In 1988, 23 year old Steve Baker joined the Brooklyn Park, MN police department. Having already spent a couple of years in junior college, trying out elementary education and wildlife biology and deciding they weren’t for him, he decided to pursue a law enforcement career through a vo-tech. As Baker put it, chuckling, “maybe I wouldn’t have to work that hard on studies”. Following his successful completion of the field training program in Brooklyn Park, Baker did the obligatory 18 months of shift rotation before he was able to bid for his patrol shift.
A suburb of Minneapolis with a population of over 80,000, Brooklyn Park is Minnesota’s sixth largest city. The 26.5 square mile city, which is dispatched through Hennepin County, is divided into four patrol areas. While officers could bid their shift, they rotated weekly through the four patrol areas (which Baker preferred because it allowed him to get to know the whole city). Initially when he started they ran 8-hour days with three shifts, (day shift from 0600-1400, afternoon from 1400-2200 and dogwatch from 2200-0600) plus a night power shift from 1800-0200. Baker gained experience working all the different patrol areas and shifts, starting with afternoons and eventually changing to nights Later in his career, as a day shift officer, the department ran 12-hour shifts (4 days on, 4 days off) although officers were now also able to bid their patrol area as well. However, as Baker noted,
“…you rarely stayed in your own area, ’cause at that time we probably had four cops working, that was our minimum, and once somebody got a call-a lot of our calls were two person calls, that was the type of city we were in-a lot of domestics, a lot of in-progress calls, so half of the shift [officers] is tied up on one call, and if another report comes out in somebody’s area that was tied up on a call, you went there. There wasn’t a lot of, I guess I’ve heard the term area integrity, or whatever, but you couldn’t ever plan on staying in your area for a shift because there was always something going on.”
During his time with the Brooklyn Park PD, Baker, in addition to his patrol work, was also a dog handler, worked general investigations and the drug task force, was a field training officer, a 25 year firearms instructor, as well as a long-term member of both SWAT entry and sniper teams. In addition to earning numerous commendations, Baker was also awarded the Medal of Valor twice, the first time, for his efforts, while technically off-duty, to save a driver trapped in a fiery wreck following a head-on collision, and the second, for his actions as a SWAT member in an active shooter hostage situation inside a manufacturing facility.
Steve Baker retired in 2016 from the Brooklyn Park PD after a nearly 28 year career in law enforcement. I had the opportunity recently to talk with Steve about his thoughts and insights into patrol work, policing, the public, and the challenges police officers face.
FH: How would you tend to describe Brooklyn Park-a high crime rate, a solid community-how would you characterize working that city?
SB: I think Brooklyn Park could probably best be described as a very economically and socially diverse city. There’s a significant amount of low income housing, there’s a very significant amount of middle income housing, and there’s a portion of the city that has $800,000 homes in it so you could see it all in a 15 to 20 minute drive.
FH: Any particular crime problems that were a little more prominent in the city itself or anything that stuck out as a problem that always needed to be addressed?
SB: Well I think domestics were the one consistent problem and you would have waves of other things that would bounce up, somebody would become interested in burglary and you get a rash of burglaries or a group of burglars that worked together would be on the run for three, four months at a time. Robberies would be a big call load certain times, especially with the advent of cellphones and Craigslist and people selling things on Craigslist; unsuspecting people going, oh I’m going to go meet this guy at a park and sell him my iPad or buy his iPad. I’m showing up to buy an iPad, the guy gets out of his car, and it’s a robbery. He never had an iPad and now he’s got $300 in cash. And the criminals found out “boy, that’s easy pickings,” and it became a fad.
We call them car prowlers, during school break we always knew that we were gonna find car prowlers. Kids going and sneaking out late at night and breaking into cars, stealing change out of the cup holders, or stereos, or whatever they could find. I don’t think there was any predominant crime but we had a little bit of everything. And it depended on who was active and what was going on. When methamphetamine became a big problem, mail theft became a big problem. Because the people that couldn’t afford their meth would go mailbox to mailbox and steal everybody’s mail, hoping to get a credit card or a check they could wash and turn into their own. Financial crimes were on the uptick with the popularity of methamphetamine.
FH: When you were working patrol what were the things you liked best about it?
