Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48AMERICAN POLICE BEAT: OCTOBER 2016 19 Cops don’t always have a choice when someone decides to commit suicide by cop. But some of these scenarios can be resolved peacefully. I n Madison, Wisconsin recently, a confronta- tion between a dis- traught 22-year-old man and two cops could have easily ended dif- ferently. The officers were respond- ing to a domestic dispute. The woman who called 911 said the male was armed with a knife and wanted to commit suicide by cop. Officer Adrian Alan, a 10- year veteran of the Madison Police Department made contact and immediately started defusing the situa- tion. Like most good negotia- tors, Alan started by asking what he could do to help. “At that point that’s when he said, just shoot me and immediately we told him we don’t want to do that,” Alan said. The two officers kept their weapons holstered. They worked slowly, calm- ly, building up a rapport with the subject and tried to keep him calm as they closed the distance between them down to 15 feet. The officers couldn’t see and didn’t know the loca- tion of the knife that was mentioned in the 911 call. Despite their attempts to get the guy talking about something other than sui- cide, the man kept at it. “Kept coming back again and again, just shoot me and he had his hands in his pockets the whole time. We asked him to take his hands out of his pockets and he wouldn’t do that,” Alan said. After another 10 minutes the man removed his hands from his pockets, put them on top of his head and the of- ficers were able to take him into custody without anyone being hurt. “It turns out he was not armed at all,” Alan said. No one comes on the job looking to take a human life under any circumstances. But it’s not hard to imagine that cops getting through something like that might be harder if the person who was shot and killed was only try- ing to hurt themselves as op- posed to innocent victims. That’s why the Madison PD’s extensive crisis inter- vention training program is so valuable – it helps cops like Alan make tough calls in tight spaces. The fact that this could have gone another way en- tirely is not lost on Officer Alan. “Madison could have been the next city on the news, just like Milwaukee, just like Ferguson, just like anything else. And contacts around the country that play out this way every single day and by the grace of God they don’t turn out that way,” he told Channel 3000. There was another thing Officer Alan did that not a lot of people would. He gave the guy that wanted Alan to shoot him his phone number. “I’ve told him and I’ve told other people, look, if you just need to talk, if you need a ride to the hospital because you’re not feeling right give us a call. That’s what we’re here for. We’re not just here to put handcuffs on people and take people to jail.” Adrian Alan is a police officer in Southern Wisconsin. He has served for over a decade in both rural and urban jurisdictions. Adrian is a Wisconsin-DOJ certi- fied Firearms Master Instructor Trainer, pistol and rifle instructor, EVOC instructor and Tactical Response Instructor. Get them talking