A man’s voice comes through the speaker of a black phone sitting in the center of a faux-wood table. Whiteboards span one wall, windows along another. More tables sit haphazardly inside this conference room, which is the generic color of offices across the country: taupes, creams, beiges. A dozen police officers in plain clothes are poised around the phone in silence, listening. “Leave us the fuck alone,” the voice says. “Just leave us the fuck alone.”
Then the line goes dead.
Two police officers are huddled over the phone. They have just seconds to make a decision about what to say when they call the man back. Do they tell him the house is surrounded by tactical officers—a SWAT team? Do they tell him to come out with his hands up? One of the officers dials. The man picks up: “What the fuck do you want?”
“Listen, Ronnie,” the officer says, “the quickest way to make us go away is for you and Melissa to come out.” Melissa is Ronnie’s girlfriend. He has barricaded himself in the house with her.
“I didn’t do any fucking thing wrong,” Ronnie says. “Melissa and I just need to work this shit out. I’m having my eyes fucking opened as to what’s been going on.”
“I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” the officer says. His name is Matt. “But we heard a gunshot—”
“There wasn’t no damn gunshot,” Ronnie says, then adds, “It was just a shot to the ceiling.”
“I need to know Melissa’s okay.”
“She’s fine as fuck. What I’m doing is none of your fucking business. Stay out my business and I’ll stay out yours.” Ronnie hangs up. We are on the outskirts of San Diego, on a quintessentially sunny July afternoon.
Besides the officer next to Matt—his name is Chris—there are several others around. One keeps track on a second-by-second basis every time Ronnie hangs up the phone or his anger ramps up. 1:00 p.m. 1:01 p.m. 1:03 p.m. 1:08 p.m. 1:09 p.m. 1:15 p.m. The hours will start to stack up and they can see if there are certain triggering moments or topics. Another, the supervisor, feeds information to Matt and the others based on real-time interviews that are going on elsewhere by other police officers or detectives—with friends, family members, acquaintances of Ronnie and Melissa. They learn about previous relationships, family incidents of violence, maybe street fights or run-ins with the law or employment histories. Several large sheets of paper are tacked up along the whiteboards with information about Ronnie and Melissa, their history, their family members, what can be gleaned about their relationship dynamic. Several officers are writing madly as the information comes in, dates of the relationship, and employment. Other incidents of violence. Past hurts in Ronnie’s childhood. It is disjointed, appearing in pieces in real time in the hope that they can square Ronnie’s personality and past with what’s happening here today. They learn that this morning a coworker went to pick Melissa up for work, and when she came to the door, she had a bloody lip, appeared nervous and scared, and said she wasn’t going to be able to come in. That coworker, Denise, called the police; they refer to her as the reporting party. Officers have spoken with Ronnie’s sister and brother. Learned his father was sometimes abusive, that Ronnie had a strained relationship with him. They have also learned that Ronnie cheated on Melissa with one of her friends, and that Melissa hasn’t been going out with their mutual friends much anymore. She goes to work and goes home, and they rarely see her. One of Ronnie’s ex-girlfriends tells officers she’s never seen him violent in any way; she also says she thinks maybe he still loves her, and they suspect she harbors feelings for him and so the information is suspect.
They’ve been at this for several hours already. Officers around Matt are quietly trying to piece together all the information that’s coming in and gauge the dangerousness of the situation. Of them all, the most pressure is on Matt to keep Ronnie talking, to calm him down, to let Melissa come out unscathed. Though there is a kinetic energy in the room, it is also strangely quiet, like a group of kids whisper-yelling in the corner of a library. The ringing phone and the voices of Ronnie and Matt are the primary sounds despite the flurry of activity. One wrong word or sound could set Ronnie off. One right phrase and Matt will connect with him. In law enforcement parlance, they refer to these as hooks and barbs. Hooks pull Ronnie in, calm him down; barbs set him off. Matt has already walked into a barb with Ronnie several minutes earlier when he brought up Melissa’s coworker, Mack. Ronnie, it turns out, believes Mack and Melissa have been having an affair.
“I’m letting him spout for a while, burn off that energy,” Matt says. “At least he’s mad at me and not her.”
“He’s going to get tired,” another officer says.
But it’s speculation, because Ronnie keeps hanging up on them pissed off, and he’s made no sign to release Melissa. For all they know she could be dead already. Or the house could be booby-trapped. He could have multiple weapons, high-powered weapons in there with him. He’s already blockaded the doors so she can’t leave.
Matt calls back. “Hey, Ronnie, you hung up on me. I’m just making sure we’re all right.”
