the man. She thought it was seven rounds, but was informed later it was much more. She recalls that her armpits were sweating.
At a party later that night, Hill was still ruminating on what had happened that morning.
“I couldn’t just shake it off and put on my party dress like everything was OK in the world,” Hill said. “I was affected all weekend long.”
It wasn’t until Monday afternoon when Hill said she was finally back to her old self. But two months later, she was still wrestling with thoughts about whether she’d made the right decision in shooting the gunman at the bar.
“Did I react the right way? I believe I did,” she said. “If I had hesitated, I would have been dead. It’s also equally horrifying for me to find out I shot someone who didn’t have a weapon.”
The bar scenario is fictitious, and nothing that Hill had experienced was real. Even the weapons hanging from the belt around her waist were either disabled or, in the case of her gun, empty of bullets. But the emotions on that fall day inside the simulator at the San Jose Police Department training unit–an amalgamation of fear, stress and insecurity–were very real.
In November, the administration of justice department at West Valley College offered students an opportunity to step inside the mind of a police officer in a force response scenario. More than two dozen people participated in the first two lecture sessions, and fewer than that in the simulator activity.
Faraz Tajik, 23, of Saratoga was the first to volunteer and, like Hill, didn’t appear outwardly nervous. Minutes after pulling down a pair of goggles over his eyes and strapping on a belt containing a baton, pepper spray, Taser and a handgun, though, Tajik froze, incapable of diffusing a domestic disturbance situation involving a man in a yellow wrestling shirt standing in front of a house shouting and lifting dumbbells. He tried to talk over the guy, moving toward him, then away.
“I didn’t know what to say,” Tajik later admitted. “I didn’t know what I would say in that situation if I was a cop. What am I supposed to say? I kind of want to redo it. I definitely would approach it with a different mindset, I guess.”
One of the seminar’s underlying themes was that in real life, there is no redo button; often, police officers must make split-second decisions under extreme stress. Most of the time, it ends well, but sometimes it doesn’t.
It is debatable whether things went as well as they could have on Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Mo. The shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown at the hands of Darren Wilson, a 28-year-old white Ferguson police officer, sparked outrage and resulted in protests throughout the country and even other parts of the world. When it was announced on the night of Nov. 24 that the grand jury had elected not to indict Wilson, a fresh wave of violent protests broke out in several cities in the U.S., including locally in Oakland, San Francisco and Berkeley.
If that case didn’t affirm the belief held among many that officers routinely engage in racial profiling or display patterns of excessive force, the grand jury’s decision in the case of Eric Garner’s death left little doubt in their minds.
Just a month prior to the incident in Ferguson, New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo placed Garner–suspected of selling single cigarettes from a pack–in a chokehold during an attempted arrest. The maneuver, prohibited by the NYPD, resulted in Garner’s immediate death. Garner had expressed to Pantaleo and other officers at the scene that he was tired of being harassed and that he was not selling cigarettes. And as in the Brown case, on Dec. 3, a grand jury decided not to indict Pantaleo, setting off impassioned demonstrations nationwide.
In response to these incidents but prior to the grand jury rulings, Ed Flosi, an adjunct professor at West Valley College, offered a 12-hour seminar to educate the public about how cops are trained to respond in situations that call for using force. The seminar, spread over three Saturdays, covered legal principles and training standards, various types of weaponry officers have at their disposal, the reality of human performance limitations and how the media often get the story wrong.
Flosi, a retired police officer who is a use of force trainer and expert witness on deadly force cases in both the state superior and federal courts, said he offered the seminar not necessarily to change anyone’s opinions but to educate people, particularly those who may not hold a favorable view of police officers.
In the first seminar on Sept. 20, Flosi talked about the limitations of memory and how that impacts officers when they are under stress. In such situations, fine motor skills are diminished, officers experience an “adrenaline dump,” and may experience impacts to their vision and perception.
“It’s unrealistic for us to believe officers are these unreal ninjas,” he told the class.
Tajik said participating in the seminar helped him gain a newfound appreciation for the challenges that those in law enforcement routinely face.
“I don’t think I could handle that on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “The stress level and being in that mindset and keeping calm, I don’t know if I could do that. Being in that state, it’s kind of doing that every single day, every call you have to go through. [That’s] something you’d have to be able handle mentally and physically.”
Hill has spent lived and worked in Brazil, where she and her family didn’t always feel safe. She said the seminar made her realize the sense of security and the freedoms people in the U.S. are fortunate to have compared to other parts of the world.
“The alternative to law enforcement would be anarchy,” she said. “We wouldn’t have our safety, and there are parts of the world that don’t have that.”
Whereas Tajik, who’s studying economics at San Francisco State University, has a casual interest in law enforcement, Hill, a 51-year-old mother of two young girls, recently decided to pursue a second career in law enforcement after several decades of working in the international business field. She just began an internship at the Santa Clara Police Department, and she is on track to graduate with a degree in administration of justice from West Valley College in May.
Both Tajik and Hill said they took the seminar out of curiosity and for extra credit points, but that they emerged from it with not only a greater sense of appreciation for police work but knowledge they didn’t have previously.
“They wanted to give us a window into what their life is like,” said Hill. “It was a humbling experience. The right people are amazing, and I have respect for what they do.”
Link: Students take on role of police officers in West Valley College use of force seminar
