There is veracity in the story about RCMP Officer Desmond Sandboe's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as it was used in the defense of his actions during the court hearings into why he laid such a beating, a video-taped and recorded drubbing, on Andrew Clyburn. Stress leads to disorders of the brain that can barely be controlled, sometimes showing up as extreme actions that suddenly become the only recourse. It's not that RCMP officer Desmond Sandboe spent nine years in a police career waiting for a chance to beat a guy on camera in a cell.
PTSD is a fact of life but it gets out of control under certain circumstances. This disorder may be prevalent in police work. Police officers face a line of duty that adds immense stress to their lives. Divorce, suicide, and explosions like Sandboe's, these are symptomatic of the stress of the job. The fact is, who else deals face-to-face (and sometimes first) with the terrible things humans do to each other? Witnessing this, embattled by it, this must be horrific.
Imagine the memories of two officers who walked into the Atlinger murder scene in Edmonton. The man and woman constables will never forget the stench of death in that burnt steel barrel. They testified to it court, that it was pungent. They will need psychological treatment for months to process the pungency It's reality. Anyone would need to see a doctor if they walked into a garage that smelled of death and had the awareness and the training to know they were dealing with the human vein. They were standing amid a death scene, possibly facing one of their very own. They were confronting a killer, who, turns out, was and is indeed a murderous fiend.
Yes stress is a killer and killers cause stress. This stress is the court-expressed reason for Sandboe's insane burst of rage upon Clyburn, and in light of the diagnosis of PTSD, there can be no reason for Sandboe to be dismissed. What cannot be dismissed, in the treatment of this officer, and any officer, is the way PTSD occurs. It is often cumulative. It is the outcome of prior history with high stress encounters. One incident in the Sandboe case. in particular, speaks to the accumulation of his stress starting well prior to the Lac La Biche incident. Sandboe had another high stress encounter with a serving but off-duty Edmonton Police Service officer in 2003. And as it turned out, later, it is partly his duty to deal with the aftermath of the killing frenzy in Mayerthorpe, Alberta, by James Rozko.
PTSD is deadly and occurs from close encounters with death that cannot be erased from the mind, and these encounters accumulate to create greater disorder. PTSD requires empathy, for people who have severe forms of the disorder often describe life as being rather unlivable without a distinct purpose, meanwhile the disorder causes so much dissembling of a person's character, via things like dissociation, explosive rage, amnesia, flashbacks, and deep contemplations of suicide or paranoia, keeping focused on a distinct purpose becomes a major challenge.
It's not his dedication or commitment to duty that is in question because, frankly, he showed a form of restraint when Clyburn's head came up to the cement wall in the prison cell (as shown on Youtube), and I think Sandboe realized he was way out of control at that instant, when perhaps he had a moment of clarity that saw himself putting Clyburn's head into a different state of matter.
Taking Sandboe out of police work might be the worst thing the RCMP could do to the man. “I've been painted as a monster; I've been painted as a bully,” he told media after his sentencing to six months house arrest. "It's been horrible stress, depression, anxiety, humiliation. It breaks you down." Clyburn for his part rightly pointed out that Sandboe should have been on leave and in treatment since he was in that condition.
Police see things and experience the living nightmares. Lest we forget, it was Sandboe's chums in the body count of officers in Roszko's insanity, and cops are under threat at all times anyway, people wanting to kill them at any moment, and cops may be called upon to kill at any moment, and that's the last thing anybody wants to do unless they are people who belong in other kinds of uniforms.
No doubt cops get stress, and some probably get addicted to it. It's only natural that they would live with high adrenaline levels and learn to cope with it. They also need help when it goes too far.