SB: The unpredictability. You never know what’s going to happen that day when you’re going to work. And if there’s nothing happening, you can make stuff happen, you can be-if there’s time to be proactive, you can be proactive and go find bad guys. You don’t have to wait for somebody to call. You’re dealing with the widest variety of people you could imagine, from people that are down and out, and destitute to millionaires. I’ve dealt with professional ball players and people who couldn’t rub two pennies together and I don’t know that there’s another job in the world that has the diversity and the amount of variety in their work that a patrol officer does in a police department.
FH: Given that, anything you really didn’t like about patrol, anything that was a pain, stuff you could have just as well done without?
SB: Oh, I don’t know. I guess my least favorite call would probably be shoplifters, or alarm calls. ‘Cause alarm calls were bogus 95% of the time, ya know? It’s a waste of time to me. Shoplifters were just…a pain because its usually a very small dollar amount and people are stealing for the thrill of it. Its not even “I can’t feed my kids, I need diapers,” it’s going to grab a porterhouse and run like crazy! (laughs) So those are frustrating because there’s also really no penalty for a misdemeanor theft. So it’s kind of a waste of time in my mind.
FH: When you were working SWAT, did you work that for a while? How did you feel about working SWAT?
SB: I loved the SWAT team. I stayed on it till the day that I retired. At one point there was an opening, it was probably about 10 years before I retired so I was in my early 40’s and…it’s a taxing job. I mean you have to be physically fit, you have to be able to lift, and carry, and run, and jump and everything else. And I was in my early 40’s and went-you know, maybe it’s time to slow down a little bit, so I applied for a spot on the rifle team as a sniper. Got accepted to the sniper team, there are four snipers that are assigned to the SWAT team, and we were all previously on the entry team. Shortly after I joined the sniper team to give my body a break and try to slow down a little bit, the SWAT administrative people said, “you know what, you guys on sniper team have too much experience on the entry team, and you’re all still capable operators, we want you to cross train [as] both entries and snipers.” So, it was just twice as much time out of my month, we train monthly, both entry team and sniper team. So it ended up being more training, more time committed rather than less. But I really enjoyed it, kinda one of those things that I really loved, and stayed with it till the end.
FH: Since you started your law enforcement career, what do you think were some of the most helpful tools or innovations that you’ve put to use in your work? What were some of the things you found really useful to have in police work in general?
SB: I gotta think about that one. I mean I didn’t really have a lot of propriety in my job too because I did DARE for two and half years, I was on the SWAT team, I was a field training officer so I was the guy the rookie jumped in the car with for a month at a time. I was a firearms instructor for 25 years. I did general investigation for year, I did drug task force for two years. So there was a lot of variety in my job. I think the thing that I disliked the most was the technology because I’m not a techie person, I’m not a computer person. I prefer sitting down and writing down what happened, or having a dispatcher tell me over the radio what the call was that I’m going to and telling me the address so I can write it down on a piece of paper instead of it popping up on a computer screen with a description of the call, address, and nothing else. The techie stuff is actually what bothered me the most. I really can’t put my finger on anything that was most helpful, other than, I mean, with such a variety of duties, I was the jack of all trades and master of none, but I had enough knowledge in all those things that I felt I was successful at them. And the administration must have thought so also ’cause they kept letting me do it all. But yeah, I can’t think of a thing that really helped me out or was a favorite.
FH: Are there things in the way of innovations, tactics, equipment, that you felt was lacking or something that you really felt you should have or that is essential?
SB: I always thought drones would be an incredible help to us, especially on something like a SWAT callout where there may be a hostage inside, or there may be an unknown problem, or a suicidal person and you don’t know if they’re still alive or not. I always tried to get our police department to employ a drone. We had a robot, but robots, Minnesota weather, don’t always mix. The robot we had could climb stairs pretty well but if it got tipped and went down the stairs, we couldn’t necessarily right it every time. And I thought, boy if we just had a drone with a camera on it, we could do a little reconnaissance, find out what’s going on in there, but because of the privacy issues and what-not, we never did, while I was working. I don’t think anything has changed since then.
FH: When you were with the department did you experience a lot of change in administration; a lot of changes with the chief, or a lot of new lieutenants, captains cycling through, or was it a pretty stable command structure?
