Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Last week, word filtered out through what is left of the media here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that police were looking for a woman from Pittsfield Township named Dawn Fital. Pittsfield is the township just southeast of Ann Arbor, between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Like many areas around here, the homicide rate is incredibly tiny. The Michigan State Police searchable database for 2006 (the most recent year included) shows that there were no homicides. In 2009 (the most recent year for county-wide statistics) there were 9 homicides in the entire county.

At any rate, Dawn Fital went missing on Monday from the apartment she shared with her boyfriend and ex-husband. Police in Indiana picked up her boyfriend on Tuesday after he was spotted digging a hole behind a bank, and he apparently told him he had killed his girlfriend. Her body was found on Thursday in a pond near where the boyfriend was arrested. He has been charged with open murder.

Over the four days between when this story first hit the news on Wednesday and the arraignment on Saturday, there were approximately 12 stories in our local news outlet about it. As much as I'd like to tell you that that's because we are all so stunned that anyone would be killed in our neck of the woods, and while that is not completely irrelevant, I think it is incomplete.

Dawn Fital, a White woman, was allegedly murdered in her own home by someone she lived with, a White man. She was not a criminal, a drug dealer, or a gang banger (and yes, we do have those in Washtenaw County as well). She was not African-American, and she was not male. She was not "supposed" to be a homicide victim around here.

But think about that for a moment. Because if Dawn Fital was not "supposed" to be murdered, that implies that someone else was. The fact that Fital does not meet the typical statistical profile of a homicide victim may be notable, but it should not make her death more important than that of any other person. Everyone who is murdered has a family and friends. Everyone is a human being.

The thing that strikes me -- or perhaps triggers me -- about Dawn Fital's death is that I can count on one hand the number of female homicide victims in Washtenaw County in the 9 years I have lived here. Every one of them was a victim of domestic violence. So in that sense, I guess Fital does fit the profile. The problem is the existence of the profile, and a society that in any way condones a pattern where Black men are disposable as victims of violence in general, and women are disposable as victims of violence by their partners.

A man biked to a Del Taco restaurant in San Bernardino, California this afternoon armed with two handguns.  He walked inside, walked over to a table and opened fire on a family of four.  He then shot himself in the head.  The father of the family died at the scene, and an 8-year-old boy died shortly after arriving at the hospital.  A 5-year-old boy and his 29-year-old mother are in critical condition, as is the 56-year-old shooter (there are conflicting reports, with some indicating that he has also died).  Reports indicate he is the woman's stepfather.

This story is horrific, of course.  In the next day or two we'll be hearing more about the relationships among the shooter and the victims and about what his motive may have been. 

In this lull while we wait for more information, it's interesting to contemplate why we think that more information will be helpful. If we think about it for any length of time, it's obvious that, at least for most of us, there is no motive strong enough to justify this kind of premeditated violence, particularly against children.  No matter what we find out, this story is not going to stop being horrific, so why do we care?  Most would chalk it up to macabre fascination with other people's tragedies, but I think there is more than that. 

We generally think of family members as "safe."  They are not the people who, when we see them walking towards us on the street late at night, cause us to cross the street.  We may or may not like our families, but most of us are not afraid of them.  At the same time, we also know that there are people who, with good reason, are afraid of members of their family.  Abusive spouses and parents, disturbed children and other violent relatives are out there, and their families, quite reasonably, fear them.

For those of us who aren't afraid of any of our relatives, it's hard to fathom that someone close to us could try to kill us in broad daylight in public.  This incident must be different in some way, and we want to know how.  This is not just because of morbid curiosity.  We are looking for evidence that, while we don't fear our families, this family had a reason to fear the mother's stepfather.  If we can figure out the motive, we can reassure ourselves of two things:   First, that the same motive doesn't exist in our own families, and second that this was that "other" kind of family -- one of the ones where people knew they should be afraid.

Why do we need that reassurance?  Because the alternative makes us want to hide under our beds and never come out.  The alternative is that any family, anywhere, any time can go from peaceful to violent.  The alternative is that the people we consider "safe" are not safe, in which case we are not safe, even if we think we are.  No one can live a normal life believing that violence could erupt without warning at any moment.  We all know, somewhere in the back of our minds, that random violence does occur, but for the most part we live life as though it doesn't, and we don't want evidence to the contrary, thank you very much.

I don't know anything about this family -- not even their names.  In the days ahead we'll find out whether this attack was at all predictable.  Whether it was or not, however, will not change the fact that half of this family is dead, and the other half will have to live with that loss and this traumatic experience for the rest of their lives.

