Joseph K. Loughlin and Kate Clark Flora, co-authors of Shots Fired

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Joseph K. Laughlin is the former Assistant Chief of Police for the City of Portland and a published author. Kate Clark Flora is a mystery and crime author who has published 18 books. She and Laughlin recently co wrote the second book, Shots Fired, which came out this past October. Thanks for coming in today.

Joseph K. Loughlin:

Oh, thank you for having us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you're okay if I call you Joe?

Joseph K. Loughlin:

Sure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

All right. I'd like to start with reading a quote that that's towards the end of your book Shots Fired, and this was in an address to the International association of Chiefs of Police. Too often law enforcement gets scapegoated for the broader failures of our society and criminal justice system. His words were echoed by Dallas Police Chief David Brown, speaking at the memorial for the officers assassinated in Dallas. Every societal failure we put off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding. Let the cop handle it. Not enough drug addiction funding. Let's give it to the cops here in Dallas. We got a loose dog problem. Let's have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail. Give it to the cops. Policing was never meant to solve all of these problems. The first quote too often law enforcement gets scapegoated for the broader failures of our society and criminal justice system was by former President Barack Obama. That's a very big statement to have in your book.

Joseph K. Loughlin:

It is a big statement and it rings true because actually 70% of the time that officers spend on the street is negotiating from one thorny situation to the next and dealing with all of our societal ills that are left at the doorstep. Like the chief of Dallas said, whatever it is, mentally ill, drugged, deranged. We're dealing with that all the time. So police spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with those types of issues, and often with no good answers. You know, where do you bring this person? You know, this is closed. How do I take care of this mom? Or these kids have been taken away from the family and all those things. So for me, as a police officer who spent 30 years in the business, to watch this country scapegoat the police as the problem was the motivating factor for me to write this book of police officers with Kate in the worst possible situation. That's deadly force, which, by the way, nobody wants to be involved in. So the. I think the rhetoric and the pervasive misunderstandings that have been pushed out over and over again have confused our society. But back to what you just expressed and what the president had expressed is true, and we often scapegoat the police for the broader societal ills.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Kate, what was it like for you to work on a project that could be very grim at times?

Kate Clark Flora:

Well, it's my fourth grim project, so actually, I think that's really. It's a really interesting question and one that people ask me a lot. But I've spent, between writing nonfiction, you know, fictional police and real police, I've spent about 15 years now spending time with police officers, talking about homicides, but particularly talking about their lives, talking about the impact of the job. And part of that, you know, came out of my early friendship with Joe. We've been friends for about 20 years. So I think that I stand sort of in the feet of the civilian. I'm the, you know, the person who asks the question, why this? Why that? And then I have sort of, over time, evolved into becoming the person who gives voice to something that a lot of police officers don't have an opportunity to do. And in our collaborations, of course, that's exactly what we're doing.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It is an interesting time to be a police officer because it seems as though we are in some ways doing to police officers what we did to people returning from Vietnam.

Joseph K. Loughlin:

I can't believe you said that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You can't believe I said that?

Joseph K. Loughlin:

No, because I've been expressing that. I go, what's happening to police in this country? And what we need to know and recognize is that police today are very, very different from the 60s and 70s. The. The training, the policy procedures that we have now, the scrutiny that's on the individuals and the organization is intense. And pronounced. And every officer out there knows that he or she could be front page news and painted in a terrible picture the next day. I know, I'm digressing, but the notion that any police officer wants to be involved in a deadly force incident is far, far from the reality and from the truth. But you know, you express that perfectly. And I remember saying that when I was motivated to do this work and had to bring Kate in because it was so massive and I had so many officers I talked to is I go, what's happening to the police in this country today is very similar to what happened to our soldiers and military personnel that came back from the Vietnam War. You know, think about that. It was a horrible time in our country and people were throwing paint on them urine and they couldn't wear the uniforms and imputing everyone as it's one big entity of a problem. Ten years later we all come together and say, well, we're sorry, you know, we didn't realize what really happened. Well, too late. The damage is done and the damage that's been done to the profession of police in this country is we're going to suffer. We are suffering consequences now. And, and I can go into that, but that's a great statement because I've been saying that from the inception of the thought of this book.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I was struck by how messy these situations are. And you said this repeatedly in the book, that what most of us think of is what we see on television and that is here's a brightly lit space, here's a clean shot, the officer can fire at a person's arm and that's enough to disable him. But what I'm reading about is off officers who are falling downstairs into darkened basements where maybe there's bomb making materials, they don't have a flashlight, they don't know whether the person's on drugs. You know, in one particular case somebody's being stabbed. You know, there's so people are fearing for their lives. I mean, when you're in that situation, it's not that different than being in a wartime situation where you're just trying to make the, the best decision that you can. And it's not probably going to be perfect and it's going to impact you for a long time.