SB: We had actually a very stable command structure. Obviously as the older generations retired it was filled in with younger, within a few years I’m working for people I trained, so I was happy to have had a say in their training, but the chiefs ended up staying quite a while really. The chief that hired me was there for probably 20 years, I’d say. I know it was ten years after I started that he left, it was a retirement thing. Hell, he got to that age and said I had enough. The chief that replaced him wasn’t there a long time and ended up moving into a job with the BCA, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. The chief that replaced him was probably 5 or 6 years and he ended up going to Boston for an administrative job with the PD there. And now the Chief that is there now is actually the first guy I trained in 1991, he was the first person I was an FTO for and he’s been the chief for 6 or 7 years now. He’s a good guy, good chief, and I think he’ll probably be there for another 5 years before he’s at retirement age, five to seven. Even with the sergeants getting promoted to lieutenants, getting promoted to captains, or whatever, there wasn’t a lot of turnover. Once they were there, they stayed there. I was lucky to work for good people, that took care of the troops, and kept us informed, and kept us safe, and everything else.
FH: So they stayed supportive. You didn’t feel like they [administration] got stuck in a rut, with having long-term people, the same people from within the department? It still seemed like they maintained that support for the ground troops, and still kept trying to move forward in their thinking?
SB: Yeah, for the most part. In any group of people you’re going to find the few that you don’t want to work for, or don’t want to have work for you, or whatever it is. So there were those. For the most part I was able to avoid ’em for most of my career because I got lucky when I was young and got assigned to good shifts. And by the time I was old enough to choose my shift, I think I may have been working for somebody for a couple of years, a few years, throughout my career that I didn’t appreciate, but for the most part, I had wonderful supervisors. They’ve got a tough job too because we’re all brought up together, you become very close friends when you’re working the same shift and then they get promoted, now they’re your boss. I’ve talked to a lot of our supervisors and they all said, “Yeah I been called into the Chief’s office today and was told I can’t hang out with you guys anymore ’cause we have to have a separation.” And we always talked about that as a crock of…baloney, and I always told my bosses, “they’re my friends too,” and if I do something wrong and I needed to get slapped on the wrist or whatever it is, I know you’re gonna be fair about it and you know I’m not gonna complain about it because I know when I screw up, so we always had a good understanding, I least I did, with my bosses. There was never any animosity or anything like that if things were gonna go wrong.
FH: Being you were very experienced in a lot of different areas, and the department liked what you were doing, did you feel like they wanted to, or tried to, utilize you as a resource, whether they were looking at a policy change, maybe looking at different approaches, tactics? Did you feel like they looked at you and other veteran officers as a resource?
SB: No (laughs). The policy writers in the department are usually pretty high ranking and even though I worked with them when we were young, I may have trained some of them, once you get to that position you’re in a different world. You can’t write the position or the policy as though you were working on the street. I butted heads a lotta times with our administration over-Boy this is silly. “Well that’s the way it is.” Yeah, I get that, but it’s silly. But they have their reasons they have to put these policies in effect or they have to be worded they way they are. But I don’t have to agree with them as a patrol officer. I don’t have to agree with them, I just have to follow them. You keep your nose clean, and follow the policies, and make the best of it.
FH: Through the past few decades, there’s been changes in the way policing has been approached. There’s been problem-oriented policing, community-oriented policing, intelligence-led policing; in your time there, did your department try to adopt some of these approaches and policies to put them in effect in the department?
SB: Yeah, in the early ’90’s, the department created a community-oriented policing program and they had one detective, and two patrol officers, and a sergeant if I remember correctly. And the patrol officers were aggressive, creative thinkers, the detective was an aggressive, creative thinker, and the sergeant was an administrator. And the officers and detective would come up with these ideas to pinpoint problem areas-let’s use a bait car, let use whatever-and they would be shot down because there was a liability here, or it wasn’t a good idea, or there wasn’t staffing, so they kinda fought that problem for a while. The community-oriented policing, at least in our department, was more, or it seemed to morph into more, of a, “we’re gonna have a picnic with the community” type of a thing, and making friends, which I think you do that as a patrol officer anyway. You stop and say hi to a business, you get to know people in the neighborhood who are constantly outside or whatever. When you have time you make contacts, but you’re also solving problems at the same time. I don’t think that our community-oriented policing was allowed to necessarily be proactive and focus on problems areas in a different way than a patrol officer did in its early days and I think that was frustrating for the officers and detective involved in it.
