From the book: Brave Hearts: Extraordinary Stories of Pride, Pain and Courage
NYPD Captain Barry Galfano opens up about the stress suffered by first responders to the attacks of September 11, something he discovered only after intensive work with a therapist. Excerpted from Brave Hearts (braveheartsbook.com) by Cynthia Brown
In 2006 Galfano retired from the NYPD. It was not long after that before the emotions he thought were buried came flooding back.” I was exercising a lot and my new job as security director for the United Nations Plaza complex was demanding. I was busy. But every time I heard or saw anything about 9/11, I would completely break down. That’s when I decided to seek professional help.”
“It was during my visits to the counselor that I began to understand what we had all been through,” he said. “A sudden death, or bad accident or act of violence is one thing. It’s usually over in an instant and you can slowly recover with time. But there were a lot of us who worked at Ground Zero walking that pile every day, looking for remains of our friends who died, finding more body parts or even just small pieces of tissue, then calling the medical examiner to come and take it away. We had to deal with it over and over again.”
Barry’s therapist told him that to her knowledge there had never been an incident where first responders had to go back to the scene of a terrible crime where thousands of people died, day after day, week after week, month after month. The endless wakes and funerals only added to the extended emotional trauma. Barry attended over forty funeral services for close friends and colleagues in those first months after the attacks. There was no way to escape from the sadness and grief so he buried it deep inside.
In talking it out with the therapist, Barry began to understand the stress he was under had taken its toll on his family. His decision to sleep at Floyd Bennett Field so he could be closer to the site, meant he did not return home for weeks. He shut out his wife and children by not talking to them about what he was going through. The few times he did go home when he had a day off, things did not go well.
“I remember my first day off,” Barry said. “I couldn’t sit still. I kept calling my guys asking them if they found anything. My wife kept staring at me while I was on the phone. After a few hours she told me to go back to work. She said it was obvious it was where I wanted to be. So I left and went back to the site. It was my first day off and I was so restless I could not make it through a whole day at home.”
“The bonds we formed over those months working at the site were extremely close but they worked against us too,” Barry said. “On our days off, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves.”
When he did go home, his wife kept after him to talk to her, but he just couldn’t open up. Ultimately, their marriage did not withstand the stress and Barry and his wife filed for divorce.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
New Jersey Police Chiefs Speech
June 22, 2011
Speech for New jersey Police Chiefs Association
Thank you so much for inviting me to speak to you tonight. It’s the first time I have been asked to talk to such a prestigious group and I am truly honored.
First I’d like to tell you about my journey that landed me here tonight.
In the mid 1970s, I accepted a part-time job working on an early community project with the Boston Police Department. My job was in a very busy police station in one of the most crime-ridden areas of the city.
At that time there were very few women or minorities on the force and it seemed like every one of the two hundred officers assigned to the station where I worked were very outspoken about their conservative views on everything from the Vietnam War to women’s rights to homosexuality. One officer actually told me he didn’t think “girls” should have driver’s licenses.
It was quite a culture shock for a me – an ultra liberal-minded young woman who came of age in the 1960s - to find herself plopped down in the middle of this strange world.
I worked there for three years, helping to organize meetings between residents and the cops who patrolled their neighborhoods.
During that time I saw first hand what all of you do for us - the constant efforts to protect us against armed assailants, drug dealers, drunks, gangs, the homeless, truly crazy people, and a whole range of garden-variety crooks.
I was continually amazed at the restraint, humor, humanity and most imnportant integrity those incredible people showed as they went about their difficult tasks.
I saw more acts of human kindness and sacrifice in that police station than I had ever witnessed among my affluent, liberal neighbors in the Cambridge neighborhood near Harvard University where my husband, Jim, was a professor of economics at the Kennedy School.
One time I came back to the station and found an older officer sobbing — the kind where your whole body heaves. He had just returned from a call where he found a three-month-old baby dead in a bathtub.
The day of Christmas Eve the first year I worked there, one of the guys took home a particularly violent eleven-year-old boy so he wouldn’t have to spend Christmas Eve alone in a cell. The boy was black. The officer, who had six children of his own, was white.
Then there was the cop I saw over in the corner of the roll call room reading the book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, Susan Brownmiller’s seminal history of the crime of rape, after he responded to a brutal sexual assault of an older woman near a church. When I asked him about it, he seemed a little embarrassed. After all Susan Brownmiller was a radical, militant 1960’s feminist. He told me, “I’m just trying to figure out why it would happen. My daughter told me to read this book.”
I have so many memories and experiences I could share but by far the most memorable and a real watershed experience for me was an incident that captured the immoral and even dangerous ways the press, politicians and others twist and distort something the police were forced to do with the best information they had at the time, all in a split second of time.
It was just a week after two white Boston cops shot and killed a 12-year-old African-American boy. The press went wild with the usual stories – cops gun down unarmed teen, family and friends remember their son and friend, etc. Department was under tremendous pressure.
One of the things they did was organize a community meeting in a neighborhood where the boy lived. The city was suffering from the blow back of court ordered busing to integrate the schools and the racial situation was very tense. The news reports indicated violence was imminent.
Expecting there might be trouble, the department sent more than the usual contingent of uniformed officers, along with a sergeant, lieutenant and the commander of the district. As this entourage entered the church basement – lit must have looked like some sort of armed invasion - everyone in the room stood and applauded.
The police were totally dumbfounded.
As the meeting progressed, we learned the youngster who died had repeatedly assaulted and robbed people. He targeted the most vulnerable - young kids and the elderly.
At some point one of the people at the meeting stood up and actually read a list of the other bad kids in the neighborhood. He wanted to know if the cops could take them out too. The rest of the time that evening was spent with the police explaining why that was not an option.
The media, who was there in force, never reported that any of this took place. To me this seemed like an interesting turn of events. Who knows why they didn’t put that in their news stories.
You all may have some interesting theories about that.
After those three years in that station, I knew I wanted to do something that would help the law enforcement profession. Several years later when I founded American Police Beat, my goal was to create a publication so cops around the country could communicate with one another about the most pressing issues affecting their personal and professional lives. Today, 18 years later, American Police Beat is the leading law enforcement magazine in the United States.
And as many of you in this room know, five years ago I began working on a book about police work which was published this past November. My mission with Brave Hearts, Extraordinary Stories of Pride, Pain and Courage, was to introduce Americans to all of you wonderful people and let them know about the amazing job you do for us and the price you pay to do it.
So . . . for someone like me . . . who has spent my life advocating for you and doing my best to spread the word about the tremendous job you do for your communities and country, you can imagine how enraging it has been for me to watch the powers that be scapegoating you all for our current economic problems.
Your pay and benefits, which have absolutely nothing to do with the current mess we are in, are being blamed for the recession, the sub prime mortgage crisis, your city’s bond ratings and everything in between.
A lot of people think the war on police officers, fire fighters and teachers is a Republican effort and certainly when you look at the political party of Chris Christie along with the governors of Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, it’s true there’s no Democrats.
But I believe there’s a larger truth here.
It certainly would make all our lives easier if there was one political party that took public safety and the standard of living for law enforcement professionals seriously and another party that did not.
Then the choice would be easy.
Sadly that’s just not the case.
What we have here is more like a class war. It’s the top two percent of the richest people in the country versus everybody else. In a representative democracy like we think we have in the United States, the richest two percent of the population does not get to call all the shots. But increasingly that looks like the reality we’re dealing with.
I think that the safest way for all of us to approach politics these days is to just assume that anyone running for public office who wins ends up with another boss – and it’s not you or me.
I say forget all those cliches, “Democrats are big government spenders,” or “Republicans are serious about the national debt.”
Most of what we are seeing is a dog and pony show that’s increasing cultural divisions or just plain distracting us so we can no longer recognize our common interests.
Somehow we have to find a way to see past party labels, and all the screaming and bombast, and take a look at the deeper, darker alliances that are changing the very fabric of American life.
The evidence that were are at each other’s throats rather than working together to take back our country is everywhere. In my state, Massachusetts, a place that routinely votes to raise taxes to improve essential services like schools and public safety, the Democratically controlled State House of Representatives just outlawed collective bargaining over health care for state employees.
Granted that’s not as egregious as what we’re seeing in other states, but this is pro-union, liberal Massachusetts!
