Current Events
Making Sense Out of Senseless Tragedy:
Oak Creek Police Chief John Edwards
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CHIEFS OF POLICE
On August 5, 2012, a 40-year-old white supremacist shot dead six people and wounded four others at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The shooter took his own life after being shot in the stomach by a responding police officer.
The tragedy garnered immediate national and international attention, with dozens of media outlets descending on the Milwaukee suburb with a then-population of just over 35,000.
In the center of the media maelstrom was Oak Creek Chief of Police John Edwards, who kept a cool head and stepped up to the microphones time and again to sound a calming but authoritative voice in the midst of the senseless tragedy.
Edwards has since gone on to become a frequent speaker on the subject of leadership and communities coming together in the wake of such violence. He sat down with us recently to discuss that fateful day, the leadership decisions he made, and what he and his officers have learned in the two years since.
What follows is our chat:
Question [INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CHIEFS OF POLICE]: What were some of the first decisions you had to make when you initially got the call regarding the Gurdwara shootings?
Answer [JOHN EDWARDS]: I didn’t get a call. What happened was I was driving past with my daughter in the car and a squad from the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department pulled right in front of me and cut me off on the main highway that goes past the gurdwara. I realized immediately something was going on, so I called my dispatch. They said right away that we had a shooting, there was one officer down, and they put me right through to the ambulance that Lieutenant Brian Murphy was being transported to the hospital in.
I talked to the officer who was with him, and I asked him for a quick briefing of what was going on. He told me what had happened, and I ran right to the station, put on my uniform, and headed out to the scene.
I had a sergeant who was there who had arrived prior to me. He had taken command and was on the inner perimeter. The first thing I did was go up and tell him, “I have command,” and relieved him of those duties so he could handle the inner perimeter of where they were doing a search and grid search.
There were a lot of things that started happening after that. But the first decisions were taking command and then finding someone that I could hand command off to, because I was being pulled in so many directions. I was looking for familiar faces. Finally, one of my captains showed up, I gave him a quick briefing, and turned command over to him.
I then took over overall scene command, but he was the incident commander. It was all about finding bodies and familiar faces to put in places to get things done quickly and getting an idea of what was happening so we could make those decisions.
Q: It sounds like delegation of duties on the fly became very important, yes?
A: Yes, that’s right. And the media was already showing up. We didn’t realize at the time that this was going to be an international incident. Right away, we knew we had to set up a staging area for the media so that we could start feeding them information as soon as we were able to so they don’t start foraging around for their own stories.
Q: In retrospect, what was the hardest decision you had to make on that terrible day?
A: The hardest decision I had to make that day was who was going to handle the investigation. Prior to this, I never imagined there was going to be an incident that our department couldn’t handle. At this particular incident, there wasn’t much we could handle because of the scope of it. We handled the scene. The officers took care of the problem. That wasn’t an issue. They took care of the whole problem immediately.
But I had to make a decision whether the FBI or a state crime investigation unit would take over the initial scene and help with processing. I had an officer-involved shooting. I didn’t have people to investigate that. So, we had all kinds of things to dole out. Basically, I had to make the choice. Who was going to handle the major part of this investigation?
That took a while to go through, and that was the hardest decision I had to make.
Q: What did you ultimately decide?
A: I decided that the FBI would handle the crime scene and the investigation of the shooting. We didn’t know if this was an attack on gurdwaras around the United States, if it was planned, and were there other things going on. My thoughts were the best people to get boots on the ground in as many places as possible would be the FBI.
I then chose the Milwaukee Police Department and the District Attorney’s office to handle the officer-involved shooting, and that was difficult also because we had always handled our own. Our officers had an expectation of how it should be done, and now we were handing it over to another agency. They did a fantastic job! I couldn’t be more pleased with how they handled it.
Q: So, at what point did you realize that this tragedy was going to draw so much attention around the United States and around the world?
A: When you are in one of these situations and you’re at the scene, you’re in the command post, you’re meeting with people ... you are in a bit of a bubble. The rest of the country knew a lot more about this than we actually did, and it has to do with the shooter himself. Very quickly, information got out on him.
As far as who he was, he was a white supremacist and that had been leaked out. I wasn’t aware of that. I wasn’t watching TV. I wasn’t watching any news reports. I was trying to gather information for our first press conference. Then, I started getting questions about white supremacists, and then I became very cautious. I knew he was associated with white supremacy, but not to what extent. I had to say, “If I say that, I can’t take it back. I need more information.”
I think it was the next day, CNN was in our driveway and I walked out. And they said, “Would you like to see the piece we’re doing on the shooter?” And it was all about the white supremacist stuff he was involved in. I thought, “Wow! This is WAY beyond anything I’ve been told yet!” They had everything on this guy. Everything that he was involved in, every place he had been.
It was at that point that I realized, “Holy cow, this is big.” It was not only national news, I was getting calls from India. So, we knew it had gone international very quickly. But we were in a bubble for the first 12 or more hours on just how big it was.
