Police officer tries to save life while citizens call for death
Simon Drobik has seen a lot of pain and ugliness in his 15 years as a police officer, but nothing prepared him for what he encountered on the San Mateo bridge over Interstate 40 one Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago.
Drobik responded to a call that a man was threatening to jump off the bridge onto the freeway below. Drobik is the Albuquerque Police Department’s spokesman on weekends.
When he arrived at the scene around 1:30 p.m., he found two rookie police officers already there, including Gabriel Candelaria, who was trained in crisis intervention. The man threatening suicide was standing on a ledge above the freeway and holding onto a railing. The man was not arrested, so I won’t name him here.
Someone jumping onto the freeway could easily cause a horrible traffic accident, so police closed the westbound lanes of I-40. They left the eastbound lanes open, but because of all the activity and unusually heavy traffic for a Sunday, traffic was creeping along.
Drobik said dealing with a potential jumper takes a lot of time and a lot of police resources. Candelaria, who Drobik said “is probably the most empathetic guy I’ve seen in a long time,” talked with the man for almost five hours.
“The guy was having the worst day of his life,” Drobik said. Two of his children had died recently. His marriage was falling apart. His wife was planning to leave him and take the remaining children with her. The officers’ goal was to help the man find hope. “I don’t even think of it as a police action,” Drobik said. “It’s one
person helping another. It’s as bare bones as it gets. It takes time.”
The officers looked for ways to connect with the man and to bring out his story. Drobik said the police try to get a jumper to take baby steps: Once you get him talking, perhaps you can get him to turn to face you or accept some water or provide the name and phone number of a loved one. Because the man’s feet were half off the ledge, the first order of business was to get him to step back a little so he wouldn’t fall accidentally.
Then things got ugly. Drivers in the eastbound lane of I-40 started yelling out their windows such helpful advice as, “Jump!” “Kill yourself!” and “Do it!” Every time someone yelled, the man prepared to jump.
Drobik said it happened at least 50 times. Police finally closed the eastbound lanes of the freeway.
“How can you say that?” Drobik said. “I’ve seen a lot of brutal stuff in 15 years, but … how could someone say that? That’s very dark. I was very embarrassed for them.”
How, indeed, could someone say that?
Neuroscientists say that our brains are wired to make us innately self-centered, presumably to help ensure our individual survival. However, there is a region of the brain called the right supra-marginal gyrus, which controls our empathetic response. Researchers at University College in London discovered in 2004 that when we see someone else in pain or suffering, our brain responds as if we ourselves were in pain. Empathy is essential in a species that depends on cooperation and socialization to survive and to thrive.
People can turn off their empathetic response, especially when they feel themselves to be victimized or regard someone else as an “other,” which is when genocide occurs. People can also be trained to feel empathy and compassion.
That’s all well and good, but it’s one thing not to empathize with a troubled man standing on the ledge of a bridge. It is quite another to encourage him to jump. What are we to make of that?
There is simply no excuse. It is wrong. It is selfish. It degrades our society. It debases our city. It stinks.
The police eventually got the man off the ledge. He collapsed in the street and was taken to the University of New Mexico Hospital for evaluation.
“I don’t know what’s going on in a society where people can’t get the big picture,” Drobik said. “I wonder if it’s because we’ve become so disconnected” in a world in which human interaction comes in the form of a text message. “We’ve lost a sense that it takes a village.”
Do we think a desperate man on a bridge has victimized us in such a horrible way, by making us sit in traffic for a while, that we want him dead? Has a member of our community made himself an other because he lost hope?
I suspect most of us have wondered whether life has any meaning. Whatever our religious or spiritual views may be, we make meaning in our lives with the choices we make. We can choose darkness and we can choose light. We can choose genocide and we can choose justice. We can choose to make a better world and we can choose not to.
A few weeks back, dozens of motorists on an Albuquerque street chose darkness. They should be ashamed of themselves.