“Everybody’s cool,” Ronnie says, sounding not at all cool.
“Okay, okay,” Matt says. His voice is a little shaky. He’s young, only in his late twenties. “Hey, tell me what you do for work?”
Instantly, it’s clear this was a mistake.
“I’m not here to give you my life story, motherfucker! You know everything about me. You slicker than a can of oil. What the fuck is wrong with you? Who you think I am?”
Slam.
Matt is shaking his head. He knows he fucked up. His colleague, Chris, is sitting beside him telling him it’s all right. Rookie mistake. But it’s clear that Matt’s lost the ability to connect with Ronnie like he needs to, and they decide to turn it over to Chris. The handoff in a hostage situation is critical. It can’t look like a handoff. And Chris and his team can’t lie. They can’t tell these guys that they won’t be charged, that it’ll all be okay if they just come out with their hands up. And yet they have to compel them, basically, to walk straight out of that house and into a jail cell.
They have only seconds between each call to discuss strategy. Unlike other crisis situations, where an offender takes strangers as hostages and time can often help deescalate a situation, such time is not on their side in a domestic violence situation. The longer it goes on, the more likely it could escalate and end in violence. They have to be approachable yet firm, confident yet empathetic. They have only their words. It’s a complete departure from how officers normally operate, where there is a clear delineation of powerful and powerless. Using the tools of what Hamish Sinclair would call “to intimate,” they have to compel an offender to relinquish control. They cannot bark orders. They cannot make demands. They cannot throw a noncompliant offender to the ground and handcuff him. All they have, in this moment, are words. And some officers, it’s fair to say, are better with words than others.
They decide to do the handoff this way: Matt will tell Ronnie he’s going to look into the Mack situation, interview Mack a little about his relationship with Melissa, and in the meantime, Matt’s going to turn the phone over to his partner, Chris.
They call again. “Ronnie, it’s true. We do have a lot of information about you,” Matt says.
“Fuck you, you lyin’ motherfucker,” Ronnie says. “Lyin’ Matt.”
Matt lets him spew, then tries out the plan, tells him he’s going to look into this Mack guy, turn Ronnie over to Chris. Ronnie is spewing on the other end, calling Matt a liar, telling him he’s not interested in being friends. It goes on. Ronnie hangs up. Matt calls back over and over again. “Listen,” Matt says in a rare moment when Ronnie is quiet, “this Mack. He’s an old guy. Like sixty-five, seventy years old. Did you know that?” The implication is clear. Melissa is young, in her twenties still. No way she’d be sleeping with someone so much older. (I wonder if these officers have ever seen Hollywood movies.)
Ronnie picks up on it. “Are you familiar with modern chemistry, motherfucker?” he says. “They make a blue pill that keeps your dick harder than a superhero’s kneecaps.” Click.
When Matt calls back, he tells Ronnie he’s going to talk to Mack, that Chris is going to be on the phone with him.
“Is Chris a liar, too?” Ronnie asks. “You put someone on the phone, you make sure it’s a fucking honest cocksucker, all right?”
Chris takes over and says this: “Hey, Ronnie, it’s Chris. What’s going on?”
Instant mistake. Because of course, Matt, Ronnie, Chris … they all know “what’s going on.” But you can’t blame Chris. It’s a generic phone greeting. It’s how any of us would get on the line, probably. But every word is crucial in a hostage situation, every second matters, and it’s not just the words themselves but how they’re delivered, and the emotional context with which they’re offered. The authenticity. And Ronnie’s sharp, attuned to all of this. His response is this: “Are you a lying motherfucker, too?”
Back and forth they go, with Chris calling, trying to find an in, a hook, some way to connect, and Ronnie hanging up on him. Three, four, five, seven, fifteen times he calls.
“I can hear you’re upset,” Chris says.
“No shit, Sherlock. You must be a great investigator,” Ronnie says. “Why can’t you just leave me alone? You guys ain’t getting nowhere.”
“We want to get somewhere, Ronnie, but we need to make sure everyone’s okay, first,” Chris tells him. “Can I talk to Melissa? Is she okay?”
“You want the bitch on the phone, I’ll put the bitch on the phone. I’ll throw the bitch out the goddamn window if you want her.” Ronnie turns his head away from the phone and yells into the void. “Bitch, these cops want to talk to your fucking ass!” But he doesn’t put her on the phone. Instead, he offers to throw her out the window again, says it’ll be so quick she won’t even feel it.
“Ronnie, Ronnie,” Chris says, “it concerns me when you talk like that. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“Oh my golly, oh my Jesus Christ,” Ronnie says. “Oh my soul. What the fuck you want me to do? Why don’t you all get the fuck out of here?”
He hangs up.
Chris takes a moment to confer with his supervisor, who advises him to go over what Chris knows so far with Ronnie. “Say, ‘Hey, this is what we know. Denise came to pick up Melissa. Someone heard some shots, but maybe not.’ ”
“So you want me to downplay the whole thing?” Chris asks.
“Just tell him what you know, why we can’t leave. That her friend came to get her and saw a little blood. That the gunshot’s a little concerning. I’m not saying minimize it completely, but don’t make it sound like he’s Al Capone, either.”
Chris nods. He hits the redial button on the phone.
I decide to go down the hall and see Ronnie for myself.
Ronnie is actually retired officer Lou Johns. We are in San Diego at a crisis negotiations training for law enforcement officers, specifically targeted toward domestic violence situations. When I told friends I was going to a hostage negotiation and training session, they immediately imagined banks and a small gaggle of men in ski masks. Though the numbers are not tracked consistently, around 80% of all hostage situations in this country are a result of domestic violence, said William Kidd, who is leading this week’s training. The FBI has only recently begun to track hostage situations, but only when jurisdictions voluntarily submit their numbers. Currently, there are more than seven thousand in their database. And while there are crisis negotiation trainings all over the country for the FBI, for law enforcement, for any number of similar agencies, this one in San Diego is the only one that puts intimate partner terrorism at the center of the training.
The end goal of a hostage situation with domestic violence at the center versus strangers changes the entire scenario, infuses a tense situation with an extremely dangerous emotional charge. Gary Gregson, another facilitator this week and a division manager at DPREP, a law enforcement training and consulting firm, says that in a traditional hostage situation involving strangers, hostages are a bargaining chip. “A bank robber will use his hostages to gain escape.” But with domestic violence, it’s the exact opposite. The hostage taker wants to stay exactly where he is. His end goal is not to escape; it isn’t even necessarily to stay alive. It is to maintain control. “The abuser wants her to recant, to apologize,” Gregson says. “Or pay a penalty for not going along with him.” That crucial difference factors into every aspect of a negotiation. The relationship between abuser and victim, because it is emotionally charged, intensifies the dangerousness. Violence may be ongoing throughout the negotiation. And coercion. Gregson reminds the participants that they’re dealing with manipulative people, that they must guard against displays of friendship or trust. He reminds them that battered spouses or children will frequently display Stockholm syndrome, identifying or aligning with one’s attacker, even in the aftermath of a hostage situation. (It is sometimes called trauma bonding.)
Gregson says the most difficult aspect of any negotiation for a police officer is to “take off your cop hat and put on your negotiator hat.” In an earlier training, one of the officers was tasked with interviewing the sister of “Ronnie.” It became clear that he didn’t appreciate the difference between an interview and an interrogation. “We don’t want her to feel pushed,” Gregson said later. “We want her to feel invited, comfortable in this environment. Think of it as social rather than investigatory.”
Law enforcement, it’s fair to say, has a troubled relationship to domestic violence. Police are often, though not always, the first responders to a violent situation in the home. And research has shown that even if there is no arrest, a police response can be a significant deterrent for re-abuse, as well as increase the likelihood that a victim will access local domestic violence services, like protective orders.1 But police can also be the perpetrators themselves—rates of domestic violence among police officers are two to four times higher than the general population. In one recent video, I watched police officers on a call to the ex-wife of a colleague of theirs. She described how he broke in to her home, threatened to kill her and her new boyfriend, how she’d endured years of abuse when she was married to him. Seconds later, in bodycam footage, those same officers stand at the foot of her driveway joking around with the perpetrator—their coworker. They don’t dismiss entirely the incident, but they tell him to just lie low. He swears he didn’t break down her door. He minimizes. Just days later, both she and her new boyfriend are killed by her ex-husband before he turns the gun on himself. In an earlier scenario in San Diego, I listened in as William Kidd played the part of a former SWAT commander named David Powell. In real life, Powell had broken a restraining order and been called in to police headquarters by his superior. When he refused to show, calling to say he had hostages, the SWAT team that he once commanded surrounded his house. A seven-hour standoff followed, after which Powell stepped onto the porch and opened fire on his former colleagues. They shot back and killed him.