Kate Clark Flora:

I think that's one of the reasons that in some of these incidents we've included the voices of multiple officers so that you can actually see that the officer on the right hand, left hand side of the car who's trying to get the driver out and the Guy on the right who's got a gun in his face and the guy in the rear who's trying to figure out what role he can play and how to disable the, you know, the bad guy. All of their perceptions are going to be radically different because of where they're standing. And the public doesn't understand that.

Joseph K. Loughlin:

Well, you really captured a lot in the way you just express it. It's not tv, it's not the movies. These things don't occur in sterile environments. They don't defy the laws of physics. Usually it's in a flash or a blink of an eye when you're talking to someone like we're engaging right now, then all of a sudden someone's trying to kill you or someone from behind you is trying to get. It's so unpredictable. And every case is unique. It happens in cold weather, hot weather, different terrains, dark alleys, stairwells, down in basements. It's nothing like what's presented on tv. But the general population is educated and trained by Hollywood, TV and the movies, self included. Until I became a police officer, which I express in the book a little bit as well, you know, I was a very, you know, liberal minded college student. I had no inclination of being a police officer by any stretch. And that's where life took me. And you learn the realities of things. But all cops will tell you that the general public has no idea what we really do on a day to day basis and how the day is punctuated by violence, whether it's domestic or someone doing a robbery or what's illustrated in the book. But you really captured exactly what I believe, society believes, you know, why not wing them? Shoot him in the leg. It doesn't happen in a clean, sterile environment like this room. And even at the range, at the firing range where we train, if I were to move my hand in a motion like this, good luck trying to hit it now, that's slow. In the dynamics that are rapidly evolving in these circumstances, people don't stand still and present themselves. There's no pithy dialogue before something happens. It happens in an instant. And that's illustrated in the book. So that's what we're trying to show. And the reason we picked deadly force, or I picked it, I had a whole other book going before this about police work is when I saw the country convulsing into this, in my view, craziness. I just felt I have to do something about this and educate the public. So we, you know, people say it's good to hear the Other side, there aren't all sides. The police are the public and the public of the police. And we got to bring our society together. And we don't excuse bad cops, poor tactics, horrible situations, terrible mistakes that happen in war, and then these violent circumstances. But by and large, it's a very, very small percentage that occurs in the country. And less than 5% of officers ever use their weapon. I never had to use my weapon in my 30 career. And that would be the norm for most police. Police officers. But people watch TV and, you know, Don Johnson and Miami Vice or whatever, going way back, killed like 150 people or something absurd, you know, and that's what people think.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I had a hard time reading this book, not because it's. It's a hard read, but because it's so tragic.

Joseph K. Loughlin:

It is tragic.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's people on both sides that are being impacted really for the rest of their lives and their families. It's whether you're somebody who's high on drugs or just committed a crime and you've been shot and killed and now you leave your children behind, whether you're the officer who shot the person or you're the officer that got shot in the face or you're the officer who died leaving children behind, there's just. Everybody is a casualty when it comes to shot being fired, it seems.

Joseph K. Loughlin:

Yeah, we should turn this over to her. This is great.

Kate Clark Flora:

You can just go and talk about this book and then we'll go write another one. But, you know, it really. I think one of the things that people never really understand, particularly if you're educated by media, is the ripples, you know, the impacts. And one of the things that, that's in the book that people don't really think about is the officer's family. You know, you're, you're. The officer is on the front page of the paper with, you know, the immediate rush to judgment. And then the officer's children go to school, the officer's wife goes to work or to the supermarket. And the, you know, everybody has an assumption about what that person did, which is not founded in fact. And so it's, you know, there's, there's implications for the victim, for the person who was shot, subject. And there's implications for the officer. There's implications for the department and for the families. But, you know, that is all about the community, because as Joe says, cops are not them, they are us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And this can take. And I think that's really important. I mean, this idea that these are. You're calling Them guardians within the book. They're the people who are choosing to put their lives on the line, and the families are choosing to be part of this as well. And it can take up to three years or maybe even longer for an investigation to figure out whether, you know, is it a bad cop situation? Is it truly the fault of the criminal, what's going on? And by that time, a lot of people have lost interest. We only heard what we first heard.

