The cost of duty

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, January 30th.

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Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: showing the light of Christ during the darkest of times.

Police work means dealing with human behavior at its worst. Law enforcement officers see and experience terrible things.

WORLD’s Lindsay Mast has the story of a former police officer who grappled with how to do the work after the worst of outcomes.

LINDSAY MAST: January 17, 2018 was a typical winter day in Racine, Wisconsin. Investigator Chad Stillman put on his police badge and gear. He didn’t know it then, but it would be the last time he did.

CHAD STILLMAN: We're getting the car to go out. End up getting a call from a confidential informant who says, hey, you know, such and such is out here. He's got a gun on him, and he's and he's selling, selling dope.

The man was a convicted felon out on probation and parole. The tip led to a traffic stop for a missing front license plate. What happened next changed Stillman’s life.

Police audio from WITI-Fox 6 Milwaukee:

AUDIO: Black pants, red hoodie, Southbound Park, he’s going through the yard…

The suspect got out and started running. Stillman and his partner chased him on foot. In the yard of a nearby house, the man pulled out a gun.

STILLMAN: The next thing I know, I'm just staring down the barrel of a nine millimeter handgun from probably, I'd say, seven to 10 feet away.

Stillman and his partner yelled repeatedly to drop the gun, show his hands. But he didn’t.

AUDIO: Shots fired! One down! We’re ok!...we need EMS… (gunshots)

The officers fired. The suspect died on the way to the hospital. His family was devastated. Angry.

There were protests. Local news picked up the story.

FAMILY: There’s no reason for those cops to have shot him that many times, saying he was a threat.

Stillman and his partner became the target of public backlash … threats of extreme violence against Stillman’s family, his little girls.

STILLMAN: I'm trying to, like sleep at night, wondering if my kids are sleeping close enough to the floor that all right, if there's a drive by will the bullets, you know, will the stone on the front of the house stop the rounds? Are my kids safe? Like, what!

A report issued two months later cleared Stillman and his partner of any wrongdoing.

But the shooting changed him. Being in the news changed him. A nurse at a hospital he’d see sometimes on cases, reached out and told him she had thought terrible things about him, until she read the report.

STILLMAN: She's like, I will never believe the media again. I thought you and your partner were evil, racist, dirty, murdering cops, and I thought you should go to prison. And that's how I felt for months.”

The investigation may have cleared Stillman, but a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder kept him from returning to his job. It was a low point.

He had hit bottom once before, after eight years on the force as a non-Christian. He says he hadn’t had the right perspective on life–his marriage, his family, or his job. But that changed when he was 30 and accepted Christ.

He became a better husband and father. Even his approach to police work changed.

STILLMAN: You will be amazed when, how far you can get relationally, even in investigations, by just treating people like with respect, wanting to know their story, genuinely wanting to make them feel loved.

He saw the people he took into custody differently, even prayed with them in interview rooms–eyes open, in case they tried to punch him. People he was investigating hadn’t always experienced much compassion.

STILLMAN: If you could make them feel heard for the first time in their lives, like they would tell you their whole life story, sob, confess to the crime, and then hug you on their way to jail when they know they're never gonna get out again. Because they never had anyone sit down, look them in the eyes and genuinely say, like, “bro, tell me, tell me how we got here.”

Stillman says in the 10 years since the shooting of Michael Brown and the scrutiny of law enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri, police officers have had a more difficult time being proactive.

STILLMAN: We need cops that are guardians and warriors like we have to have that as a society to function. But there's been so much anti-cop rhetoric that officers are terrified to put on the warrior hat when they're called to do it.

He had to wrestle with that first hand–having used lethal force, then walking through that period of intense, public criticism.

Stillman has since spent time as a police chaplain. Sometimes, he misses the impact he had on his community before.

STILLMAN: When someone calls the police, it's usually the worst day of their life for the most part, like not a good day. So being able to show up and be that, be that hope, be that light, be that encouragement is I miss… I do miss that.

But he’s been to Texas to comfort a SWAT team member who was the first in the room after the Santa Fe High School shooting. And he hugged a man who couldn’t do much but lay flowers on the memorial at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison.

STILLMAN: And you pray for him and his family, and they leave, you know, better than when they showed up.

It’s not the same work. But it’s good work.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lindsay Mast.

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