JULY 2005 • Volume 29 • No. 7

Not your typical medical school sabbatical

The pitch to Hollywood producers would go like this: Handsome, 40-something director of world-class emergency department who not only wields a scalpel but knows how to fire a gun. Meet the cop doc, a physician who's ready to tackle any trauma as part of a SWAT - Special Weapons and Tactics - team.

This might sound like some far-out premise for the latest network crime drama, but this one would be reality TV.

After six months of intensive, boot-camp-like training at a police academy in San Mateo, Bob Norris, chief of emergency medicine, graduated earlier this year at the top of his class. It isn't how most professors choose to spend their sabbaticals, but the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, had inspired Norris, 47, to find some way he could thank the law enforcement officers who help to protect the nation.

Norris decided that he wanted to serve as medical support for emergency tactical teams, so that he could offer officers, as well as victims and offenders, immediate treatment if they are injured in the line of fire. "It's becoming more and more common to have such a provider available because of the bad outcomes that can occur," he explained. "And it lets me give a little back to the people who protect me and my family."

Norris admitted that some colleagues were surprised when he told them about his sabbatical. "I got some funny looks when I first mentioned it," he said. "But after I explain it in the context of tactical medicine and wanting to be a more effective volunteer, they seem to think it makes a lot of sense."

The cop doc began volunteering with the Santa Clara County Sheriff's tactical medical team a few years ago - the team now has six volunteer medical professionals - but he and other team members felt that they needed to undergo more training on how to conduct themselves in a high-pressured crime scene.

So in 2003 Norris completed the first tier of training - 180 hours of class and exercises - at the police academy, qualifying to be an entry-level reserve deputy. Still, he wanted to go even further and complete the training that would allow him to be a full-fledged police officer. That meant doing the six-month program, followed by an internship in the field.

"Extremely wrenching" is how Norris described his latest stint at the academy.

Classes were far different, obviously, than medical school, but to an observer the level of detail might appear as rigorous. Certainly the physical demands were more rigorous than an all night of studying with a coffee pot.

In lessons on nighttime shooting, Norris struggled to learn how to shoot with a flashlight in one hand, gun in the other. "It was incredibly counterintuitive," he said.

Another exercise involved a surprise nighttime ambush in which a criminal began shooting at Norris, and he had to return fire while making his way back to the patrol car to radio for help.

"You know it's going to happen at some point in the course," Norris said. "You know someone's going to pop up and start shooting at you - but you don't know when." Although they're using blanks, he said, it's hard to treat it as make believe. "It's very scary," he said. "You get tunnel vision, and you have the sensation that everything slows down."

In two other classes - High-Risk Felony Pursuits and Emergency Vehicle Operation - road courses were laid out with scads of closely-place cones. "You tip over one cone, you flunk the course," he remarked. A recruit has another chance on any test that they fail, but a second failure means having to drop out of the course and start over next term.

Norris had one close call in an exercise in which he had to search a suspect who he had just wrestled to the ground. He found a gun and a knife hidden on his body, but he missed a small fork hiidden on his body, but he missed a small fork hidden on the man's forearm by the sleeve of his sweatshirt. "I went home and told my son that I would pay him $5 for every weapon he hid on his body that I couldn't find," he said. Although his son made some good pocket money, Norris passed the test the second time around and didn't miss any hidden weapons for the remainder of the course.

On March 3, Norris' 880 hours of work culminated in a graduation ceremony at the San Mateo Center for Performing Arts. His 38 graduating classmates, in perfectly fitted, dark-blue uniforms, and Norris in his sheriff's tan and green, all punctuated with white gloves, marched into the auditorium, straight through the delighted throng of family and friends, as well as uniformed representatives from precincts stretching from San Francisco to San Jose.

In the months since graduation, Norris has stayed involved by participating in field exercises with local law enforcement agencies and says he will decide whether to become more involved with practical field training that would allow him to go "solo" and perform such tasks as making arrests without an accompanying senior officer.

Norris, who is married and the father of two teenagers, isn't about to quit his day job to become a police officer, although he hopes to complete the field training later this year. Doing the training is partly for his personal satisfaction, but, more important, he believes it will allow him to work better with officers in the field.

In the meantime, Norris continues to respond to pages from law enforcement agencies in Santa Clara County that need medical support during an action. He has been called on a number of occasions - including a potential hostage situation that turned out to be a suicide - where he has had to don body armor and a helmet and rush to the scene, but none of them has yet required him to ply his skills.

Still, the knowledge Norris has acquired from participating in these actions and doing the police training has opened up new avenues for research. He's started to work on a study of the best way to perform advanced rescue breathing to help a badly injured person to breathe in an emergency crime setting.

-By M.A. Malone, Stanford Medical Center Office
of Communication and Public Affairs

Photo: courtesy of Bob Norris