A recently released body cam video out of Florida has been making the rounds on social media. Why? Because a cop seems to lose his mind and starts cranking rounds into the back of his own patrol vehicle. Inside is a man who he had already arrested and placed in the vehicle, and he thinks that not only is the man shooting at him, but that he had been hit.
According to media sources, the officer lost it when an acorn fell on his vehicle (you can barely hear it in the video if you turn it up), which he mistook for a gunshot.
If you don’t want to watch the whole long video, you can skip to 12:55 on the video below (or click here to start a little before he loses his crap). After the video, I’ll discuss some things we can all learn from it.
Lesson #1: Wellness Is Key
The biggest thing we can take away from this is that your own wellness is of paramount importance.
Some people are saying it looks like the acorn set off PTSD, but I can’t find any information to confirm that, so I’m not going to assume that’s what happened here. But, if it was, we have to keep in mind that PTSD is treatable. There’s literally no reason to walk around with a gun (especially if you’re going to be a cop) and have untreated PTSD.
No, they won’t take your gun rights away for seeing a therapist. The only way that happens is if you get committed to a mental health facility against your will or if you get red flagged in some states. Seeing a therapist and getting guidance on processing past trauma can only improve your rights situation, because if you do what this guy did, you may end up losing your rights.
It’s also important to keep in mind that you don’t have to be someone who ran over an IED in Iraq to get PTSD. Childhood abuse, car accidents, and many other things can put you in a bad spot mentally, and you’re not a “faker” or a “weenie” for getting that help.
If it wasn’t PTSD, I still think this looks a lot like somebody who was walking around on the edge for other reasons. We don’t know what those are in this case, but we do know that life is hard and it’s easy to start carrying too much stress around, even without PTSD.
After all, we’re all in a country that seems like it’s teetering on the edge of civil war, and there’s no shortage of bad imagery of warfare and death on social media and mainstream media. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, there are people who tell you that the bogeyman is out to get you, and sometimes it’s easy to believe.
So, we all need to get out and touch grass once in a while. The gay couple down the street probably isn’t trying to destroy western civilization and turn your kids into freaks. The guy with a Gadsden flag across the way probably isn’t planning to fight for Dictator Trump in November. Russia doesn’t have nukes in space (yet). PLA agents haven’t crossed the border with your name on some kill list (unless you’re some kind of VIP, and you’re probably not).
No matter what narrative has you on edge, or whatever else might have you stressed out, it’s a good idea to relax and take a few deep breaths. Nobody can ride around with that stuff in their head and not make dumb mistakes. Being mentally, spiritually, and physically healthy can keep you from losing it.
To Be Fair…
Another thing that must be mentioned is that the idea of a guy in handcuffs shooting you isn’t totally insane. It’s a real problem in law enforcement that departments and agencies of all kinds are trying to fix through better training.
The sad fact is that all too often cops get lazy and don’t do a thorough search of people getting arrested. It’s not common, but jails sometimes find guns during a second search before putting someone behind bars. Others (like the guy in the video above) try to ditch their gun in the back of the car so they can claim it isn’t theirs. Sometimes they shoot the cop through the back of the seat so they can escape.
But, this guy may have taken the wrong lesson from the training videos and let a scary fake scenario live rent-free in his head. Instead of being confident that a thorough search was conducted (the point of such training), his first thought was that the guy could have come up with a gun and that the falling acorn meant he had been shot at. So, he lost it and acted based on that assumption.
So, if you’re in law enforcement, be double sure to be mentally well and triple sure that you’re doing thorough searches, and you won’t have to worry about resigning in shame or far worse.
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