Joseph K. Loughlin:

Exactly right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Nobody ever comes back and says, oh, I'm sorry, I was wrong.

Joseph K. Loughlin:

We illustrate that throughout the work. And in a deadly force, there are no good outcomes, not for the officer, not for the family members of the deceased, not for the community, not for anybody involved in the peripheral. The organization goes through a lot, and there's sort of a disconnect between the individual who's involved, like, hey, I don't want to be involved in this. And they get ostracized to some degree. It depends upon the network and the professionals of each police department. But there are no good outcomes in these. And it's piercingly painful events and the worst possible situation. So there's a lot of ripples, as you said, in so many ways. They're never. They don't walk away unscathed, and they're never the same again. In fact, I have several officers in the book, and I've talked to dozens and dozens of officers that just, I don't want anything to do with this profession anymore. I didn't sign up for this. I wish it never happened. Those are the common denominators. Nationwide, many police leave the profession as soon as they're involved in this, and some never come out of it. In fact, I did a bunch of interviews where the officer's in the middle of it, he goes. Or she, I just can't do this anymore. Or they actually start crying, tearing up, go into sort of a trance of, like, you know, I just can't deal with this. So this is what we're trying to educate the public about, is that this is what you may think, and this is what happens to the human beings behind the badge. And I'm hoping it brokers better understandings and starts better conversations in our country, because we're off the track right now. We got to get it back in all aspects.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you're not suggesting that there aren't perhaps bigger problems within the institution?

Joseph K. Loughlin:

Of course.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I mean, I've had. When we decided to have you on the show, I actually had two separate younger people talk to me about institutional racism within police Force. And I said, well, I've read this book and it doesn't, obviously I have very limited experience with this, but it doesn't sound like he's saying there is or isn't institutional racism. That's not really the point of what you're trying to say.

Kate Clark Flora:

This book was not written to cover all the problems with police policing in America. This book was written to say when we are going to have a conversation about policing and in particular when we're going to have a conversation about deadly force and use of deadly force, we would just like people who are entering that conversation to understand that these, the things that we cover in the book, the things that people believe versus what really happens. The, you know, the speed with which these institutions happen, the long term implications for the officers. You know, you talk to the officers in Watertown, for example, the ones who were in the shootout with the Tsarnaev brothers, who didn't know they were in a shootout with the Boston Marathon bombers. They thought they were stopping two carjackers. And then bombs start flying. And those, you know, that's people who years later, you know, are just recognizing how, you know, the devastating damage that that night did to them and you know, how, in terms of going on with their lives and when they go out, you know, how they feel differently and how they see the world differently and how unnerving it can be. So we're just saying, read the book and read the stories and think about this. When you're jumping to judgment or when you want to have the conversation. We're not saying this is the end of the conversation.

Joseph K. Loughlin:

I mean, I deliberately stayed out of race because that is, that's another, you know, 22 volume book that you really have to drill down on. But I think again, perception becomes a reality. And you know, I've talked to hundreds of police officers. I'm still involved in the profession and I deliberately stayed out of that. Two things that you had said is that when something goes out on the media and it's played over and over and over and over again to get into the psyche of the American public, it confuses good citizens, whether it's race or force, which people have very little realistic information on in regard to what police do in general every day. But deadly force, there's no information. It's TV and movies. So we're trying to, you know, when that video comes out, when you see a video of a partial point of the video, you're not seeing the entire story or the contours of the event. Look at a Football game. How many cameras does it take to determine what happened by people who are present and looking at it? But yet they got to go to a camera and look at eight different cameras and eight different angles. So if you close your left eye or right eye and take a view, it can be myopic or in the perspective of the officer, there's a lot more happening in a 365 degree. So I even had people say, well, they did it again. They killed another black guy for no reason. And I go, well, wait a second, we don't know what happened here. And again, we're not excusing poor tactics, horrible situations, tragic circumstances. But people, I think our society sees the same six videos played over and over and over again. And I can drill down on each one. I don't want to get into that. What I want people to do is what I'd like. What we'd like people to do is let's expand our mind a little bit and have some conversations about the human beings and the reality. Again, it's not excusing terrible circumstances. Let me keep going. Every single year in this country, 60,000 police officers, and that's the only ones, are assaulted in the line of duty. It's happened to me many times and many of my co workers in Portland here. And that's illustrated in the book as well. Well, there are officers that are shot in the face, they're crippled for life, they're on breathing tubes, they got cinder blocks in the head. And the list goes on. Thousands every single year. You don't hear a word very similar to our veterans, you know, that you don't hear about, by the way, the veterans, you know, there's 22 suicides a day. The same thing happens. It's pronounced in police work too. Because you're exposed to such a underside of society, difficult environment every day with no good answers, often and is punctuated by violence. So back to the original piece of this. We stayed out of the race problem because it is a problem and it's perception, realities and all those things. That's another. That's another whole book. That's not the point of the work. The point of the work is the human beings and bringing us together with conversations. Make sense?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Absolutely.

Joseph K. Loughlin:

Okay. Because what you're saying is pretty good. You capture a lot. I just can go on and on because I get passionate about it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, one of the things that, as I was reading the book, I was thinking about my work as a family practice doctor, my father's work as a family practice Doctor My mother's work as a teacher. I mean, I don't think it's dissimilar in that you kind of take all comers. Somebody crosses the threshold, at least if you're a teacher or if you're a physician. And, and you deal with whatever is in front of you. And it's not necessarily straightforward and it's not necessarily as simple as oh, here's a urinary tract infection that you're just going to give antibiotics to. There's like webs of things that you're also, you're dealing with so much backstory to so many of these situations. And you're, as a police officer, you're like, you're not even in a safe environment necessarily. I mean, you go to wherever you're needed to, to go and you do whatever they ask you to do. I mean, that's probably about as suboptimal as any job I could think of.

Joseph K. Loughlin:

Well, you're thrown into again, rapidly evolving circumstance. So 911 calls comes into this building, for instance, with somebody I don't know breaking all the windows out with an axe and going crazy and chasing people around. Now you, by the time you get there, things have changed. So you may think you're going into to this environment here where the person has moved over there and there's all sorts of damage. You just don't know on any given call what's going to happen. I'm painting it in an extreme case, but most of the cases we talk about in this book happen on routine calls. A noise complaint, a routine arrest, a check in on someone, a typical car stop, and they explode into these insane cases where with violence. My point is you just don't know on any given day. And what police officers negotiate each day. Let's say there was a horrific accident out here when we all get out of the show here and people are dying and dismembered or something like that, and everybody here in this room sees that that's going to affect you for the rest of your life. That may be the first call of the day for the officer and then he or she is going from one difficult situation to the the next, trying to calm down. Abuse, kids, sexual abuse, the list goes on. And there's a cumulative effect on the individual over time. And that's another part of this book too is like let's do something for the holistic health of officers. In the end, we talk about solutions where we can infuse some funds and money and create good employee assistance and good peer Support networks, which, by the way, it's like 5% of police departments have that nationwide. You know, in a profession that values bravery and stoicism, you know, sort of put along the side, but just like our veterans, you need to take care of, you know, the mental health and the emotional components and job. Don't you want good officers pulling up and trying to make informed decisions? It's pretty tough. It's a tough, tough job. And now, I think more. More than ever, I think we're experiencing something in the profession that I haven't seen since I've been involved in this.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Kate, were you surprised by some of the things that you found? I know I was reading about the relative. It's relatively recent that employee assistance programs have actually come on the scene, and even the training is somewhat inconsistent. Some officers know a lot about weaponry, and some officers don't have quite as much knowledge. And when you were reading, when you were writing this book, did you find things that you thought, oh, my goodness, I never would have guessed that?

Kate Clark Flora:

Not so much. The last book that I did was a main game Warden's memoir. And after he had spent 25 years in the woods, he said he'd probably pulled 200 bodies out of the woods. He'd gone to Katrina after, you know, gone to New Orleans after Katrina. So, you know, because I've been doing this for a long time, I was much more focused, I think, on trying to make sure that the impact part of the story stayed in the book. You know, when our editor would say, I want to cut this here, I would be saying no, because the things that the officer says about, you know, his life after this, in the next three paragraphs, are the critical ones. Because what we're looking for is not simply the incident, but the resonance, the impact. And so I don't think I was surprised yet. What do you think?

