I just witnessed a police shooting—and here’s what it taught me about trauma

Healing really does happen in relationships.

A cop drawing her gun and running. The grip of her shoes on the hot pavement. A gunshot. “Stop resisting! F*cking stop!” Blood pooling on the ground. What seemed like hundreds of cop cars speeding up and screeching to a stop. Assault rifles. Helicopters. An ambulance. Yelling.

These are the fragments I remember from witnessing a police shooting over the weekend. I was in Miami for a friend’s bachelor party. We were renting an Airbnb on one of the affluent Venetian Islands, where a house down the street is selling for $40 million. I was out for a run just after noon on Saturday. I noticed a police officer driving slowly, speaking through her vehicle window to a man across the street. The man appeared to be Latino, middle-aged, and poor, his clothes and backpack dirty and worn. He was walking away from the officer, speaking incoherently and gesturing wildly with his hands. I assumed he was experiencing a mental health crisis (which was later confirmed by the local police department).

I’m going to press pause there.

I’m telling you what happened second by second because that’s what my brain wants me to do. Ever since those few seconds of time, a part of me has been yearning to be heard—truly heard. I’ve told the story to my partner and multiple friends. I’ve told it to police detectives. I’ve told it to a television camera. I’ve tweeted about it. I’ve written an opinion essay about it that I pitched to the New York Times.

Each time, I’ve noticed this part of me wanting to give the blow-by-blow of what happened. Like it’s trying to make sense of what I saw. Like if I just get the details right, and someone else can put themselves in my shoes, then I can let it go and move on.

This post is more about how trauma works than it is about what I witnessed. Though, it’s also a little bit about the horrifying disaster that is policing in this country.

Back to the story...

The officer then jumped out of her vehicle, drew a gun, and ran at the man. Another officer was running from the opposite direction. As they both reached him, I heard a gunshot. They spent 10 or 15 seconds handcuffing the man, and then the second officer fell back on the pavement writhing in pain. Another officer put on rubber gloves and started applying a tourniquet to the injured officer’s leg. Other officers with assault rifles yelled at me and other bystanders to leave the area.

I’ve since learned that someone in the neighborhood had reported the man, and that a call had went out to officers to “be on the lookout” for a possibly armed person. The officer “accidently” fired her gun, according to police. The injured officer survived with a gunshot wound to his leg that is not life-threatening. The man was uninjured, taken to a medical facility, and then released. He hadn’t been armed but allegedly had a lighter that looked like a revolver.

My two big takeaways from the experience are: 1) The police made me more unsafe than the man did, and 2) healing happens in relationships.

I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this now, but the officer’s escalation seemed reckless and unnecessary. I was terrified. I’ve been around guns my whole life—my dad and I hunted when I was a kid. But I’ve never felt powerless around someone with a gun.

I’m angry that police have so much power in our society, and that we ask police to do so many things that have nothing to do with solving crime. We spend way too much public money on policing. You would think the massive protests after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 would’ve changed things at least a little. But the 1,176 people killed by U.S. law enforcement in 2022 was a record high since experts first started tracking the killings nationwide in 2013.

Despite misleading claims by right-wing politicians and pundits that crime is soaring because police have been “defunded,” in many cities and counties, defunding never actually happened. Spending on police is up in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Meanwhile, violent crime rates remain well below historic highs in the 1990s. After a spike during the pandemic, murders declined significantly in many areas of the country last year.

Whether we call it “defunding” the police or something else, we need to move public funding from policing toward health care, housing, education, and good jobs to help people in need and address the underlying causes of crime before it happens. “The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police,” anti-criminalization organizer Mariame Kaba wrote after Floyd’s murder.

Now, about trauma...

As I’ve processed what happened, I’ve been reminded of something I’ve heard over and over again but never really fully grasped. I’ve guided therapy clients through healing trauma. With the help of my therapist, I’ve healed my own trauma. But I’m really starting to get that trauma is not what happened to us or what we witnessed, but instead it’s what happens inside of us. I’ve understood that intellectually, but now I feel it in my bones.

The physician and addiction expert Gabor Maté says:

“Trauma is not the event that inflicted the wound. Trauma is not the sexual abuse. Trauma is not the war. Trauma is not the abandonment. Trauma is not the inability of your parents to see you for who you were. Trauma is the wound that you sustained as a result.”

And that wound can only be fully healed through being seen, heard, and felt by others. Nervous system researchers call this “co-regulation,” when someone we trust and feel safe with gives us their undivided attention and unconditional care.

Bessel van der Kolk, author of the bestselling The Body Keeps the Score, says:

“If we are around people who love us, trust us, take care of us, nurture us when we are down, most people do pretty well with even very horrendous events. But ... if you’re not allowed to feel what you feel, know what you know, your mind cannot integrate what goes on, and you can get stuck on the situation.”

That’s what this feels like. Part of me is still stuck on the Venetian Causeway on Saturday afternoon. My partner has helped me process what I experienced. I’ve shared about it in group therapy. Writing about it now is helping too. The stuckness is almost gone. But parts of me are still there, in shock, confused, terrified, sad, angry.

I’ll probably be writing about what happened more in the coming weeks and months. I’m curious what to do with the powerlessness and fear I felt, and how those feelings relate to how I’ve been socialized as a man. But I needed to write this—and I needed you to read it—to heal more. Thank you for being here.

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Now, a question for the comments below: Have you ever experienced gun violence?

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