Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

The subject of police suicide has gotten considerable attention lately. First the California Highway Patrol acknowledged that their recent history showed a suicide rate among their officers five times the national law enforcement average, which is already a scary number. A month later, a USA Today report, documented that this was a national problem. