Field training. First DOA run. House full of meth addicts losing their minds. I get there followed shortly by medics who begin working the very dead-looking subject, trying to pump out a pulse. The lead medic steps away from the as-yet-unknown subject and approaches me looking for information: “Name and DOB.” 

“Casey Seaton, 1/7/91,” I tell him without missing a beat. 

He types something on his tablet and relays info to the medic doing chest compressions. “Casey! Casey!” one of the other medics yells to the lifeless body. “Casey! Can you hear me?” 

“Nice name,” I think to myself. They continue compressions as my training officer smirks. I know I’ve screwed something up, I just don’t know what. 

“Mr. Seaton!” one of the medics yells at the body. 

“What the hell?” immediately pops into my utterly surprised brain … followed just as quickly by absolute embarrassment. “Now I understand,” I tell my FTO. “I’m what you might call ‘an idiot.’” I laugh at myself. 

All of a sudden the seemingly lifeless “Casey Seaton” springs up and says matter-of-factly, “My name’s Richard,” before dozing off again. 

Funny story, but not actually mine. I poached it from another rookie after she had me rolling. She fully owned the experience, but I could very easily have made the same mistake. I’ve made and still make plenty of ’em, though thankfully less embarrassingly nowadays.

Face-reddening as I’m sure it was, that mistake was ultimately very minor and made in the safety of a relatively static environment. High impact, low risk: an ideal learning combination. Mistakes I’ve made as an officer that sort of fall into that same category include: 

1. Missing an overdosing man’s nose and spraying Narcan directly into his eyes. Fortunately, medics said the eye shot actually still had a positive, albeit diminished effect. Lesson: Know how to use your equipment.
2. I arrive on scene of a supposed burglary and find a man stomping toward me with a hammer raised in the air and another man yelling from down the hall while holding a knife. Hallway’s filled with someone’s recent pepper spray, still stinging. Alone and with my partner very far away, I get my gun up and tell the hammer guy to drop it, which he does, tell my partner to step it up, which she does, and tell the knife guy to go back inside his apartment, which he does. All very fortunate given the apartment complex door locked behind me after someone let me in. Lesson: Wait on backup. 
3. I am the backup on another run where my partner’s got a resister. I get there about the same time as two other officers. We can see the guy and my partner, and we sprint their way. As I push my car door, car parked on the slightest of slopes, I feel the whole thing shift as it starts its downhill descent. I was in such a rush I never put it in park. Lesson: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast applies beyond shooting. 
4. Two-vehicle accident, dispatched as van versus pickup, male versus male drivers in a disturbance. Called in by a passerby. I get there and no one’s disturbing anyone. In fact, both parties look happy. As I ask the van driver and his husband, a front seat passenger, what happened to cause the accident, the driver tells me he was rear-ended by the trailing truck following too closely as they approached a red light. “Any injuries?” I ask in an almost robotically serious way, still trying to find the “disturbance.” “No, not us,” as he leans in toward me with a wry smile. My mind defaults to defensive officer safety mode. “I’ll tell you this, though: This isn’t the first time I’ve been rear-ended by another man.” Caught me by total surprise as we all three burst out laughing. Lesson: Hell, I don’t know; adapt to new information and don’t take yourself too seriously, I guess.

These instances are what author Greg McKeown calls “learning-sized mistakes,” which can be incredibly valuable pieces of feedback. Failure, in my experience, is the most impactful way to learn. There’s a deeper scar left by the embarrassment of failure than there is by the glee of success. Failure’s like a good, ol’-fashioned, carb-loaded, butter-basted, home-cooked Southern meal: It sticks with ya. The more embarrassing or significant the failure, the stickier it is. Just don’t make it too sticky. Most, if not all, of my policing mistakes have been learning-sized. But what turned out to be learning experiences could often just as easily have turned catastrophic. That’s one of the wild things about police work. It only takes one difference in one instance to upend your career, perhaps your life, and the lives of others. “You’re an unnamed superhero … until you fuck up,” a lieutenant once told me. “You fuck up and you’re a name-slandered, face-plastered-all-over, better-wear-a-hat-from-here-on-out supervillain…. Don’t fuck up.” Good pep talk. Correcting learning-sized mistakes is a great defense against getting into such a pickle.

Police runs expose the very human fallibility of officers. Mistakes of fact, inadequate information, inferences and the perishability of skills all come into play. Same with inattention blindness, the term defining the phenomenon of visual or auditory exclusion where a person’s brain simply tunes out seemingly irrelevant information. If you’ve ever seen the video of the “Invisible Gorilla” experiment by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons — where a person in a gorilla suit overtly walks through a small group passing basketballs, even stopping to pound his chest, yet half of all viewers fail to see him the first time watching — then you know what I’m talking about. 

This strange evolutionary relic is magnified in a fight–flight–freeze situation, which is why I stand by my perspective that it’s simply amazing we don’t see more police use-of-force mistakes. That’s not a finger-pointing comment, but rather a suggestion that we as a society oughta rethink our untenable position of expecting police perfection. Retired Glendale (N.Y.) P.D. chief Michael Ranalli elaborates on these points in his 2017 “The Chief’s
Chronicle” article, advocating for the necessity of objective analyses when police officers use force. His argument boils down to: If we expect people to be police officers, then we’d better expect imperfect outcomes, even if all actions were reasonable.

Before ballgames, which are far from life-threatening, athletes have practiced day in and day out. During games, referees have the luxury of consultation, instant replay and sometimes even call reversal, blatant acknowledgments of the fact that they’ll mess up. In real life, police officers are usually given one chance to get it right, despite relatively little practice, no replay and direction from a prehistoric physiological response shipped direct from the amygdala to the senses. Police are increasingly expected to respond to hostile and perplexing situations while simultaneously considering threat elimination, civil rights, legal parameters, mental health, third parties, personal protection, preservation of evidence, preservation of an aggressor’s life, protection of property, public perception and the professionalism of their language, all within a civilian setting. Mistakes will always remain part of an officer’s “practice,” like a doctor or a lawyer’s ever-unfinished work. Just remember to learn from them. Look back to inform, look forward to improve.