USA TODAY International Edition
Deadly toll for women, cops
Cycles of violence put officers at risk
Linda Pope faced a flood of red and blue lights as she arrived at the hospital on the night her husband was killed.
Cincinnati Police officer Daniel Pope had been shot in the head while trying to serve a domestic violence warrant on a 20-year-old man who fled the scene and shot himself. Now, as Linda sat in the hospital exam room being told her husband didn’t survive, it felt like the walls were closing in.
Pope lost her husband on Dec. 6, 1997, just five days before their seven-year wedding anniversary. To her, he is 35 years old forever.
“You never forget. You never stop hurting,” she says.
Pope learned a tragic lesson that is still playing out 20 years later: Domestic abusers aren’t just dangerous for women — they are also deadly for cops.
In 2017, more officers were shot responding to domestic violence than any other type of firearm-related fatality, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. From 1988 to 2016, 136 officers were killed while responding to domestic disturbances such as family arguments, FBI data show. By comparison, 80 were killed during a drug-related arrest in the same period.
And in just the first few months of this year, six officers have already died in shootings related to domestic violence. One of them is officer Justin Billa.
The first time Erin Billa met Justin, they were 5 years old. In her middle school scrapbook, she circled his name, with the word “cutie”
written next to it.
It was almost 10 p.m. on Feb. 20. Fonda Poellnitz, 58, was dead, and her ex-husband Robert Hollie was a wanted man in the domestic violence shooting. When officer Billa reported to Hollie’s home in Mobile, Ala., shots rang out. Billa was rushed to the hospital. A SWAT team moved in and found Hollie had killed himself.
Billa, 27, later died at the hospital. He had been an officer for just two years.
“I literally felt like my heart was broken in a million pieces,” Erin Billa says.
On March 28, they would have celebrated their third wedding anniversary.
The pattern of repeated abuse makes domestic violence calls particularly dangerous for officers. A 2008 study by the National Institute of Justice determined that victims of domestic violence are more likely to call the police after repeated assaults — which puts police officers in an even more volatile situation when they do respond.
“If someone breaks into your home, you’re going to immediately call police. You’re not going to let someone break in 10 times. But with domestic violence, it’s unique in that way, that the call could represent something that’s been percolating over time,” says David Chipman, senior policy adviser at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and a former agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for 25 years.
Rates of domestic violence in the United States declined by more than 60% from 1994 to 2010, but the scourge of abuse still touches millions of Americans. About one in four women and one in seven men have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s 29 million female victims and 15.6 million male victims.
Over the past several decades, certain police policies toward domestic violence have changed from considering abuse a family dispute to a serious criminal offense that requires a response, including specialized domestic violence units inside departments and comprehensive service centers for victims.
“Back in the ’80s and ’70s, nobody ever looked at this as a crime. They looked at it as more of a nuisance. As officers started getting injured and in many cases killed — and victims being killed, also — we started analyzing and assessing and identifying better methods” for responding to domestic violence, says Frank Fernandez, director of public safety in Coral Gables, Fla., and chairman of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Firearms Committee.
Showing empathy helps officers deescalate a potentially explosive domestic violence situation, Fernandez says.
Tactics such as arriving on the scene with at least one other officer, standing on either side of the front door instead of approaching it directly, using verbal communication skills to develop a dialogue with the parties involved and having domestic violence detectives follow up with repeat offenders are now more widely used.
Even as departments begin testing new tactics and technologies, the dangers of police work haunt families.
Pope says she fears no amount of training can save an officer in an ambush.
“Domestic violence is absolutely the deadliest situation that police officers are found in,” Pope says.
Natalie Schreyer is a reporter at the Fuller Project for International Reporting. The Fuller Project is a non-profit news organization dedicated to covering issues that affect women and girls globally.