Joseph K. Loughlin:

Well, you have experience now. You've been doing it for a long time.

Kate Clark Flora:

You know, I sort of see one of the roles that I play as being a civilian spokesperson for saying, this is a world we don't know about. So I kind of act as a. A translator. So for me, it wasn't as surprising as it might otherwise have been if I hadn't been doing this for 15 years. But I think it should surprise and have impact on readers. I think they should be saying, I had no idea, you know, because as he says on Miami Vice, that, you know, on TV shows constantly, the officer shoots somebody next week and the week after and the week after that. And even when I'M writing fictional cops. I'm always thinking about what's the actual impact of having seen this thing or been in this situation. And I think that's important for the public, for all of us to understand. I shouldn't say the public. I am the public.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Are we getting to a place where we are doing better at having conversations across disciplines? I guess what I'm specifically thinking of is we know that we have a drug problem. We know that's a worsening drug problem. As a doctor, I deal with this all the time, whether it's a baby who is born from an addicted mother or whether it's the family of a person who committed suicide after not being able to kick an addiction, or the patient, him or herself. But then, you know, you're from the police force. You have a different view of this. The public has a different view of this. Are we getting better at having conversations?

Joseph K. Loughlin:

We need to get better. We need to get better nationwide because people, critics of the police conveniently dismiss that the job is inherently dangerous. And also they dismiss statistics and the reality of the work. And that's what this is about. But I think we really need to get a lot better. There's a lot of talk, but not about this. Police are ubiquitous. They're everywhere. You know, the drug problem, every. That's what people are focused on right now. The narcotics and the heroin problem is pronounced. It's in front of us. We see it every day. But this is, you know, you know, you see an officer sitting in the car over there and thinking, oh, what are they doing? They're just, you know, having a cup of coffee or writing a report. Maybe. You have no idea where that person had been. He just might come from a Sid's death, a baby died, or a horrible death scene or something really violent. We need to have these conversations. And that's why this book is about the extreme circumstances. And again, going back to where the nation convulsed into this craziness, in the words of the president, scapegoating the police for all the other problems. Let's look over here. Not here. 17,200. 17,250 million murders in this country. That's up 20% from when I started doing the book. That's a problem. You know, how about two women a day are killed by spouses in gun violence? That's a problem. Why are we talking about what's going on inside the inner cities and the terrible dysfunction and the hopelessness, these poor souls that live in these inner cities? And then the police that are put in impossible situation with people who are in an impossible situation. They're not good outcomes. So we need to. That's the point of the book. You know, let's open our minds a little bit, expand conversations and not conveniently dismiss. Yeah, the cops did it again. And go back to the 60s and 70s. A lot of people have a tendency to go back in time and think of the police in those terms or in terms of Hollywood. And that's. I really don't think we are getting better. I think we're getting better if something's in front of us. But from my perspective, I think the police are dismissed frequently and people have parts and pieces of information from social media or from a reporter. Yep, this is what happened tonight. We're investigating. You never hear any more about the case, which even when we pull up as a commander that pulls up on a deadly force incident that I've been involved multiple times in, it takes us time to figure out. Hours and hours and hours to figure out, well, Kate was there. What do you mean Kate was there? Well, Dr. Lisa was there too. And you know, wait a second. It just takes a long time. And then it takes protracted multiple investigations from various sources, from the attorney general officer, district attorney to internal affairs, to use of force teams and policies and procedures. So there's a lot, lot more to this. So hopefully going into the human dynamics behind these things and the humanity and the piercingly painful events that happen, I hope this does and we both hope this brokers better understandings.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I've been speaking with Joseph K. Laughlin, the former assistant chief of police for the city of Portland and a published on along with Kate Clark Flora, who is a mystery and crime author who has published 18 books. Thank you for being here.

Kate Clark Flora:

Thank you, Lisa. I wish we had another hour.

Joseph K. Loughlin:

Well, we appreciate you doing this too. So, you know, there's a big voice with Love Maine Radio and your reputation, so thank you.