Several months ago we had occasion to file a police report, and DeKalb County wanted to send someone out rather than take it over the phone or have me come in. About 10 o’clock that night a police officer showed up at the door.

He came in. He was very courteous and efficient. He took our report and explained how we could get a copy of it. The whole thing took probably twenty minutes.

The next time I encountered him was on the news. Officer Kevin Toatley had been killed in a traffic accident, hit head-on by a driver heading the wrong way on the freeway. Officer Toatley was driving home. That afternoon he had survived a police chase that had ended in a shootout not very far from our house.

According to the news reports he had called his wife from the scene to tell her he was okay. A few hours later he was killed on the highway.

Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear about someone being killed. A policeman. A teenager. A homeless person. A senior citizen. The fact that our information is filtered through the flat screen of the television set makes it easier to absorb that someone with that particular label is dead without thinking about the fact that this was a person with—until that point—a future, with a family, perhaps with children who expected to see their father or mother come home.

I didn’t know Officer Toatley except for those twenty minutes he was in our house. He came because we had been wronged and needed to file an official report. I was impressed by him and by his ability to do his job, as minor as the part of it dealing with us might have been.

And since then I’ve had difficulty when I hear of another shooting or car crash getting beyond the fact that we seem to depersonalize them by giving them a label. Perhaps it makes it easier to live in a world that’s gone far too violent.

Violence is nothing new. Years ago, a man I had gone to school with, one of the mildest and most unassuming people imaginable, walked into his barn and was shot to death by his son.  The headline in the newspaper called him by name.

It’s not that violence exists, but that it’s so prevalent. And I’m afraid we’re becoming desensitized to it, to the point that otherwise normal people are on the Internet with posts in praise of somebody who took a shot at a shoplifter.

I believe, based on our very brief encounter, that our community lost something important when Kevin Toatley was killed. He was a man who did his job and went home to his family. He was, I’m sure, looking forward to seeing his children grow up. The headline read, “Officer killed in Crash.” But that’s very limiting. He was an officer. He was also a husband, a father, and as best I could tell, a very decent human being.

It would probably make us think more and perhaps do more if we quit killing labels and recognize that behind every one of them is a person who’s important to those around him or her. They’re not labels; they’re people.