6abc Philadelphia
You may wonder what happened to the empathic ability of the police officers at the Uvalde shooting.
We can use the 5 stage empathy model to understand their action at the time.
Every human being has the survival need to meet in a dangerous situation. When the police officers were reluctant to break into the classroom of innocent young children facing the imminent danger of death, one hypothesis can be their own fear of death at Stage 1 survival level of compassion.
Then the controversy is whether we can expect police officers to sacrifice their lives to rescue people in danger. We are especially talking about young elementary school students.
Observing the police officers’ actions at the scene, we can see that their fear of survival surpassed their duty as civil servants or sympathy at Stage 3.
If any of the children are their own, the police may have acted differently, which can also be considered a stage 1 level of compassion, identification, or projection of love toward the own family or ingroup member.
Stage 3 compassion or sympathy may involve their own feeling toward a child in danger if any of those officers have their own children of similar ages at home.
However, sympathy may not arise if the officers are from different racial or ethnic backgrounds to consider the children in danger are not from their community, such as through subtle racism.
We can now check how much empathy training has been implemented in the existing police officer training program. We can wonder if the training is primarily focused on protecting the safety of the police officers and understanding their higher mortality in the line of duty.
One more factor we need to consider is that when the police officers and the shooter face each other, even if the bulletproof vest is protecting them, the police officers will be in an inferior position in their morale because most shooters are suicidal and prepared to die when they plan to shoot others in public, while no police officers will be prepared to die.
The best way to train police officers is to equip them with a higher level of empathic ability that considers the welfare and safety of innocent children as their priority. The training may also prepare them to consider even the welfare of the criminal offenders’ families without simply demonizing them, who might have had no clue about the horrendous acts in advance through the systematic training of empathy skills and education.