In a local New Jersey article covering the incident, the police chief said the incident followed a “domestic situation.”2 This, too, is part of the problem. The language we use to describe what is, by any measure, a crime. Domestic disputes, domestic violence, private conflicts, volatile relationships, mistreatment, domestic abuse. All of these are passive constructions, eradicating responsibility not only on behalf of the abuser, but on behalf of law enforcement as well. That domestic violence is a crime shouldn’t be obscured, not least of all by those charged with protecting the public from violence. In my view, although I use the term “domestic violence” in this book because it is the most commonly used reference for what I am investigating, a far more accurate term, and one that captures the particular psychological, emotional and physical dynamics, is “intimate partner terrorism.”
The training in San Diego addressed directly the potential bias of cops arresting or negotiating with other cops in a crisis situation in the David Powell scenario. Gregson asked what impact it might have on them knowing they were negotiating with another officer. Those attending the training admitted such a scenario would be difficult, but insisted they’d follow the procedures as they would with any other crisis negotiation.
Yet still police departments around the country routinely fail to discipline officers for domestic violence complaints. In a study done in Los Angeles of ninety-one cases of officer-involved domestic violence, three-quarters of the time the complaints weren’t even included in performance reviews.3 And a situation such as what happened with David Powell, in which an officer’s actions are not addressed immediately, or possibly at all, isn’t, frankly, the exception.4 Police departments across the country fail to discipline officers for the same crimes that civilians are arrested for every day. A study from Florida between 2008 and 2012 noted that while only about 1% of officers remained on the job following a failed drug test, and 7% remained after a theft, nearly 30% of officers with domestic violence complaints were still employed in their same positions a year later.5 Victims are reluctant to report domestic violence, fearing retaliation, and police officers not only have access to guns, but they also know the law, and they have relationships with prosecutors, judges, administrators. A police officer’s partner knows, surely, that any call that comes through 911 will show up on the zone car computers of law enforcement across a jurisdiction, showing the address where the call originated, the name of the perpetrator, the incident being reported, and other information that can instantly alert an officer’s friends or colleagues. And even when it comes to specialized training of law enforcement, at least a quarter of departments around the country have no written procedures on how to deal with domestic violence calls.6
But the code of silence that often keeps fellow officers from outing colleagues they know or suspect to be violent isn’t simply tribalism: an “us against them,” cop-versus-civilian philosophy (though most police officers I’ve met feel this to some degree). Domestic violence charges brought against law officers can carry an outsized weight for the perpetrator; they often equate to an officer losing his or her job, since convicted abusers are not allowed to possess firearms. At the same time, the stresses of the job result in higher rates of familial violence, as well as alcoholism, divorce, and suicide. The lessons of the male role belief system that I’d learned sitting in classes by Jimmy Espinoza operate every bit as strongly in any given police department as they do in the San Bruno jail.
Lou Johns, playing Ronnie in San Diego today, was the longest serving crisis negotiator in San Diego’s history. He jokes that he spends an inordinate amount of time on the golf course these days. That is, when he’s not here, helping to train new recruits, such as the twenty-one participants who are here from jurisdictions all over the state of California this week. Johns’s reputation preceded him, his “way with words” as his fellow facilitators say. (“Did you hear that one, about the superhero’s kneecaps?” he asked, when I walked into the office where he was playing Ronnie. He laughed a little. He had the phone on mute. I could hear Chris on the other line, trying to connect, trying to find a “hook.” Johns tossed back a pistachio.)
The first time Johns was ever called out to a negotiation it was a suicide. A man on a bridge. Johns was filled with an electric anxiety. It was freezing, a cold rain falling on them, wind at maybe twenty miles an hour, three a.m. The guy’s girlfriend had slept with his brother. Johns told him that was fucked up. It wasn’t a reason to kill yourself, but it was fucked up. The guy asked for one reason he should live, one excuse, something he hadn’t heard before. “You mean like a joke?” Johns asked him. “Yeah,” he said. “Tell me a joke I’ve never heard before.” Johns said, “You’ll come off this bridge if I tell you something you ain’t never heard before?” The guy said he would. So Johns goes, “Okay, how about this one: I’m standing up here freezing my Black ass off. Stick a pole up my ass and you got yourself a fucking Fudgsicle.”
The guy crawled down off the bridge.
Johns is full of these kinds of stories, the unexpected, the ridiculous. Once he came to a scene, SWAT team in full gear, surrounding the building. They’d been out there a few hours. No one had made contact yet with the offender. Johns got on the phone, said, “Hey, man. Why don’t you come on out.” And the guy did. Just like that. The stories without happy endings, the ones where that person didn’t climb down from the bridge, that spouse didn’t let his wife go, Johns talks less about. Those are the narratives that run through an entire precinct, that compel nearly every one of the participants here this week.
Johns spent twenty years as a negotiator for San Diego. In the early days, which were the late ’90s, no one was really thinking about domestic violence, he told me. “It used to be, okay, motherfucker, you’re going to jail. Then if the woman is talking shit, you say, ‘I don’t give a fuck if I have to come back and put both of you in jail.’ ”
He hangs up on Chris. The phone rings one second later. “Ronnie,” says Chris, “it really frustrates me when you keep hanging up.”
“Hey, motherfucker, you know what? I don’t give a fuck if you frustrated,” Lou/Ronnie says. “One, two, three. Hang up!” Click.
Johns turns back to me. “When the domestic violence stuff came into effect, I could actually see how it made everything more clear,” he says. “It channeled things as to what was going on.” Domestic violence trainings and awareness in the early 2000s began to give police officers a context for why and how abusers were violent, the particular ways that abusers manipulate, how police sometimes re-traumatized the victims, why victims sometimes appeared to want to stay in these abusive relationships. Earlier in the training, Kit Gruelle, one of the facilitators, had shown a situation not unlike Michelle Monson Mosure’s, which illustrated to them how a victim could be out picking up the kids from school, going to the grocery store, running errands, appearing “free,” and still be a passive hostage, under the control of a partner who had convinced her she’d never get away from him alive.
The scenario goes on for another hour. Despite what it may sound like, Johns has a script in front of him. He doesn’t know how the officers on the phone will respond, but he has certain indicators as to the emotional tenor of the situation that he wants the officers to pick up on and those indicators dictate what he says. He knows, for example, that he needs to get them to a point of frustration by hanging up and swearing. He knows his responses should point out when they make a mistake—such as when they do too many handoffs. He also knows he can’t be entirely noncompliant. He has to allow them moments of both hooks and barbs. He also will appear to get suicidal later in the scenario, and he’ll say things like, “I dunno, man. Just fuck all of it. It’s all bullshit. None of this shit really matters. Melissa don’t love me anymore anyway.” Officers on the other end should pick up that change in tone, situate it as a sign of increased danger. If a perpetrator doesn’t think he has anything to live for, a lethal situation can turn fatal. It’s no accident that suicide is one of Jacquelyn Campbell’s risk factors.
In another set of rooms down the hall, another retired officer plays “Ronnie” with another set of trainees. It’s difficult to watch the police try out this first negotiation. You can often hear the nervousness in their voices and the scenario is chillingly authentic, for them and for me. It doesn’t matter that we’re in a generic set of brick office buildings beside a San Diego highway. Most negotiations happen over the phone, between people who don’t lay eyes on each other until it’s over (and in many cases never). While we’re in the second day of training, Kit Gruelle e-mails around a news article. A former lieutenant in Georgia killed his estranged wife and her boyfriend. Bodycam footage from an earlier incident shows him at three a.m. lunging for her even as the police are standing there. He threatens her in front of the police, saying, “You know what’s going to happen.” And yet he was not arrested that night. He was ordered to turn in all his guns. He still managed to get his hands on one. Another one, just weeks before this class began, happened in Orlando, an estranged boyfriend with a history of battering ended a twenty-one-hour standoff by killing his four hostages—all of whom were children—before killing himself.
The real-life stories thread through the entire session. Stories from the facilitators and their years on the force (most of them are retired now). Stories happening in real time, as the trainees sit in class learning. Stories close by and across the country. Daily stories of angry men, scared women, vulnerable children. The constant stream of stories give these scenarios the feel of real life, the weight of real life. And the officers doing the talking, you can hear in their disembodied voices over the speaker phones the insecurity and anxiety of getting it wrong, the desperate attempts to find that one gem of a phrase that will be their bridge.
And all of the scenarios they conduct in this training come from real-life cases. Ronnie and Melissa were an actual couple once, in the exact situation the officers this week enacted. The next day, Gruelle e-mails another domestic violence hostage situation. And from the airport that night, when we’re all at our various gates waiting to fly home, another one. And when I get home from my red-eye flight, two more are waiting for me in my inbox.
In nearly every geography I visited throughout the course of writing this book, I also did a ride along with the local police. I tried to make these on weekend nights as often as possible. (It perhaps goes without saying that I was almost always assigned to their department’s most liberal, gregarious officer, though once—in Washington, D.C.—I was assigned to a female officer who was only on her fourth night out and seemed wild with nervousness, as if I were secretly spying on her for some higher-up. I got slightly nervous when she inquired as to whether I’d brought my bulletproof vest.) I asked them all about officer-involved domestic violence and about guns and domestic violence calls more generally. From California to Massachusetts and places in between, they answered that they would do nothing differently with a colleague than with a civilian abuser.
To a one, I did not believe them.
About guns, they all said they wished there were fewer among civilians.
And this I believed.
Guns made their jobs exponentially more dangerous, far less predictable, and unlike many pro-gun civilians, they were all too aware of how chaotic and unreadable a scenario with guns can get. My ex-husband used to say, “You can’t negotiate with a gun.” Diplomacy, he believed, offered more chances for everyone to come out alive, not just the perpetrator.
The idea that a gun can “save” anyone in any situation has always seemed suspect to me. A gun is a passive instrument; it does what it’s told to do by a human. And humans make mistakes. I picture a home invasion, someone in bed, asleep, who wakes suddenly to find a stranger in the dark perched over the bed. How does the gun get into the homeowner’s hands? How does the safety get turned off? How does the bullet find its way into the target in those sheer seconds? Maybe it’s a quiet house; the homeowner is awakened, reaches under the mattress, silently gets out the gun, silently clicks off the safety, silently tiptoes downstairs. He can hear the thief, but the thief cannot hear him. Silently, he finds the thief holding a flat-screen TV and he shoots. Maybe it’s a movie theater. Guy walks in in the dark, starts shooting. Somewhere in the audience is another gun, a good guy. He shoots, too. Maybe it’s a hotel room. Guy starts shooting. A dozen people in the crowd have guns, but they’re good guys. Good guns. They start shooting back. How do you identify the good from the bad? The intentional from the accidental? Maybe it’s a sniper at a gas station. Someone with a Toyota has a gun. He’s a good guy. He shoots, too. Maybe it’s a kid, and another kid has a gun. A good kid with a gun. A good teacher with a gun. How do you know, how do I know, how does anyone know who is who, and which gun is which, in those panicky milliseconds? Where to run, how to hide? How does a plastic seat with a fabric top stop a bullet anyway? A car door? A locker door? A speaker? A particle board desktop? Doesn’t matter who’s good and who’s not. Bullets have no moral preference. Every domestic violence scenario I’ve ever known has had this one thing in common when guns are present: there is never, ever time to think. A knife gives you a second to run. A bullet does not. Guns supercharge the dangerousness for all parties involved. I think of that woman in Montana all the time at the fatality review, the retired nurse with her knitting needles saying, “Get rid of the fucking guns.” She says it in a room where more than half the people around her, she knows, are carrying guns. Get rid of the fucking guns.
For several decades both researchers and law enforcement themselves said domestic violence calls were among the most dangerous the police encountered. And certainly they are among the least predictable. It’s also true that plenty of police across the country have been killed or wounded on domestic violence calls. In a fourteen-year study of 771 police officers killed (just over fifty a year, on average), about 14% are killed on domestic violence calls—97% from firearms.7 In my first years of asking ride-along questions, police would almost unequivocally answer that domestic violence calls were their most dangerous (occasionally, someone might also include traffic stops). But in the past two or three years, officers have begun to say to me, anecdotally, that it’s active shooters. That’s the scenario they fear most. In a law enforcement report that studied FBI data on active shooter incidents between 2008 and 2012, the authors found that the perpetrator stopped shooting about 40% of the time when police arrived; of those incidents that were ongoing even after police arrived, the law enforcement officers were shot about 15% of the time. Active shooter events, called ASEs in law enforcement parlance, were both on the rise and now among the deadliest for police, the study concluded.8 The idea that many of the active shooter situations officers were likely to encounter began as domestic violence wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the report.
Officers aren’t the only ones who would like to see fewer guns among civilians. A third of women in the United States today live with guns in their homes, yet fewer than 20% say those guns make them feel safer, and more than half want stricter gun laws in the country.9 The risk of homicide to a person in an abusive situation increases eightfold when guns are present.10 A decades-old gun ban referred to as the Lautenberg Amendment, which passed in 1996, was intended to ban convicted abusers with misdemeanor domestic violence charges from possessing or purchasing firearms, but research has shown that this is rarely enforced.11 Misdemeanors, it’s important to point out, have a wide range of definitions from a simple slap all the way to a near-fatal strangulation, depending on the state. States must enact their own statutes requiring abusers to turn in their guns and at the time of this writing, only sixteen states had such a statute in their governance laws.12 The federal law does not generally apply to those who are not recognized legally as married13 (often called the “boyfriend loophole”). Stalking is also not included in Lautenberg, which means that tens of thousands of stalkers are legally in possession of firearms in America today.14
In a study done by April Zeoli, one of the country’s leading experts on guns and domestic violence and an associate professor at Michigan State University, she and her colleague Daniel Webster looked at the forty-six largest cities in America to see what effect, if any, these gun restrictions had on intimate partner homicides. Surprisingly, they found that the federal domestic violence misdemeanor firearm prohibition offered no reduction in such killings.15 Zeoli says there are likely multiple reasons for this, including a lack of enforcement, a lack of knowledge about the restrictions by local jurisdictions, and judges in some states with wide discretion when it comes to putting the prohibition in place. The laws can also be confusing. “If you have a law that says this person can’t have a firearm, but doesn’t follow up with who’s supposed to take it, how it’s removed, where it’s stored and who shoulders the cost … you’re leaving it to local jurisdictions to figure out what may work for them … this gives people who may not want to put the law in place a lot of discretion.”
Where the laws do seem to have significant impact, however, is in the twenty-four states that have firearm restrictions for those with restraining orders, temporary or otherwise. Currently, eighteen states also have laws that allow police to confiscate firearms at the scene of a domestic violence incident.16 Zeoli’s study found that intimate partner homicide decreased by 25% in cities where the restraining order laws were clear and enforced.
“It’s not always an issue of being shot,” says Teresa Garvey, a former prosecutor and attorney advisor for AEquitas, a prosecutor’s resource for domestic violence law. “[Guns are] used to make threats, to back up threats, or to add to the environment of intimidation.”17 They are used as blunt force instruments, and as reminders of who holds the power. Like Donte Lewis, who hit his girlfriend so hard with his gun, she foamed at the mouth. Thirty-three thousand domestic violence firearm incidents occur annually in the United States—far exceeding the number of intimate partner homicides.18 Guns take away any bargaining power a victim may have once had.
The single most common argument in favor of gun ownership is that it makes women safer. That it doesn’t matter if you prohibit abusers from purchasing or possessing firearms; if they want to inflict harm on another person, they will find a way to do it. But Zeoli says, “This simply isn’t true … Would-be [perpetrators] aren’t replacing guns with other things.”19 In chilling testimony before the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, David Adams said that he, too, had decided to test this theory among fourteen killers that he interviewed. “Eleven of the fourteen men who used a gun said that they would not have killed if the gun were not available,” Adams told the committee. “Many serious abusers already have the motive to kill their intimate partner or ex-partner; let’s stop making it so easy for them to have the means to do so.”20
Kit Gruelle told me this was the most significant misunderstanding about guns and domestic violence. “[Guns] increase women’s danger exponentially,” she told me. “Until a gun comes into the relationship, she still feels like she has some capacity to deal with what’s going on, whether it’s to run, to lock the bedroom door, or whatever.”21 The pro-gun argument that asks women to arm themselves is asking them to behave as their abusers behave, Gruelle notes. Such views have conscripted the narrative, putting the blame on victims for not doing all they could to protect themselves. “It’s not a character flaw if [women] don’t have a natural tendency to turn and fire on the father of [their] children,” she said. Gruelle told me that if she had ever pulled a gun on her abusive husband “he’d have taken it away and laughed at it.”
My ride alongs taught me that no matter how often police superiors talk about domestic violence, it is really the culture of any given department and the belief system of any given officer that will dictate what happens out on the streets. One Saturday night in Montana, I was out with a cop who’d been on the force for more than a decade.22 A little after midnight, he got a call for a “domestic.” We showed up at a trailer, the third squad car to arrive. A woman with a loose bun stood crying at the end of a pickup truck, while her husband was at the bottom of the driveway talking to several officers. The man I was riding with—I’ll call him Dan—made his way around the woman and to the entrance of their trailer. Two bug-eyed kids under the age of five were wandering in and out of the house. Another officer was in a field next to the house looking for a knife. The man had called the police on the woman after she threatened him with the knife. After he called, she ran out of the trailer and threw the knife into the field. Both of them had been drinking.
There were eight police officers on the scene by now, all white men. The woman was in a stretched out black T-shirt and leggings. She watched the officers as they wandered into her trailer and back out, around the field and the yard. Three were talking to her husband; none were talking to her. “He hit me first,” she said, wiping at her cheeks. I’d been standing beside the trailer taking notes.
I looked at her to acknowledge I’d heard, but didn’t want to say anything. She clearly thought I was on their team somehow.
