North Coast law enforcement: An attack on us is an attack on society

Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies Sunday were supposed to remove the black bands from their badges, a sign of professional solidarity and mourning worn since five Dallas police officers were killed in a July 7 sniper attack.

But at 8:42 a.m., the first panicked reports went out on police radios in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Shots fired, officer down. Another three uniformed men died in another attack aimed specifically at police.

“It just went from one tragedy to another tragedy with no in-between,” Sheriff Tom Allman said.

For a department that lost one of its own two years ago when Deputy Ricky Del Fiorentino was killed by a fugitive fleeing a crime spree in Oregon, “emotions run deep,” Allman said. “When our guys hear about kids being raised without their dads, it hits home.”

Law enforcement on the North Coast, and across the country, is grappling strategically, tactically and emotionally with the shootings of uniformed officers in separate planned assassinations in two cities. Are officers adequately trained and equipped to head out onto the streets at a time when their uniforms could make then a target? Are they heading out to communities with a growing fear they may not return home?

“From the day you start this job as a uniformed person, it’s something that is a possibility and you’re taught that from the beginning,” Sonoma County Sheriff Steve Freitas said.

Freitas is considering hiring a consultant to do “a top to bottom evaluation” of personnel safety, both in the field and at sheriff-run facilities. That could include an analysis of how deputies deploy into situations such as public marches and rallies, as was the case in the Dallas attack, to determine what - if anything - might make them safer and more prepared.

Police work has always been risky. Confronting violence and using force is part of the job, part of the training. But there is evidence the job is not getting more dangerous. Researchers studying FBI data about on-the-job police deaths and assault deaths have found the numbers decreasing steadily over decades at levels not accounted for by a change in the number of police.

Yet, calculated assassinations of officers are rare and disturbing in a job where officers run toward risk instead of backing away.

“It attacks the fabric of society when you attack police,” Santa Rosa Police Chief Hank Schreeder said.

The shootings come at a time of racially charged conversations about police shootings. Communities are demanding more say in how they are policed and more accountability for instances of unlawful abuse of authority. But that conversation was interrupted July 7 with the sound of gunfire at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas. And again Sunday in Baton Rouge. Both perpetrators were black men with military backgrounds.

Schreeder said he considers the shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge in the same heartbreaking category of other mass shootings conducted by single perpetrators targeting specific groups: children in schools, gay men in nightclubs and, now, uniformed police officers on the street.

The chilling effect of the shootings is showing up at briefings, when a new round of officers start their shifts. Command staff at several agencies said they’re reminding officers it’s OK to wait for backup to arrive before entering a potentially dangerous situation.

“Delivering good service and being safe can happen together,” Petaluma Police Lt. Ken Savano said. “If you have to wait for another officer to clear, that’s OK. Take care of each other and talk to your families.”

Photos of people bringing flowers and food to police stations have become a symbolic gesture - shared widely on social media - to show support for a profession under fire long before officers were attacked.

“The overwhelming majority I think everywhere, but especially Sonoma County, supports what we do,” Freitas said. “We get that through tangible things, flowers and cookies, we get that on a constant basis.”

Two Santa Rosa police officers traveled to Fort Worth, Texas last week on a trip paid for by their union to attend the funeral of the youngest Dallas policeman killed in the sniper attack, 32-year-old Officer Patrick Zamarripa.

Detective Barrett Klein and Officer Matt White flew across the country to show Zamarripa’s family “that so many people care for their son and to show how proud we are of him,” said Klein, a 2005 Analy High School graduate who became a police officer four years ago.

On the flight home, Klein said they talked about how they hoped the killings were the acts of a madman, “one person who did one heinous thing” and would end there. But that would not be so.

“I wake up six hours later and see that it happened again, I couldn’t believe it,” Klein said. “I had to turn off the TV, it was too much.”

You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 707-521-5220 or julie.johnson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jjpressdem.