An officer responding to a domestic call in a mobile home park in Greene County NC was shot to death by a young man when he walked up to his trailer to see what was going on. The killer then committed suicide. The officer, Deputy Jon Willis, was 31 years old and leaves two children behind. Deputy Willis was a devout Christian who liked to design and build cars and motorcycles. His 32nd birthday would have been yesterday.
Domestic disputes, as they are currently known, are the most dangerous category of police calls. One of the most hazardous things about domestic calls is that police never know what to expect. Women have been so thoroughly trained to use the police against their husbands and boyfriends that the call could simply be because she is trying to frame the guy up, or, on the other hand, there might really be a guy who’s ready to die and take someone with him. Police must respond as though each one is potentially deadly, and therefore these calls are dangerous to the subjects as well as police.
Often, the extreme examples, such as murder suicides, appear at first glance to justify a militaristic approach to all domestic calls, but culture is adaptive, and people will come to expect war whenever the police are called to a home. This could raise the stakes, prompting more desperate and more violent reactions toward the other parties in disputes as well as the police, causing an overall higher death/serious injury rate.
Another overlooked consequence of making the police the arbiters of all domestic disputes is the fact that women are far more likely to appeal to them for assistance – even when it is not justified – than they would be otherwise. This is why police have no idea what to expect. The whole thing could be a lie, in which case some innocent guy could end up shot dead by the police for picking up a cell phone in view of frightened officers sneaking up on him. If women only called the police when the situation was truly serious, then cops would be justified in approaching these calls as very delicate, dangerous situations.
However, I’ve had cops tell me that 90% of the calls they get from women are over something trivial, so in many cases the cops simply get tired of gearing up for battle because some drunk couple got into a shouting match. Deputy Willis approached the mobile home alone, without his vest, probably expecting simply another trailer park row. Unfortunately for him, it was a fateful call, and two young men, including a father of young children – a cop known as a good man – ended up dead.