But we also-I think it was 5 or 6 years ago-the city of Brooklyn Park received a grant to take part in a program put on by a major university, and it was a collective efficacy program. Which was-when I learned about it, it seemed like community policing re-invented. So they collected all this data of problem areas and I, specifically, was assigned to a strip mall in my patrol area, and I had never been to a call there in my patrol area for two years. I said I’ve never been to a call here, how can it be a problem area, look at all the problems over here. “But this is what the data shows.” Ok, so I went and contacted all the people in that patrol area, all the businesses in the strip mall said we haven’t had a problem here in years since that one business moved out that was causing all the problems, and creating problems. So I went back to our administration and said here’s the deal; the information you guys have is old, there hasn’t been a call there. I looked back in the computer, there’s been seven calls there in two years, that’s pretty darn good. And they went, “Well, it’s the data we used, so go with it.” Ok (laughs). It may have been a wonderful program but unless your using current data to choose the areas you’re participating in or with, you’re not doing any good.
And we were required to spend a certain amount of time in our efficacy area every shift. Well, the businesses in my strip mall, every time I would go in there, they’d go, “There’s nothing going on here” and I’m-well I got do this, you got anything? “No, we got nothing.” I’ll tell you what, I’m required to be here x amount of time on every shift, so when I have a slow time, I’m gonna park in your parking lot, and if you guys got a problem, come out and talk to me. And they were like “Yeah, good, ’cause we don’t have time for you to interrupt our business. We’re trying to deal with customers here.” I get it. I get it. You’re trying to deal with customers, I’m interrupting you, you may not want the police in your business because it looks bad, and you just don’t have anything to tell me anyway.
FH: Well, Fargo [ND PD] had a Beat Ops Plan. Taking crime analyst data, crunching the numbers and saying, “here’s where your problem areas are” and the officers had the same thing “Go to the movie theater and spend time there” but there’s no problems there. So it quickly became one of these things where [officers say] “I know where I’m supposed to be and it’s not where you’re trying to tell me I should be at.”
SB: Right, I know where the problems are because I was there three times yesterday. So I’m gonna go there today and spend some extra time there and give them some extra attention and see if we can get to the root of the problem. You won’t have that data for me for the next two weeks, at the earliest, by the time it gets through the system, so just let me do my job and let me take care of problems as they pop up. And I get that some of those problems are very deep rooted and you can’t deal with them from a squad car, but I think the officer working patrol has a better idea of where problems are, and what problems are there, than someone analyzing the data weeks or months later. It changes, it flows, it’s a meandering course that the problems are on. You can’t just predict, “Oh this place is gonna be a problem next week, because this place was last week, and this place was this week.” It’s not the way it goes.
FH: Sometimes departments will change patrol focuses depending on upticks in particular crimes, for instance a department may want officers to crack down on DUIs, but after a few months, in the wake of a few burglaries, then want officers to shift their focus to burglaries. Did you get a lot of expectations from the department on patrol focuses, expectations on what you should be doing, or did you have more of a free hand to, in a sense, analyze your own problems?
SB: We were always lucky enough to have a very free hand. Brooklyn Park was a community that had a lot of calls for service. There wasn’t a ton of down-time to go be proactive. That said, we did do traffic and there were people that loved to do DUIs. We had a traffic unit for probably 20 years, there was only two officers, but we had a traffic unit. They went and wrote tickets, that was their focus. We were pretty much-we had a shift briefing before every shift, so day shift knew what night shift had done. Dogwatch would come in and tell us what they did, or what the problems were. We would do the same thing, pass that on to them-ok, here’s where the problem are-at the beginning of their shift at six o’clock at night. But in the meantime, the supervisors would pretty much just let us, be us. We were lucky enough to have a very good group of personnel working on patrol that identified problems and accepted the challenge of calming down that hotspot, or solving that problem, or whatever. So we were lucky that way. There weren’t a whole lot of, “I’m going to assign you to this intersection, you need to watch for stop sign violations” or “there’s been robberies, so make sure you go hang out this intersection and watch for the robber” because we liked arresting people and catching the bad guy. And when bad things are happening to good people, that’s kind of what gets are hackles up and we wanna go get the bad guy, they need to let the good people alone.
