How is it that in the United States, we feel totally comfortable and fine acknowledging that combat veterans returning from war will likely suffer from PTSD, but we absolutely would never acknowledge that cops probably do too, as a matter of course? 

Cops are another group of people whose job it is to experience trauma so that other people are protected. Police officers are constantly telling us that they’re scared. That’s the reason they give every time they are asked why they killed an unarmed, innocent person, and it is accepted as a legitimate reason every time. I’m sure that sometimes a situation is so alarming that any person would make the decision to shoot a person to death. I’m just as sure that cops with untreated PTSD make bad decisions all the time. Racism is the biggest part of the problem of police brutality, but racism is an assumption around which the criminal justice system was built, and needs to be tackled holistically, but requiring cops to get regular therapy as part of the job would at least reduce the amount that that racism mattered in life and death situations. Let’s treat cops like people with regular human responses to trauma. Cops need therapy.