Ex-hero ex-MO cop who assaulted his ex-wife said years ago that he needed more help | Opinion

The ex-hero ex-police chief from Greenwood, Missouri, who’s going away for 18 years for assaulting his ex-wife said years ago that he needed a longer and more targeted inpatient psychiatric stay than he got after beating a handcuffed suspect in 2018.

We don’t know why that didn’t happen, or whether it would have kept Greg Hallgrimson from later punching his former spouse, and then threatening to kill himself if she told the truth about how she’d really gotten that broken nose and fractured eye socket in June of 2020. For more than a year, she said she’d fallen down some stairs.

But we do know that our prisons are filled with people who needed treatment they did not get.

We know that even those so ill they’ve been found incompetent to stand trial can spend years in Missouri jails because no hospital beds are available.

We know that because domestic violence tends to escalate over time, it would be very unusual for the first such incident to send a victim to the emergency room with broken bones.

And though there is a lack of good data on domestic violence perpetrated by law enforcement officers, the studies that have been done suggest that it’s even more common than in the general population.

Police culture, domestic violence linked

As Bowling Green State University’s 2013 “Fox in the Henhouse: A Study of Police Officers Arrested for Crimes Associated with Domestic and/or Family Violence” notes: “many of the risk factors associated with the perpetration of domestic violence in the general population are also ‘conspicuously present’ within the context of police culture and everyday police work, including violence exposure, alcohol abuse, and authoritarianism. The constellation of risk factors suggests a link between the conditions of police work and violence within police families.”

It looked at 2,219 such arrests, and found that more than half of those officers who were convicted kept their jobs.

Hallgrimson first made the news because of another act of domestic violence by another man in need of psychiatric care.

That was in December of 2018, when Hallgrimson and another officer saved a baby that the little girl’s father had tried to drown in an icy pond. Jonathon Stephen Zicarelli told police that after having “bad thoughts” that wouldn’t go away, he’d left her there to die. Then he headed to the police department to confess to the murder he thought he’d committed.

There was no murder only because Hallgrimson and Cpl. Tom Calhoun raced to the pond, where Calhoun waded into the thigh-high water and pulled her out. Then they wrapped her in Hallgrimson’s shirt, and Calhoun gave her CPR until paramedics arrived.

Police chief beat suspect handcuffed in chair

We need heroes, and Hallgrimson was recognized as one, both by the public and by the Missouri Senate.

But then we learned that in a rage captured on video, Hallgrimson had beaten Zicarelli in a police interrogation room. While the suspect was restrained in a chair with both arms handcuffed behind his back, he threw him on the ground and struck him.

Reportedly, Hallgrimson himself found it frightening that so many who wrote to him after hearing about this attack not only approved of what he’d done to Zicarelli, but thought it made him a hero all over again. He was placed on administrative leave, though, and later resigned.

Eventually, Zicarelli was convicted of felony child abuse and sentenced to 15 years in prison, while Hallgrimson pleaded guilty to assaulting him and got five years of probation.

Eighteen months after Hallgrimson’s December 2018 attack on Zicarelli, he punched his ex-wife unconscious during an argument.

Eighteen months after that, he told The Star that “there’s just no way for the human brain to see the things that first responders see and not have it affect them. What I’ve learned is that this is a huge issue that needs to be tackled.”

Of course it is. Yet we still don’t adequately fund treatment, even as the need continues to grow. We still don’t take domestic violence seriously enough. We certainly don’t want to hear that our protectors are at a higher risk of committing it.

And as long as that’s the case, whole chain reactions of violence that might have been prevented by the right interventions will keep happening.