Jennifer Paulson, a 30 year-old special education teacher in Tacoma, Washington was shot to death in the parking lot of Birney Elementary School as she arrived for work this morning.  The suspect was pulled over by police and opened fire some time later.  He was killed in the shootout.  The shooter was someone Paulson had worked with in college.  He started turning up at her work a few years ago and calling her 10 or 15 times a day, and she eventually got a restraining order against him.  Last Friday, he followed her in his car and was arrested for violating the order.  He spent the weekend in jail, made bail and was released on Monday.  Friday morning, Jennifer Paulson was dead.

When you hear the phrase "school shooting" you probably think of situations like Columbine, or even the hallway shooting at an Alabama middle school last month.  In our minds, violence at schools is carried out by students towards students, or by adults who are intent on harming children.  This case, like the shooting in Knoxville earlier this month and even the one in Littleton, Colorado earlier this week, paint a very different picture.

The fact is that, in any workplace including a school, the most likely person to murder another person is a current or former employee or an acquaintance or family member of a current employee.  People who open fire at schools for the most part do it for exactly the same reasons they do it in factories, office buildings and other places of business -- they are gunning for an adult who they know is there.  They are current employees who are dissatisfied and go after the boss, former employees taking out their revenge, family members commiting domestic violence homicides in public, and stalkers of all kinds, whether former love interests or people who think they should be love interests.  The biggest danger doesn't come from strangers, and it doesn't come from children.  It comes from the adults we know.

Paulson certainly was afraid for her own safety.  She had not been staying at home since the shooter was released from jail.  I don't know if she told her colleagues or her boss about this man and the restraining order.  I hope she did, but it wouldn't be unusual if she didn't.  Do you know if anyone at your work is being stalked or harassed?  Do you know if they have a restraining order against someone?  You should.

It's actually not as uncommon as you would think for schools in particular to need to deal with restraining orders and issues of people who may be a danger to the school community, but usually these take the form of orders against non-custodial parents, step-parents and former partners of parents.  From time to time a parent will come to school with a picture and a court order and tell us to call the police if the person pictured comes within a certain distance of their child.  If we're doing our job, we share that information with school staff and file it in the child's file for future reference.

It is even more common, however, for a parent who is either non-custodial or does not have physical custody of a child on a given day but has joint custody in general to turn up and pick up their child from school.  The next day, we hear from the other, very angry, parent demanding to know why we allowed this to happen.  They are always surprised to learn that we cannot enforce a custody arrangement that is not ordered by the court, nor can we enforce one that is ordered by the court if we don't have a copy.  We have no way of knowing that Tuesdays are always "mom's day" if they don't tell us.

Which brings us back to Jennifer Paulson and school employees like her.  Someone who is a threat to a teacher is a threat to that teacher's students and colleagues.  If they know where the teacher works, that is one of the easiest places to find her.  In my 19 years working in schools, however, I have only known of a restraining order involving a colleague once.  People are embarrassed to talk about people who are stalking or threatening them, particularly if it is someone they once had a relationship with.  But we can't be alert to the danger to them or to us and the children if we don't know, and it's naive to think that someone who would act so inappropriately in the first place would let a restraining order stop them if they wanted to do violence.

There is a lot of healing to be done at Birney Elementary School in the days ahead.  If Paulson hadn't told her colleagues about her stalker, they're going to have to come to terms with the question of whether they could have made a difference if she had.  We'll never know the answer to that.  Hopefully, this tragedy will encourage other women in similar situations to confide in their bosses and their colleagues, if not for their own safety then for everyone else's.

On Tuesday morning in the parking lot of the Canton, Michigan library (the next town over from me), a Detroit Police Officer shot and killed his wife, who was also a Detroit Police Officer, and then killed himself. The back-story is a distressing one. The wife had come to the police department to file a complaint and changed her mind a few days before. Then police were called to the home for a domestic dispute, only to find the home empty and a note from the husband directing who should get his possessions if anything happened to him. Canton police contacted Detroit police, who made contact with the officer and decided everything was OK. Two days later, both he and his wife were dead.

It's tempting to play the blame game here. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are pointing fingers at one another. I am going to resist getting sucked into that. But this is a good opportunity to take a look at two phenomena that this incident illustrates: suicide among law enforcement personnel and domestic violence among law enforcement personnel. Both are significantly elevated.

The suicide rate among working men in the United States is roughly 12 per 100,000. Among officers in the New York City Police Department, it is 15 per 100,000. The rate in Detroit department is 28 per 100,000. Why is it so high?