FH: When you look at the roles that police officers engage in, there’s typically a three pronged approach; the law enforcement aspect, order maintenance, and service to the community-helping out the guy who’s lost, or helping the driver change a flat tire. When you were with Brooklyn Park did you feel like you able to engage in a mix of those roles, or did you end up being oriented more one way than others? How did you feel in those different roles?
SB: I think our biggest role, just because of the makeup of the city and the calls for service that we got, our biggest role was enforcement. Especially the night shift, and there aren’t a lot of things you can do on the night shift-it’s a little different now that it starts at 6 pm rather than 10 pm-early in my career when I went to work at 10 o’clock, most of the normal people were sleeping (laughs). So there weren’t a lot of people to go help or do public service with, or anything like that, between 10 pm and 6 am. Now, today’s night shift has it a little different because they are actually starting at 1800 hours. So they have a few hours when families are awake and businesses are open, but even at the end of my career, when I was working night shift, at the end of my night shift career, there just wasn’t a lot of time for that. And there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for it either because of our calls for service, there always seemed to be something going on. And like I said, with a minimum of four to six police officers, depending on what time frame were looking at through the years, it doesn’t take much for everybody to get busy. They’re [roles] all important and the community support that we get is amazing when you think about how rare it is for us to go out and one-on-one do something in the community, with the community. Now there’s a lot more programs where-Cops and Kids soccer, Cops and Kids golfing, things like that, where the officers get to meet with the community in a special event, so I think that helps a lot.
FH: In that vein, with increased media attention on officer involved shootings and movements like Black Lives Matter, as that came more to the forefront, did you see a more negative perception of the police, negative attitudes and behaviors when you were working in the different kinds of citizen contacts you had?
SB: It was just the opposite of what you’d expect. I was on day shift when that media hype really started coming, with the anti-police stuff, and we would start our shift at 6 o’clock. 7 o’clock, 7:30, we’re stopping for coffee or breakfast and every day of the week, somebody would walk up to our table and go, “Hey, thank you for what you do”. That never happened in the first 20 years of my career. Never. In the last 7, 8 years of my career, it was a daily occurrence where somebody would walk up and [say] “can I buy your coffee”, can I buy your lunch”, can I buy your breakfast” and no, thank you very much, but no. “We support you, I don’t care what they say on the news, I don’t care what’s going on, we support you. We need you.” And it was wonderful to be able to point that out to new officers on the department, who only saw the negative on the news, and in the newspaper, and whatever media they were looking at-C’mon, were gonna go to breakfast-we’d sit down and someone would come up and thank us for our service.
I was driving down Brooklyn Boulevard one day and a Black guy pulled up next to me at a red light. We looked at each other, he nodded at me, I nodded back. Light turned green and we took off and came up to the next red light. I looked over at him and he’s motioning to me to roll down my window. Well I don’t know what’s going to happen, so I’m a little leery. I roll down my passenger window and he goes, “Hey, just so you know, I got your back”. I go-really? “Yeah, that shit you see on TV, that ain’t us, that ain’t for real, I got your back. My people got your back. You don’t worry about what’s going on the TV.” We got a green light and he drove away. I had no idea who he was, he had no reason to speak nice to me, but he did. And that I think was real, and its not the media hype and the small vocal groups that get media attention.
FH: In regards to that, if you’re looking at and trying to improve perceptions of the police, improve those officer-citizen contacts, whether if it’s a traffic stop, or field stop, or anything like that, do you think that in trying to improve those relations, does it lie with individual officers and how they approach things, is it the department failing to lead, or does it have to do with citizens changing their perceptions of how police officers are, and how they think.
