Dallas Police Used Innovative Tactics to Handle Their Trauma After July 7

Editor's note: A few days after the July 7, 2016 ambush of police officers in Dallas, Officer Max Geron wrote a narrative about his experiences that day. In this column he writes part 2, picking up the story of what happened to officers after the attack.In the weeks that followed the July 7 attack by a gunman who left five officers dead, the Dallas Police Department worked hard to accomplish our base mission of serving and protecting the public while recovering from the shock of an event with the potential to produce massive trauma. There were no best practices or playbook for recovering from the July 7 attacks. We managed by working with a host of outside agencies on innovative, so-called emergent strategies.As the name implies, emergent strategies are those that emerge from the given situation. Not just random strategies, tactics or guesswork, but strategies deemed likely to work because of what has occurred and how the situation evolved. Officers, supervisors and command staff were willing to entertain novel practices.  Continue reading...