There is some good news here. And that is that I believe you guys are well suited for the battle ahead.
I think it’s pretty obvious that one of the things the powers that be might not have taken into consideration before they decided to scapegoat you for the recession and our lingering financial crisis by portraying you as budget-busting welfare queens who are cashing outrageous pension checks every month at taxpayer expense, is the reality of what you do.
Your work is challenging on levels that people outside the profession can not understand.
To be sure you do have victories.
Abducted kids are located and reunited with their families.
Violent criminals who terrorize communities are investigated, charged and prosecuted.
Dangerous drugs on their way to neighborhoods are intercepted and destroyed and the dealers are arrested.
But there’s the losses and defeats too. Three-time losers on parole gun down fellow officers in cold blood. Babies choke to death after swallowing a bottle cap as responding officers race up 15 flights of stairs in an apartment building with a broken elevator. Convicts released early from jail return to wreak havoc on communities because of budget cuts or cutting a deal with a prosecutor.
So much of your job is about sadness and loss.
But no one knows better than all of you in this room tonight that winning is not what a career in public safety is about.
Despite the seeming futility of the war on drugs, the complications involved in arresting someone like a mayor’s nephew and the revolving door of the criminal justice system, you show up day after day to do the work.
A lot of times it’s rewarding. More often it seems frustrating — like the Greek king Sisyphus who was forced for eternity to push a rock up a steep hill only to watch it roll back to square one.
But like Sisyphus, people who have chosen a career in law enforcement have perseverance and commitment. That’s why you’re all built perfectly for the fight ahead and why you will persevere against the Chris Christie’s of the world.
The assault by wealthy corporate interests on the rights of the American middle and working class did not start with the elections of last November and it won’t end in 2012.
For many people, seeing such powerful individuals and entities amassing against their interests is just too overwhelming. How can a mother of three making $40,000 annually compete with billionaires and all their think tanks and propaganda? It’s not hard to understand why some would just give up the fight and hope for the best.
But you guys are different.
You hold grudges.
You take being lied to seriously.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a street fight or a war for the hearts and minds of America, you definitely aren’t the folks people should think about going into a long protracted battle with.
Maybe the Governors of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and your very own Chris Christie here in New Jersey don’t really know any law enforcement professionals and simply don’t understand.
That might be why they figured that once the ball got rolling, cops would just hang their heads, tell their kids there’s no money for college and essentially just give up.
But law enforcement people are fighters. You know when you’re being lied to. If the Koch Brothers and their hired guns like your governor thought they could just screw you over and fly off on their private jets, I believe they were sorely mistaken.
This battle is not a sprint. It’s a marathon. And like the Greek philosopher Persius said, “He conquers who endures.”
American Police Beat will do everything we can to help and support you. So please free to call me anytime if there is something I can do.
In parting I would like to say that I hope you never forget that all of you have dedicated yourselves to the most noble profession. You are the people who bring justice to those who want to harm us.
You are the lynch pin of our great country and our democracy.
The right to be safe is our first and most important civil right and that’s the right you give to all of us at such great risk and cost to yourselves.
Without safety which is what you do, we really don’t have anything else.
You do the most important job and the toughest job out there.
Don’t you ever forget that.
Speech for New jersey Police Chiefs Association
Thank you so much for inviting me to speak to you tonight. It’s the first time I have been asked to talk to such a prestigious group and I am truly honored.
First I’d like to tell you about my journey that landed me here tonight.
In the mid 1970s, I accepted a part-time job working on an early community project with the Boston Police Department. My job was in a very busy police station in one of the most crime-ridden areas of the city.
At that time there were very few women or minorities on the force and it seemed like every one of the two hundred officers assigned to the station where I worked were very outspoken about their conservative views on everything from the Vietnam War to women’s rights to homosexuality. One officer actually told me he didn’t think “girls” should have driver’s licenses.
It was quite a culture shock for a me – an ultra liberal-minded young woman who came of age in the 1960s - to find herself plopped down in the middle of this strange world.
I worked there for three years, helping to organize meetings between residents and the cops who patrolled their neighborhoods.
