This past February 15 was the anniversary of the mass shooting in my hometown of Aurora, IL. On that day in 2019, six people were killed, including the perpetrator, and seven people were injured, including six cops. The Police Chief in Aurora at that time was Kristen Ziman. If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you may recognize Kristen’s name from a review I did of her book, Reimagining Blue: Thoughts on Life, Leadership, and a New Way Forward in Policing.
I began following Kristen on social media after the George Floyd murder and have found that she and I have very similar opinions about a number of subjects. But one subject we disagree about is compassion. In this post, I want to examine our disagreement and look at a Facebook post she shared on the sixth anniversary of the Pratt shooting.
Here’s what Kristen said on her Facebook page:
“Yesterday, during my interview with WGN Chicago about the Pratt and Uvalde shootings, I was asked if I’ve reached a point where I feel compassion for the shooters.
“Before the interviewer could even finish the question, I cut in—“No.”
“I don’t care what road led them to that moment. I don’t give a damn about their trauma, their struggles, or their mental health. There are millions of people who have endured horrific circumstances, who battle demons daily, and yet they don’t pick up a gun and slaughter innocent people.
“I don’t feel compassion. I feel rage. And when I think about the families who have to endure another anniversary without their loved ones—the first responders who will never be the same, some carrying scars both seen and unseen—my rage only deepens.
“Today marks another year since the Pratt shooting. Stop and reflect. Mourn the angels stolen that day. Honor the heroes who ran into gunfire, who took bullets trying to stop a coward.
And don’t waste a second of sympathy on the one who caused it.
Let me address the elephant in the room right off the bat. Kristen was there. I was not. Kristen was in the thick of it. She and her fellow cops—many of whom I’m sure she counts as friends—were being shot at. To the best of my knowledge, I didn’t know anyone—cop or civilian—that was in harms way that day. So, when I say I disagree with Kristen’s stand on compassion in this case, I have the luxury of saying it with a certain amount of detachment. I hate what happened that day. I hate that six people, five of them innocent, were killed. But I will never know what Kristen must feel; what she felt that day and what she must carry with her every day since. I’m going to get into my disagreement with her in a second, but don’t think for a moment that I know what Kristen and the other cops went through on that fateful day. I don’t and I never will.
Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about compassion. To read Kristen’s words, I can see that she has no compassion for the man who killed five innocent people that day in Aurora (I prefer not to use his name). Instead of compassion, she feels a sense of rage that has only grown since the day of the shooting. As she says, she doesn’t care about the shooter’s background—their trauma, their struggles, or their mental illness. Whatever led them to pick up a gun and take five innocent lives, she doesn’t care. What she cares about are the victims and their families. What she cares about are the cops who put their lives on the line so even more innocents weren’t killed. But she doesn’t care about the perp or what happened in his life that led him to become homicidal.
Truthfully, I can understand her feelings. I don’t agree with them, but I completely understand them. I’ve shared Kristen’s thoughts with other people and some felt the same as she did. They said that the perp could rot in hell and they only hope he felt the same pain he had caused. But other people had a different take. One person said that compassion wasn’t something that was earned by other people but was instead generated by the person feeling the compassion. I compare it to forgiveness, where the person doing the forgiving is the one that benefits from it.
I view compassion that I have for others as coming from a place of love and gratitude inside of me. I have compassion for other people—even bad people—because they are fellow human beings; children of God, just like me. They may have done something horrible, but that doesn’t change the essence of who they are.
Here’s an example. I do not like Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer from Milwaukee. He isn’t someone I would ever want to be around. I think what he did is deplorable. But I have compassion for him, for the things he went through in his life, and for the sick thoughts that went through his head and that led him to do the horrible things he did. I absolutely think someone like that should be locked up and kept away from civilized society. But that has to do with justice, not compassion. Justice is what we as a society do to him. Compassion is what we do for ourselves.
Having compassion in no way requires approval of another person’s actions. It does not require a lack of accountability. In fact, just the opposite. I have enough compassion that I want to see someone like Jeffrey Dahmer kept away from the rest of the world. And when we hold him accountable and mete out justice, I want compassion to go hand-in-hand with justice. That doesn’t mean going easy on someone or looking the other way. It means giving them a sentence that is commensurate with the crime they committed. It means requiring that they pay an appropriate debt to society. It should be justice that we seek, not vengeance.
Also, Kristen said she felt rage, not compassion toward the Pratt shooter. Those things are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to feel both emotions, sometimes simultaneously. She also encouraged other to not waste their sympathy on the shooter. That’s fair. Sympathy is not required to feel compassion. As I think about it now, I still feel rage toward the shooter, but I also feel compassion. What I don’t feel is sympathy, so we do have that in common.
I strive to be a compassionate person. I don’t want to lose the ability to see the person behind the monster, although it’s fair to say that I also never want to lose sight of the monster. Monsters need to be punished for the bad things they do. But for my own sake, I hope I never lose the ability to feel compassion for my fellow human beings, as flawed and complicated as they might be.
