"There’s a conception out there that policemen walk around shooting wantonly. In my experience and training, that’s hardly the truth"

As told to Chaya Inselburg

As America convulses with anti-police sentiment and the public debate centers around the question of defunding police departments, we reached out to a beat officer in a typical American city to hear his take.

Our interviewee, who’s been prohibited by his supervisor from sharing his name or any identifying details, is a police sergeant with over a decade’s experience within the uniform patrol division of the department of a midsized city. This division is what most people would call the “beat officers,” or those who work the street 24/7. Here are the things he wishes you knew.

1. Weapons are the last resort

There’s a conception out there that policemen walk around shooting wantonly. In my experience and training, that’s hardly the truth. During my six months of training at the academy and the three months of on-the-job training that followed, we internalized a system where weapons are the last resort.

At the academy, we learned a mix of police methodology, such as how to de-escalate a situation; and skills, like the use of restraints and weapons. We use restraints and weapons only in cases where a suspect is being non-compliant when we try to take him into custody.

In the police department, we have something called the “use of force continuum,” which is a system that mandates different levels of force according to different circumstances. The first level is officer present with soft, empty hands, which means that hopefully just having an officer on the scene would make somebody comply, and it just rises from there. If soft hands don’t ensure cooperation, we move on to hard hands, which is using more of a fist. Then we move to the non-lethal weapons, and then there’s the deadly force situation which is when we’re authorized to use our weapon.

Not only do we have to memorize the continuum in training, but the most important thing is knowing when to use a certain force in a given situation.

Most of the time, when I go out on a call, the first two levels are going to be enough. Based upon the number of interactions that my division has had, I can say that incidents of force are few and far between. Most of the time the situations can be handled just by the officer being there.

2. I know how it feels to be tased

I carry a 9mm Glock 17 — that’s the main service weapon. Although I don’t carry a secondary weapon, there are officers who do. All of us have to qualify every year with our duty weapon. This means we have to do what’s called a “course of fire,” or exercises with live ammunition to make sure we’re proficient. And I’ve learned to always assume that my gun is loaded. The implications: You have to be very careful with it, you never want to point it at anyone, and you always want to make sure you’re handling your weapon with the upmost respect because it’s something that could be used to take somebody’s life — including your own.

I also carry a Taser, which I’ve had to use a couple of times on duty. Before getting certified to carry it or to use pepper spray, we actually had to be tased and sprayed so that we could understand the effect those actions might have on somebody, should we decide to implement them.

Getting tased was very painful, but I understand the rationale. Until you know how painful it is, you’re not going to know what it’s going to do to somebody else. Knowing how much it hurts helped me be more sympathetic to the people I had to tase.