She said she got the knife to protect herself, because he’d come at her after they’d returned home from a party. Just then an older girl, a teenager, emerged from the doorway and collected the two smaller children and brought them in the house. The woman was wearing forest green Crocs.
“Did you tell the police?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“Has he hit you before?”
She nodded again, and her face crumpled into tears. I waited to see if any of the officers were going to come and ask her any questions, maybe do a lethality assessment, but none did. I asked her some of the questions I knew from the Danger Assessment myself. Had she been strangled? (Yes.) Were the kids all his? (No.) Did he have a gun? (Yes.) Did he have a job? (Yes.) But then an officer came up and told her she was going to have to come with him. I went over to Dan, my ride, and told him she claimed to have a history of abuse from the guy. Dan nodded. “Unfortunately, he’s the one who called. So we have to arrest her.”
The teenager came back out just then and began screaming at the police. “You’re arresting her? Her?” The officer in the field found the knife and held it up. “You should be arresting him!”
“He’s the one who called us,” said Dan.
The two kids came back outside. It was clear that emotions were ramping up. The woman was now in the back of a cruiser, watching through the window, her eyes wide.
“Can you at least not arrest her in front of the kids?” the teenager said. “I’ll take them somewhere.”
“Where can you take them?” Dan asked.
“I’ll take them to the park.” It was nearing one o’clock in the morning.
“You’re going to take them to a park in the middle of the night?” Dan said.
She nodded like it was a completely reasonable idea.
“Let’s go inside,” Dan said, shuttling her back toward the entrance of the house. I followed and when we went inside the small trailer, the disarray was shocking. The combined kitchen/living room was filthy. The counters piled with dishes, pots, paper plates that had food encrusted on them. Flies abounded. The window screens were broken. The place smelled of cigarettes, body odor, mold, old food. A bunk bed had only one mattress. A balloon made from an old condom sat on the floor. Half a dozen police filed into the cramped room, shoulder to shoulder.
“I don’t want him to stay here,” the girl said. “If you’re going to arrest her, you have to arrest him, too.”
Dan asked if the girl was scared to stay alone in the house with him. In typical teenager style, she rolled her eyes at him.
“Has he hit you in the past?”
She nodded. “With a hanger.”
A large TV dominated the room, playing cartoons. The two younger kids were glassy-eyed with exhaustion. They displayed no emotion at all. No fear, no joy, no curiosity, no surprise. The teenager was combative with the officers, and I wondered what it all looked like from her point of view, six large men standing in her living room, looming over her as she sat on the couch. One or two walked down the hall, shined a flashlight into chaotic rooms. She wasn’t forthcoming with any information, and I thought of the negotiation class. It’s not an interrogation; it’s an interview. None of these officers seemed able to step back and read the room for a minute, to crouch down to her level, to offer her just a simple comforting phrase, to ask, for example, how they could help. Was there someone she could call? Did she need food? Instead, they towered over her collectively with their bulletproof vests and their guns and their gear and their hissing radios. They were leaving her in this disastrous house where a grown man who abused them would return, probably in a matter of hours, and a grown woman who may have been equally abusive but was at least a sometime protective presence may or may not return. It was shocking to me in a sense. None of these officers was anything but polite. They knew the law. But they were also absolutely ill-equipped to act or think in any way that suggested they recognized the psychological complications at play, the implications of what they looked like from a child’s view. This was trauma happening in real time. They weren’t interested in either the messiness of human emotion or any future fallout from this moment. At the same time, their jobs had prepared them only for right and wrong, criminal and civilian.
In Massachusetts, I’d been on a call once where a brother had assaulted his sister. She’d come in, crying, to the station to make the report. The officer took her statement, and then offered her a drink of water or a cup of coffee, asked if she’d like to stay at the station for a while just to get ahold of herself (she agreed). Then he talked to her just for a minute or two about familial violence, how hard it could be on people, how it was good she’d come in. Just general stuff. He hadn’t done much—offered her a drink, a minute to gather herself, a statement of empathy. But that is sort of the point. He had done so little and yet still it amounted to an acknowledgment of their shared humanity and in the end would mean so much to her.
When we got back to the squad car, Dan said they’d be calling the department of children and families, and the two little kids would have to be placed somewhere, at least temporarily, and quite possibly permanently unless the woman could prove she was a fit mother. And with the house as disgusting as it was, I couldn’t imagine how that would be possible. “We could have handled that better,” he said to me. That at least was something, his acknowledgment. I did not disagree. And yet, many months later, I’d see for myself just how difficult it can be to act even in one’s own best interest when I’d have my own mini confrontation with an officer of the law.