ABSTRACT
Officer A experienced a highly introspective moment while sitting alone in an office waiting to speak with an investigator. A short time earlier, the first-year officer had shot and killed a suspect when a “routine contact” quickly escalated into a deadly confrontation. “I was by myself and, of course, my mind was running a hundred miles an hour,” he remembers. “Then I started thinking about what they told us in the academy about post-shooting trauma. I thought, ‘Well, that’s it: I’m going to have nightmares for the rest of my life; I’m going to become an alcoholic; my wife’s going to leave me.’ You know, things like that.”