SB: That’s a tough question. The officers that I know, and I’m thinking of many different departments, not just Brooklyn Park, they treat people with respect, as long as they’re respectful people. It’s hard to be nice to someone that’s acting like an animal, and, unfortunately, we see that a lot. And it doesn’t matter the economic background, the social background, the religious or the racial background. It don’t matter. It matters that you’re a good person. Maybe you’re a good person that’s in a bad place, but you’re going to be respectful about what’s going on and you’re going to be treated with respect. We’re all human, we all make mistakes, so you do something wrong that’s going to bring the police into your life in a negative way, you can still deal with it in a respectful way.
Now that said, are there cops that shouldn’t be working? Absolutely. And those are the people that the rest of us try to push out as hard as we can because its one sour apple that spoils the bushel, right? You got a police department with a hundred cops on it but there’s one bad person that makes a bad name for the police. And that’s who everybody talks about, and that’s who portrays the rest of us, or who’s pictured when the rest of us are walking up to a car, is that one guy who was a jerk to so many people, or a bad cop. So we didn’t want that guy around either, and the general public doesn’t understand that, but at the same time the general public has been very supportive of the police since all of this…stuff started the magnifying glass being shined on police departments.
FH: When you’re working in diverse communities with varying societal conditions and problems, the different kinds of offending you deal with, you deal with average citizens, criminals, crime victims, in a sense you wear a lot of different hats; you’re a social worker, you’re a law enforcer, you’re a peacekeeper. What do you think are some of the most important traits or characteristics that a person should have to be a good patrol officer, or be a good police officer?
SB: That’s a long list (chuckles). In my mind, and I’m not going to say this right, you have to be aggressive, you have to be a hunter, but you have to have the ability to, what’s called de-escalating, now, you have to be able to turn off the hunting part of you, and the aggressive part of you, and be there, and listen to what people say. And its not just listening to their words but its reading them too. You have to read them emotionally and physically and see where they’re coming from. There are so many different hats, its next to impossible to be a really, really, really good cop that’s never gonna screw up. Because you have to be able to deal with exactly what you said, the irate crime victim, and then you got the criminal that doesn’t wanna go to jail, then you got the little kid that forgot to get off the school bus and doesn’t know his address and you gotta find home for him-its, I just think being able to read people, being able to keep your emotions in check-but not like old school, where you don’t talk about anything that happened. My dad was a WII vet, up until the last few years of his life I had no idea what his military career held, what he experienced because that’s the way we used to be. I got a brother who’s a Vietnam vet. Still, I have no idea what he did in Vietnam as a marine, because you don’t talk about things like that. As a cop, firefighter, medic, any of that, you need to be able to deal with all that stuff but you also need to be able to share it with others and not let it fester and not let it pollute you and infect you.
FH: Do you think having these qualities, these traits, that it’s something you have a sense of or start out with if you’re going to a police officer or is this something that develops as you become a police officer?
SB: I think a lot of it is just in you. Because I’ve had friends and family that said, “Gee, I think I’d like to do this, can I come ride along with you,” and then they do it and go “Yeah, I can’t do this” or “Wow, that was really cool, I think I’m gonna go into it.” So many people say…I coached a lot of ball for my kid and the lady, the mom, that I coached with, when we were looking for players for our travel team, she would say “I don’t care what they played before. I can take an athlete and turn her into a ball player.” I agree with that. I can’t take John Q. Public off the street and turn him into a cop. Because you have to have a mindset…I think we’re-cops, firemen, medics, military-I think we’re kind of pre-wired for most of what we do because when non-police sit down with a group of us and we start telling war stories and they go “Ahh, how do you deal with that?” And we’re laughing, well it’s just normal, ya know? I don’t know if you internalize it, compartmentalize it, or if we’re just so blind to other people’s normal feelings that we just don’t get it, I don’t know. But I don’t think you can teach that. I can take an athlete and turn them into a baseball player or a soccer layer but I can’t take a normal person off the street and turn them into a cop or a fireman or a medic, or a soldier.
