The killing of a police officer has effects that unsettle us for years. Like a rock dropped in a pond, it creates concentric waves that lap at our ignorance and assumptions, eroding our complacency and our calm.
For the last four years and more, we’ve talked about law enforcement in San Jose in cold, mechanical terms — salary, pensions, retiree health care, retention percentages.
Tuesday’s fatal shooting of 14-year veteran Michael Johnson reminds us that the job is fundamentally different than other dangerous lines of work. It’s not measured by an actuarial table. It can be ended by the sudden crack of a bullet fired in anger.
“There’s so much criticism of police. Do they overreact? How are they trained?” says ex-Mayor Tom McEnery. “When you see one of those bright lives extinguished, you’re reminded that cops aren’t normal people. They’re extraordinary people.”
McEnery knows: He was mayor in 1989 when officers Gene Simpson and Gordon Silva were killed in a shootout at Fifth and Santa Clara streets, the site today of City Hall. He can tell you details about going to the hospital to check on Silva, who lingered with a pellet to the groin. A fatal pellet.
Fontana shooting
The killing of a cop has effects we cannot predict: After Officer Jeffrey Fontana, a police academy classmate of Johnson, was gunned down during a late-night traffic stop in Almaden Valley in 2001, the legal system wrangled for years about what to do with his killer, DeShawn Campbell.
When a judge ruled that Campbell was mentally retarded and thus ineligible for the death penalty, a political furor erupted.
Even longer ago, on the distant edges of memory, the fatal 1933 shooting downtown of San Jose officer John Buck by a robbery suspect he was following produced a mob outside the jail ready to lynch the shooter, Joseph Matlock.
Why is the killing of a cop different? The statistics say that fishermen, lumbermen and even farmers have more dangerous jobs. The difference is that they don’t strap on gear every day with the knowledge that a bad or crazy person may want to take them down.
Full investigation
The chronology of Officer Johnson’s killing, apparently at the hands of a suicidal gunman named Scott Dunham, 57, will be thoroughly investigated. The tapes will be analyzed, the officers’ positions will be pinpointed, the trajectory of the bullet shots will be traced. A still-estimable but demoralized department will take lessons learned from the tragedy, as it did from the deaths of Simpson, Silva and Fontana.
It doesn’t change the inherent danger of the job. In the end, the sacrifice cannot be measured in money or allayed by the sweet promise of retirement. It’s calibrated in the quiet heroism of a daily routine punctuated by violence.
Press releases don’t ordinarily reach poetry, but DA Jeff Rosen might have said it best Wednesday: “Michael Johnson lost his life, a life spent protecting ours, trying to help someone who had lost the value of his own.”
Contact Scott Herhold at 408-275-0917 or sherhold@mercurynews.com. Twitter.com/scottherhold.
