It never ceases to amaze me. From time to time I stand at a critical or dangerous incident and think, “what on earth are you thinking?” I started this as a young patrol officer when suspects would continue to fight with 3, 4, or 5 police officers who were subduing them. Sometimes I would say out-loud, “Dude, do you think you can actually win this…knock it off!” Of course that was generally ineffective.

Anyhow, last shift the officers who work for me had to arrest a guy for beating up his wife. Nothing too serious on the injuries, but he was going to jail for certain. Who is there to arrest him? Count with me here, folks: three armed police officers (guns drawn), one police sergeant, one police canine (sounding quite hungry) and the Philosophical Cop.

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I received an email from a college student doing research on police response to domestic violence calls. They were interested in knowing (1) why domestic calls were so dangerous for police officers, and (2) how we handled these incidents. I thought they were both good questions. And since more than half of my calls in the past decade have been domestics, it is fair to say that cops deal with more of these than any other single problem.

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