FH: You just gotta have that mindset, that mentality, that will, that mental fortitude…
SB: I don’t even know that it’s that ’cause I’ve seen people that are very gutsy people, they have the intestinal fortitude but then, when they’re face to face with somebody else’s tragedy, there’s a freezing point, “I can’t deal with this, I’m done, I’m out.” I wish there was a way to explain it but the people who say it’s a calling are probably pretty close. You’ve got it in you, I had no-going through school I was not saying I was going to be a cop, it was kind of like I thought it would be cool. I worked constriction, I did this, I did that, so yeah, I’ll go to cop school, it sounds like it’s easy and it could be fun. Well there I was 28 years later with a successful career, had a great time, and didn’t necessarily lose my marbles, maybe I didn’t have them in the first place (chuckles).
One thing I would like to mention-police, public service, and military-suicides are at an all time high and I don’t know what that’s about either. Is it the pressure put on by media? It is not the public, it’s not administrations, is it a problem in the hiring process? You know there’s always been a stigma with mental illness and things like that and I think that may be one of the biggest battles that all public service people deal with, that, “I’m on the front lines so I can’t have any weaknesses, so I can’t admit that I need help.” I don’t know, but I hope somebody, someday, can figure out what that is and stop the rash of people taking their own lives because its just…not ok. You’ve done a good job, you’ve done well for community, you’ve done well for your family-what is it that’s making people do that?
FH: When you were with Brooklyn Park, did the department have any kind of a program or plan that helped officers deal with things like depression, suicide, anxiety, PTSD, things like that? Did they have a strong program in place to assist with things like that?
SB: Well, there was assistance available. A program called TEAM, it was anonymous help that you could get if you needed it but the stigma was still there. Who’s gonna do that? Every time there was a critical incident we would have critical incident stress debriefings, after our shooting, after that head-on crash where I got my first medal of valor, they offered it and I’m like-No, I’m ok. I mean it happened, and I was fine with it. It’s just one of those things. But they offered it, so that was good. I didn’t turn it down because I was worried about what my partners would think, it was just another day to me. But it is available but there’s still the stigma of, “Oh, you’re doing that,”-that we need to get rid of. Public safety people or military people, it hits everybody. If you got a problem, get it taken care of because I want you, to be you. I don’t want you to be this person affected by a mental health problem, depression, bipolar, anxiety, whatever it is, because we need our people good and healthy. I don’t know what we can do to promote that.
FH: Do you think the stigma lies in the idea that if you seek some kind of mental health that you’re not going to be reliable on the street, in some way? Or is it that you just ended up being labeled, the guy who went to see the mental health professional?
SB: I don’t know. I think there may be a fear that if I admit that I’m having a problem, they’re not going to let me be a detective in the future, or they’re not going to let me be on the SWAT team. I think maybe there’s a fear of that. The fears in our world run so deep-I went and got hearing aids, probably three years before I retired, it was all noise induced hearing loss because of the sirens, dogs, firearms, alarms, everything, and my hearing loss was drastic. I started telling other people about it and their going, “Really, I can’t hear anything, if the TV is on and something is running in the background I can’t hear the TV”, “If I go out with my wife for dinner, I can’t hear her through the restaurant noise”, and I’m like-exactly what I was dealing with. You guys go get your hearing aids. And every one of them went, “No way, no way.” I’m like-why? “Well, they’ll throw me off the SWAT team”, “They won’t let me a firearms instructor”, “No, I wanna be a dog handler in a few years and I don’t wanna be banned from that because I have hearing aids.” That’s something physical, imagine what the mental health stigma must be, ya know? It kinda blew me away, wow. I don’t know what the answer is but I think that’s the biggest problem public service and military are dealing with today is suicide. I don’t know what the root is.
FH It’s obviously an issue that needs more attention and focus on it to see what they can start to parse out, what they can do, what’s going to be effective.
SB And how do we get people to buy into the fact that if you need help, go get it.
FH It’s hard enough to get the average person to do it but when your particular job duties might depend on…
SB: Well, the egos of police and fire, and medics, and military, the I’m-bigger-than-life persona that we try and put out there-I’m not afraid of anything, nothing’s going to beat me-I love that attitude because that the way you have to be to survive in those jobs where you’re fighting, you’re in a struggle, or in a bad spot-you need to know you can survive. You need to be a little cocky and little arrogant, so that’s great. Now tell that person it’s ok to get help if you don’t feel good. You can admit that your weak (chuckles). It’s a struggle to get people to accept it I think. I just hope somebody, someday, figures out how to do it.