It made me more compassionate to them, not controlling and nasty.

No matter what experience I had just had, the next patient was greeted with a relaxed and friendly face, they were then my primary concern. I could cry or cuss when I got home.

but that was my first thought. Shouldn't he have been even more interested in keeping the peace with a bunch of kids if one of those suicide calls was a teen *jumper*?

I call lame excuse.

in front of his children. The officer was dealing with that family and then the teen girl. Some people might call that a bit traumatic regardless of job title.

The officer was obviously out of control, but it's just too bad he responded to the call.

of the suicide calls.

But yeah he probably should have stayed back on this one.

Or was, hopefully he won't just resign and go work for another PD in the next town over...but probably will.

is part of the job. Put on your big boy boxers and fucking deal with it. Dont take it out on a teenage girl. Excuses are like assholes, everybody's got one.

Welcome!

As a cop, you see a lot of bad stuff. If you can't handle that, then you need to find a new line of work.

McKinney is a city of over 130,000 at the northern edge of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Surely its police department had another officer available to respond to the pool call.

face sanction for them. He should have been able to recognize the signs that he was in a bad place emotionally and stepped aside.

But to those people saying that they wouldn't react like that, I suspect all of you are being too generous to yourself. I don't know anybody who hasn't had a bad day and snapped at a friend or family member. Sure you probably didn't pull a gun on them, but you also probably weren't carrying one.

But it does speak to a larger point that we should mandate mental health care for first responders on an on-going basis to do more to prevent snapping. I'm guessing that most cops have trouble admitting that they need mental help (not like the rest of us are generally good about it) and so need it as a proactive and required process.

I'm not a cop but I know I have a hard time stepping away when I'm needed even if I'm not in a good emotional place. A few months ago, about 3 months after major knee surgery that left me unable to squat to lift heavy things, helped reorganize a gymnastics gym because my friend needed help. Even as she would try to tell me that I shouldn't do certain things, I would try to do them anyway because I had a hard time accepting my limitations. Granted I'm not a cop, and I don't carry a gun, but my friend would have been devastated if I had injured myself and I insisted on doing it anyway.

Being a stubborn pain in the ass has both upsides and downsides.