Police officers in general have characteristics that put them at higher risk for suicide. They are disproportionately younger men. They are under psychological stress. They are in a culture that frowns upon open discussion of feelings and may penalize officers for seeking mental health care, effectively reducing their access to help. They are exposed to trauma. And they have easy access to a firearm. Anyone with these characteristics, regardless of profession, is at elevated risk for completing a suicide.

Detroit police officers seem to have a rate that is elevated even above that. The job of a Detroit officer is probably more stressful than average. The city is in horrific financial trouble, endangering their jobs on an ongoing basis. The crime rate is high. The poverty rate is high. I would guess that the ratio of "easy" calls to traumatic ones is much worse than in other major cities. They are the guards for a dying city -- they don't really have much hope that their efforts are making the city better. All of that increases the psychological stress of the job.

Perhaps more importantly, however, as far as I can tell there is no Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) support for Detroit Police Officers. New York City has a CISM team -- that may account for the difference. That not only means that Detroit officers are not getting appropriate intervention for trauma exposure, but it probably also reflects a department culture that frowns even more on seeking mental health assistance. These men and women are traumatized on a daily basis, and they probably aren't getting much help.

The exposure to violence that all officers have probably also accounts for the increased incidence of domestic violence in marriages that involve a police officer. We know that trauma exposure makes people irritable. Seeing violence also desensitizes people to violence. And spouses of police officers are even less likely to report their abusive partners than most battered spouses, because they are afraid of angering their spouse even more by possibly costing them their job, and because they fear that police officers will not take complaints against one of their own seriously. There isn't much to suggest that domestic homicides are higher among police officers, but domestic violence certainly is.

And so we wind up with the scene outside the Canton Library. I said I wouldn't point fingers, and I won't, at least not in the traditional sense. But I will say that I wonder what might have been different if Detroit was taking better care of its finest.

Thanks to Quarterbacker Maureen for the tip. Although this incident occurred less than 10 miles from my house, the demise of our local newspaper over the summer meant that this was not covered on the "replacement" website, or even on most of the general Michigan news websites.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett held his first news conference since being beaten after attempting to get emergency help for a woman and baby near the Wisconsin State Fair over the weekend. I blogged a few days ago about this incident, and about the complicated nature of psychological healing after a traumatic incident in which you are being hailed as the hero. I neglected, however, to talk about the added complexity of things when you are a politician, and everything you say or do is already incredibly complex.

Barrett does some interesting things in this news conference. After he introduces the various members of his family who are there and thanks his wife for being by his side, he introduces his niece, Molly, again and points out how terrific she was in the emergency. Then he goes on to explain why his security detail was not with him. Next, he characterizes the situation as one which any citizen of his city would have responded to in the same way, and then he starts to describe what happened, again pointing out that his niece did just what he did.

I think there are a number of things going on here. One is that this is a politician, and politicians always need to worry about how they come across. He can't be the only hero in Milwaukee -- this has to be something anyone would do -- because that makes citizens feel good about themselves and they associate that food feeling with him and vote for him. Imagine how obnoxious he would seem if he came out and said, "I know I was really brave and heroic, and few would do what I did." That would be the end of his career right then and there.

Another thing you see is Barrett explaining away some criticism -- that he didn't have his security detail -- up front. Part of this, too, is simply that he is a public figure. But part, also, may represent him thinking through what could have happened differently. Just about anyone who has ever been assaulted has questioned if they could have prevented it. I'm sure he has, too.

You also see Barrett talking repeatedly about his niece. This is, in part, because he is a nice person and a good uncle and he wants her to get some credit for what she did, as well she should. Realizing that she acted just as he did also helps all of us, and Barrett himself, focus again on the fact that this was random and that he wasn't doing anything wrong. Again, he has thought through whether he could have or should have prevented what happened. If Molly called 911, and if any citizen would have called 911, then calling 911 was not the wrong thing to do. And yes, I have heard criticism in the last few days suggesting he shouldn't have.

During the Q&A, someone asked what he was thinking during the attack. He replies, "This is really bad, this is really bad." Then a reporter mentions that her viewers are calling Barrett their hero, and asks for a reaction. He says that Molly's his hero. At this point, I have to say I don't think this is posturing or politics at all. This is a man who knows he could have been killed and knows who he has to thank for that not happening. A pure politician would have stuck with "I did what anyone would have done" and maybe claimed that during the attack he was concerned for the safety of his family or the baby and grandmother. This is an honest person who has experienced trauma speaking. It rings true.

But perhaps the part of the press conference that touched me the most was at the very end. In talking about the support he has received from others -- including a phone call from President Obama -- he said it meant a great deal to him because, "This is tough." I don't think he only meant physically.

Below is a link to the full video of the news conference, although you will have to go to Youtube to watch it.