I just read an article dealing with the Ferguson situation (the situation/the altercation that led to a young man losing his life) and how law enforcement officers might be helped out by training in de-escalation. It made me think of a lot things. One being how I felt watching clips of the interview with the officer and thinking he was so cold and emotionless and machine-like. And it made me think of a conversation with a friend who is married to an officer and I brought up the interview and how he came off. She then tells me that police officer training includes the removal of emotions so they can do the job they have to do. And then the reading of the article made me think of this...... This is from an On Being episode with Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. This is an excerpt from the transcript of the program where a police officers speaks about how mindfulness training under Thich Nhat Hanh had changed her and made her a better cop. People laugh at this stuff and say it is naive. Well all I have to say to that is it is continuing doing things the way they are being done that is naive and a dead end dark alley. CAPTAIN CHERI MAPLES: Well, as a cop, what started to happen to me there got very interesting because — I dont know if you attended the five mindfulness trainings, but that was one of the things that happened at my first retreat — and I just assumed, well, Id listen to this, but I cant do that, Im a cop. You know, I mean, I might be in a position where I have to kill somebody at some point. I cant think about taking these. And Sister Chan Khong, who is one of the — probably the senior monastic here, was at that retreat, and she pulled me aside and she had this very wonderful conversation with me, the essence of it being, Who else would we want to carry a gun except somebody who will do it mindfully? Of course, you can take these trainings. And what happened to me is my heart started to soften and kind of break open for the first time. I had gotten very mechanical about how I was doing my job. I had no idea that I had shut down that way. And I came home and, especially that first week when it was so new and everything felt so fresh, I started to understand that, in a very, very deep level, that its possible to bring this into your work as a cop because, as my energy started to change, the energy that I got back from other people started to change, even including the people that I had to arrest and take to jail. But probably the first example of that was I was on a domestic violence call, and it was one of these calls where I would have just arrested the guy. I would have just, Hey, enoughs enough, you know? This was a scenario where breaking up is hard to do, and there was a little girl, and they were exchanging custody. And he was kind of holding the little girl hostage, not wanting to give her back to Mom. And there had been no violence that had taken place, but both Mom and the little girl were very scared and intimidated. And ordinarily I would have said, Thats it, slapped the handcuffs on him, taken him to jail. But something stopped me, and it was I had just come out of this retreat. And I got the little girl, got him to give me the little girl, took care of her, got her and her mom set, told them just to leave, went back. And I just talked to this guy from my heart, and, within five minutes, I mean, Ive got this big gun belt on. Im about 53. Right? And this guys like 66. And hes bawling, you know. And Im holding this guy with this big gun belt on and everything. And he was just in incredible pain, and thats what I started realizing we deal with is misplaced anger because people are in incredible pain. So I ran into him three days later in a little store on Willy Street, where I lived at the time. And this guy comes, he sees me off-duty, he picks me up, gives me this big bear hug and said, You saved my life that night. Thank you. And so when you have experiences like that, and you start to realize, Well, what am I doing different here? I mean, really, its about softening your heart. When youre a police officer and you do this work, you need to find a way to be able to maintain both the compassionate bodhisattva within you and the fierce bodhisattva and know when each is called for and how to combine the two. And once you start down this path, its possible to learn that.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 03:27:39 +0000
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