The Questions No One Is Asking about What Happened in McKinney

I’ve been hesitant to write about the chaos in McKinney and the furor surrounding what happened at the pool party that wasn’t really a pool party. The reaction from social media and people in real life against anyone offering points of view not strictly toe-ing the “it was all racially motivated” party line.

The McKinney neighborhood where this all took place is just a few towns over from ours, and its pool is one I’ve taken my children to for friends’ birthdays or summer get-togethers. It would be hard for me to imagine a more racially or ethnically diverse community than the Dallas suburbs which surround us. Far from being some kind of all-white redneck Texas stereotype, our neighborhoods are wonderfully diverse cultural melting pots. Which is why the idea of this incident was initially so shocking to the people who live here. If any part of the country should be beyond such things, it’s us.

Until our part of the world was on the world news for being bigots and hateful, and there were protestors marching down the streets and having sit-ins.

I’ll be honest here, I don’t know if it was racially motivated or not. I wasn’t inside of that police officer’s head, and can’t tell you what he was thinking. I don’t even know if what happened with the girl he appeared to man-handle were technically permissible, I’m not an expert in police procedures, but I do know that it looked bad on YouTube, and I wouldn’t want to have been on the receiving end of it.

What I am a self-declared expert in is in adults who have just-had-enough and in people who are at-the-end-of-my-freaking-rope, and that’s really what the police officer in that video looked like to me. He looked the way that I feel when I just can’t even deal for another minute longer – when I’ve run out of coping skills. He looks the way I feel inside when I tell my children to put on a movie and I lock myself in the bathroom with candles, a book, a glass of wine, and a bubble bath.

He looks like a guy who needed to put himself into a 10 minute time-out, but didn’t get to do so.

As people in my news feed debated his actions and hers and which of them was more at fault (because neither was on their best behavior that day,) I was reading up on what Cpl Casebolt had been up to in the hours before he arrived at that infamous pool party.

Before Cpl Casebolt arrived in the Craig’s Ranch neighborhood that afternoon, he had responded to two suicide calls. In one, he had calmly and successfully dealt with a teenage girl threatening to commit suicide by jumping off of the roof of her family home. With his help and intervention, she came in off of the roof, and is, one presumes, getting the help she needs.

The second was much less successful. Cpl Casebolt has begun his shift with a suicide at a different pool in the McKinney area from where his shift, and career, ended. He arrived on the scene to find that a man had shot himself in the head in front of his wife, family, and assorted other people. After securing the scene, photographing the body, and getting witness statements, he stayed on scene with the widow until someone arrived to take over caring for her.

Cpl Casebolt says he was emotionally done after both of these incidents, and although he was mercilessly mocked on social media for it, I believe him. It doesn’t excuse his later behavior, but perhaps it explains it.

I can only begin to imagine the emotional toll of not only having to deal with the calls themselves, but also what it took to help and console those involved. Consoling the widow whose husband had just shot himself in front of her? I would have been way beyond done at that point, and that was just the beginning of the work day for him. If you’d put a mouthy teenager in front of me after all of that, I can almost guarantee that I would have snapped too. So would most people.

It doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it excusable. But it might make it avoidable.

All of this has me wondering if we’re asking too much of our first responders? Are we expecting them to have depths of emotional resources which no human being actually possesses? What are we doing to avoid having people who are beyond their coping capacities out there in highly charged situations? Is it possible for first responders to “tap out” without fear of penalties and/or repercussions? Could Cpl Casebolt have said “I’m done out here. I need to be riding a desk for the rest of this shift”? Did he have the training to recognize that he was beyond his limit?

We ask heroic and super-human things of the men and women who put on a badge and swear to protect and defend us, and most of the time they do their jobs with amazing professionalism. Stories like what happened at Craig Ranch are the exception rather than the rule, and yet they do happen because they are only human after all.

If you’re the one person on Earth who hasn’t seen the video yet, you can watch it here.

Image courtesy of Pixabay