During that time I saw first hand what all of you do for us - the constant efforts to protect us against armed assailants, drug dealers, drunks, gangs, the homeless, truly crazy people, and a whole range of garden-variety crooks.
I was continually amazed at the restraint, humor, humanity and most imnportant integrity those incredible people showed as they went about their difficult tasks.
I saw more acts of human kindness and sacrifice in that police station than I had ever witnessed among my affluent, liberal neighbors in the Cambridge neighborhood near Harvard University where my husband, Jim, was a professor of economics at the Kennedy School.
One time I came back to the station and found an older officer sobbing — the kind where your whole body heaves. He had just returned from a call where he found a three-month-old baby dead in a bathtub.
The day of Christmas Eve the first year I worked there, one of the guys took home a particularly violent eleven-year-old boy so he wouldn’t have to spend Christmas Eve alone in a cell. The boy was black. The officer, who had six children of his own, was white.
Then there was the cop I saw over in the corner of the roll call room reading the book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, Susan Brownmiller’s seminal history of the crime of rape, after he responded to a brutal sexual assault of an older woman near a church. When I asked him about it, he seemed a little embarrassed. After all Susan Brownmiller was a radical, militant 1960’s feminist. He told me, “I’m just trying to figure out why it would happen. My daughter told me to read this book.”
I have so many memories and experiences I could share but by far the most memorable and a real watershed experience for me was an incident that captured the immoral and even dangerous ways the press, politicians and others twist and distort something the police were forced to do with the best information they had at the time, all in a split second of time.
It was just a week after two white Boston cops shot and killed a 12-year-old African-American boy. The press went wild with the usual stories – cops gun down unarmed teen, family and friends remember their son and friend, etc. Department was under tremendous pressure.
One of the things they did was organize a community meeting in a neighborhood where the boy lived. The city was suffering from the blow back of court ordered busing to integrate the schools and the racial situation was very tense. The news reports indicated violence was imminent.
Expecting there might be trouble, the department sent more than the usual contingent of uniformed officers, along with a sergeant, lieutenant and the commander of the district. As this entourage entered the church basement – lit must have looked like some sort of armed invasion - everyone in the room stood and applauded.
The police were totally dumbfounded.
As the meeting progressed, we learned the youngster who died had repeatedly assaulted and robbed people. He targeted the most vulnerable - young kids and the elderly.
At some point one of the people at the meeting stood up and actually read a list of the other bad kids in the neighborhood. He wanted to know if the cops could take them out too. The rest of the time that evening was spent with the police explaining why that was not an option.
The media, who was there in force, never reported that any of this took place. To me this seemed like an interesting turn of events. Who knows why they didn’t put that in their news stories.
You all may have some interesting theories about that.
After those three years in that station, I knew I wanted to do something that would help the law enforcement profession. Several years later when I founded American Police Beat, my goal was to create a publication so cops around the country could communicate with one another about the most pressing issues affecting their personal and professional lives. Today, 18 years later, American Police Beat is the leading law enforcement magazine in the United States.
And as many of you in this room know, five years ago I began working on a book about police work which was published this past November. My mission with Brave Hearts, Extraordinary Stories of Pride, Pain and Courage, was to introduce Americans to all of you wonderful people and let them know about the amazing job you do for us and the price you pay to do it.
So . . . for someone like me . . . who has spent my life advocating for you and doing my best to spread the word about the tremendous job you do for your communities and country, you can imagine how enraging it has been for me to watch the powers that be scapegoating you all for our current economic problems.
Your pay and benefits, which have absolutely nothing to do with the current mess we are in, are being blamed for the recession, the sub prime mortgage crisis, your city’s bond ratings and everything in between.
A lot of people think the war on police officers, fire fighters and teachers is a Republican effort and certainly when you look at the political party of Chris Christie along with the governors of Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, it’s true there’s no Democrats.
But I believe there’s a larger truth here.
It certainly would make all our lives easier if there was one political party that took public safety and the standard of living for law enforcement professionals seriously and another party that did not.
Then the choice would be easy.
Sadly that’s just not the case.
What we have here is more like a class war. It’s the top two percent of the richest people in the country versus everybody else. In a representative democracy like we think we have in the United States, the richest two percent of the population does not get to call all the shots. But increasingly that looks like the reality we’re dealing with.