Q: How did that spotlight affect how you did your job in the moment?
A: In the moment, it was so fast and so crazy and so chaotic at the scene.
Once we got a handle on things and the next day started, the media started pouring in from all over the world. We were pretty much tied up, talking to different people about different things, having meetings, having press conferences. It actually made me understand my role as a chief better.
I had been in law enforcement for 30 years, and I was only the chief at that time for a couple of years. When that happened, my former chief contacted me and talked to me about some of the things going on. I realized at that particular moment that “I am no longer a cop. For my role in our department, our size, and where we were at, I am now a support person. I’m an administrator, and my total role is to support patrol and make sure they have what they need to succeed.”
And they did. They had it that day. But it wasn’t because of me. It was because of my former chief who had made sure they had all of the equipment, knowledge, and training that they needed that day. But it really opened my mind. I said, “Now, I get it. I know exactly what my role is.”
Q: What did you and your officers learn from this tragedy?
A: So many wanted to hear about what happened, and we had so many things we wanted to tell people so they didn’t have to go through the mistakes we made. We probably did 60 to 70 presentations the first year around the United States, and I neglected my department for that year. I look back and I think, “Wow! It was important to get out this message, but I wasn’t where I needed to be.”
I also learned how important it is to step back and see who is directly involved. Just because they didn’t pull the trigger or get shot at, they are still affected. You need to get them away from the scene as soon as possible.
But the biggest thing that we did learn was, and I try and tell this to other chiefs when I go out to talk to them, is that your cops need the knowledge, the equipment, and the training to get the job done. They also need to be empowered to use those tools that we’ve given them, and they’ll handle any situation. We have to trust them to do that. They don’t need supervisors looking over their shoulder. Yes, we need supervisors. But when the bell rings, they need to be allowed to do what they need to do to take care of the situation.
As we always say about that day, August 5, 2012, nobody cared who had stripes, bars, or stars. We had a lieutenant who was out with 17 gunshot wounds. The officers handled it and took care of the problem. All they needed was what we had previously given them to take care of it.
Q: Was there some advice that was given to you earlier in your career that has stuck with you with regards to leadership?
A: When you start off as a cop, you feel like you want to be a young lion and go out and hunt. You don’t really think about those things that happen down the road. As you get a little longer into your career, you get a promotion or something like and you start to see what other people are doing.
The best thing that I was told was “Be the best at what you are doing.” So, if you are a patrol officer, just be the best at it! Don’t look past that position to sergeant or lieutenant. Because if you are looking for leadership, you can’t pick and choose that leadership role. It will find you. It will come to you. If you are the best at what you do in your role, people can’t ignore you. You are going to get moved up when the time comes.
Q: Is there anyone outside of law enforcement that you have taken inspiration from -- a legislator, a captain of industry, a historical figure, a clergyman, etc -- whose words and/or deeds have helped you when making tough decisions?
A: I’ve seen both Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell talk. And just their presence and the way they are confident in how they talk about gathering the right information and making sure you make the best decision. When you make a decision, you stick by it. If it’s a bad one, you live with it. And if it’s a good one, you live with that, too … One of the things I take away from them is “Don’t try and bluff.” Talk to what you know. If you don’t know it, you don’t know it. But people will ultimately know if you’re lying about it.
Q: Finally, you continue to serve as a guest speaker and give presentations from time to time around your state and across the United States. What are some of the key messages you try and impart to your audiences, especially with regards to dealing with a tragedy in one’s community?
A: I always show them the faces of the victims from the Gurdwara, and I tell them there’s a reason why we do our training. There are always faces behind it. We lost six members of our community. We can get better so we don’t lose members. And we were there very fast, and our officers handled it all very well. But people need to know that, with regards to training, there is a reason you do it and there is a reason for it. It’s not to take up time.
I also tell officers, “You need to know the people in your areas.”
The Gurdwara was kind of closed to us. They didn’t have a lot of trust with the police in India, and they brought it here. We had offered them help years prior, because we knew they were being mistaken for Muslims and there was a lot of violence against them after 9/11. And they turned us down, because they didn’t trust the police in India. We didn’t push that.
We didn’t take it to another level and try and work that out, and we should have. So, know who is in your community. Find out what’s going on.
And when I talk to chiefs and administrators, I tell them, “If you are a decision maker and your people come to you with new equipment or training recommendations within reason, and your first response out of the box is “That will never happen, that won’t fly,” you need to quit this profession and go do something else. Turn the reins over to someone else, because it passed you by. Our role is support. Whether you get the equipment or the training or not, our job is to try.
Finally, if you do have one of these incidents, I believe we have a requirement to pass on lessons learned. We need to share that information with other agencies. And it shouldn’t be “Look what we did.” It should be “Look what we did wrong so that it doesn’t happen again.”
[Edited for sikhchic.com]
October 23, 2014