Posted on 02/28/2005 4:35:10 AM PST by Born Conservative
Robert Griffin suggests chain-saw incident could have ended differently.
FORTY FORT (PA) - A borough psychologist is questioning whether a seven-minute standoff could have been resolved differently after a River Street man was shot while charging at police with a chain saw.
Robert Griffin, whose practice is just a short distance from where William Henkle was gunned down last Monday, describes the incident as a lose-lose situation for all involved.
“It would be very hard to look at this as a success,” said Griffin. “The best you can say is everybody lost, but at least some people didn’t lose more.”
In addition to Henkle and his family, Griffin said many others have been, or potentially could be, affected by the incident, including the police officers on scene at the time, their families, and those who live in the normally quiet West Side community where the shooting took place.
“I think some sense of safety, some sense of security has been lost,” said Griffin, who added officers might suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome as a result of their involvement in the case.
There were 30 shots fired by five officers during the early morning incident, which police have labeled “suicide by cop.”
Griffin, who has conducted training sessions for law-enforcement personnel in de-escalating violent situations, said suicide by cop, or police-assisted suicide, is a relatively new phenomenon.
Research done to date shows the perpetrators/victims are most often depressed males who have attempted or talked about suicide before. They often demonstrate poor impulse control or aggressive behavior. Drugs or alcohol often play a role.
In addition, the perpetrators/victims often have mixed feelings about ending their own lives and are looking to shift the responsibility to someone else, said Griffin.
“As a police officer, you have to take advantage of that ambivalence,” said Griffin. “The person only has to stop being suicidal for one minute for the situation to be resolved without someone getting hurt.”
Time is another valuable tool for police, one Griffin said he feels wasn’t used effectively in last week’s incident.
“You think it would have occurred to someone that this guy was holding a chain saw and that eventually it would run out of gas,” he said. “These things don’t have very big gas tanks.”
Unlike a situation in which a person is threatening to use a gun to hurt himself or others, Griffin said, the use of a chain saw could have given police more flexibility.
“The officer who was hurt had to be within arm’s reach,” said Griffin, who recommends law-enforcement officers back off and give space to someone they suspect might be trying to hurt himself.
“They already had the road blocked off and it was five in the morning, so there weren’t a lot of people walking around,” said Griffin. “They could have taken a step back to assess the situation and formulate a plan.”
It is unclear if officers had a chance to plan their strategy, and few details have been released.
A call to state police Friday was not immediately returned. An officer with the Forty Fort police department referred all questions to the state police or the Luzerne County District Attorney’s Office.
Carol Crane, a spokeswoman for District Attorney David Lupas, said the incident is being investigated by the state police. Lupas said last week he believes the shooting was justified, and he commended the officers for their bravery.
A copy of the state police investigation will be forwarded to Lupas, who will then review it to see if further action is necessary, said Crane.
Griffin said the officers’ course of action, “was not what I would have recommended.”
I do my share of testifying in court. This is a Liar-for-Hire PhD psychologist. The latest plaintiff's Trial Lawyer Inc. evil theory is that municipalities should pay millions when someone is killed by police officers defending themselves from a homicidal murderer.
The intimidation by the left of cops has left the citizenry in the inner city unprotected. Most of the sociopaths inhabiting the streets know they will never be held to account except by the other competing drug dealers.
Ummm... no. You should do whatever you need to do to STOP a deranged person with a chainsaw from getting within arms reach.
"Trial Lawyer Inc. evil theory is that municipalities should pay millions when someone is killed by police officers defending themselves from a homicidal murderer.
It's a potential bonanza. I could be all wet, but it is also possible that there is an extremely dysfunctional family involved. This might look like "the chance of a lifetime" for them to cash in.
I guess because the shrink has a doctorate he thinks his obvious remarks are profound. No cop comes away from a suicide by cop feeling anything but used and ripped-off.
This guy's offering his trite Monday-morning-quarterbacking and implying that the cops consider this a howling success demonstrates only that some people are eager to disgrace themselves publicly if only it will get them some media coverage.
The proper response is to pray for the family and victims of the dead man and for the cops involved and those who love them and care for them.
The igonorance of the educated is amazing:
"You think it would have occurred to someone that this guy was holding a chain saw and that eventually it would run out of gas,” he said. “These things don’t have very big gas tanks.”
Spoken like one who has never used a chainsaw.I get 45min per tank- quite a few trees (or butts as the case may be)
Teuller Drill: attacker can cover 21 feet in 1.5 seconds starting from a full stop - just about equalling defender's reaction time.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, "detached
reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an upraised knife." Or chainsaw.
The "twenty-one foot rule".
That's right. They could have kept away, I think.
Posted on Fri, Mar. 11, 2005
Times leader
DAVID ISEMAN
City editor
Let’s get all the facts about a tragic event DAVID ISEMAN Opinion
At the outset, let me admit: I’m not a very trusting person, especially when it comes to authority.
As a reporter in Ohio, I used to cover police. If you spend enough time around cops, you start to realize they’re human.
One detective I knew back then would always call in his arrests. He also liked to gab, tipping me off to other crimes he heard about. He was one of my best sources.
I last saw him in court. But he wasn’t the arresting officer. He was the defendant.
He got busted selling burglar alarms, breaking into the homes where they were installed and then investigating the break-ins as the only detective in the rural township where he worked.
Of course that’s not to say that most cops are like him. Most certainly are not. Unfortunately, some are, which makes it harder on all the rest.
Like the state police captain, Kenneth Hill, who came to our newsroom the other day.
Hill, a guy with lots of responsibilities supervising state troopers across four counties, agreed to sit down and talk about the fatal shooting of 40-year-old William Henkle.
You’ve probably heard the story of Henkle by now. Cops say they had to fire at him on Feb. 21 when he lunged at one of them with a running chain saw. Police called it suicide by cop. But the death has triggered lots of questions from folks willing to second-guess the police.
Weary of all that Monday morning quarterbacking, Capt. Hill agreed to answer anything and everything we wanted to throw at him about the shooting.
Then a wild card surfaces
We did a bit of uneasy sparring at first, as Hill went to some lengths to explain why he decided to come to talk to us. We countered that, despite his visit, we would likely be pushing for a full written state police report of the shooting.
After he loosened up, Hill seemed candid. He seemed honest. He seemed sad for Henkle.
He answered questions until we ran out of them.
I left the meeting feeling confident police had to shoot Henkle. I even felt like we might not need to press for the full written account of the shooting.
Then we got the letter.
A full four pages long, it raises more questions about the shooting. But it’s different than previous second-guessing. It claims to quote a witness.
It says the witness saw all but fleeting moments of the standoff, including the entire time shots were fired. It says the witness never saw Henkle go after police with the saw.
It says police stopped Henkle’s elderly mom from trying to talk him into putting down the chain saw.
The letter writer, Henkle’s longtime acquaintance and former next-door neighbor Vicki Johnson, says the witness doesn’t buy the “suicide by cop” explanation because Henkle had made plans, evidenced by a note found in his pickup -- a 35-item, to-do list with only 15 things scratched off.
Vicki, 46, who now lives in Tunkhannock, believes the witness. She knows her well. It’s her 69-year-old mom.
Vicki also contends that her mom gave a statement to police after the shooting. We’d like to read that. So, we’re going to press on for the complete account of the shooting.
I want to believe Capt. Hill. But I also have a hard time not believing an elderly woman who claims to have seen almost everything that happened.
We need that written report.
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