I think that the safest way for all of us to approach politics these days is to just assume that anyone running for public office who wins ends up with another boss – and it’s not you or me.
I say forget all those cliches, “Democrats are big government spenders,” or “Republicans are serious about the national debt.”
Most of what we are seeing is a dog and pony show that’s increasing cultural divisions or just plain distracting us so we can no longer recognize our common interests.
Somehow we have to find a way to see past party labels, and all the screaming and bombast, and take a look at the deeper, darker alliances that are changing the very fabric of American life.
The evidence that were are at each other’s throats rather than working together to take back our country is everywhere. In my state, Massachusetts, a place that routinely votes to raise taxes to improve essential services like schools and public safety, the Democratically controlled State House of Representatives just outlawed collective bargaining over health care for state employees.
Granted that’s not as egregious as what we’re seeing in other states, but this is pro-union, liberal Massachusetts!
There is some good news here. And that is that I believe you guys are well suited for the battle ahead.
I think it’s pretty obvious that one of the things the powers that be might not have taken into consideration before they decided to scapegoat you for the recession and our lingering financial crisis by portraying you as budget-busting welfare queens who are cashing outrageous pension checks every month at taxpayer expense, is the reality of what you do.
Your work is challenging on levels that people outside the profession can not understand.
To be sure you do have victories.
Abducted kids are located and reunited with their families.
Violent criminals who terrorize communities are investigated, charged and prosecuted.
Dangerous drugs on their way to neighborhoods are intercepted and destroyed and the dealers are arrested.
But there’s the losses and defeats too. Three-time losers on parole gun down fellow officers in cold blood. Babies choke to death after swallowing a bottle cap as responding officers race up 15 flights of stairs in an apartment building with a broken elevator. Convicts released early from jail return to wreak havoc on communities because of budget cuts or cutting a deal with a prosecutor.
So much of your job is about sadness and loss.
But no one knows better than all of you in this room tonight that winning is not what a career in public safety is about.
Despite the seeming futility of the war on drugs, the complications involved in arresting someone like a mayor’s nephew and the revolving door of the criminal justice system, you show up day after day to do the work.
A lot of times it’s rewarding. More often it seems frustrating — like the Greek king Sisyphus who was forced for eternity to push a rock up a steep hill only to watch it roll back to square one.
But like Sisyphus, people who have chosen a career in law enforcement have perseverance and commitment. That’s why you’re all built perfectly for the fight ahead and why you will persevere against the Chris Christie’s of the world.
The assault by wealthy corporate interests on the rights of the American middle and working class did not start with the elections of last November and it won’t end in 2012.
For many people, seeing such powerful individuals and entities amassing against their interests is just too overwhelming. How can a mother of three making $40,000 annually compete with billionaires and all their think tanks and propaganda? It’s not hard to understand why some would just give up the fight and hope for the best.
But you guys are different.
You hold grudges.
You take being lied to seriously.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a street fight or a war for the hearts and minds of America, you definitely aren’t the folks people should think about going into a long protracted battle with.
Maybe the Governors of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and your very own Chris Christie here in New Jersey don’t really know any law enforcement professionals and simply don’t understand.
That might be why they figured that once the ball got rolling, cops would just hang their heads, tell their kids there’s no money for college and essentially just give up.
But law enforcement people are fighters. You know when you’re being lied to. If the Koch Brothers and their hired guns like your governor thought they could just screw you over and fly off on their private jets, I believe they were sorely mistaken.
This battle is not a sprint. It’s a marathon. And like the Greek philosopher Persius said, “He conquers who endures.”
American Police Beat will do everything we can to help and support you. So please free to call me anytime if there is something I can do.
In parting I would like to say that I hope you never forget that all of you have dedicated yourselves to the most noble profession. You are the people who bring justice to those who want to harm us.
You are the lynch pin of our great country and our democracy.
The right to be safe is our first and most important civil right and that’s the right you give to all of us at such great risk and cost to yourselves.
Without safety which is what you do, we really don’t have anything else.
You do the most important job and the toughest job out there.
Don’t you ever forget that.
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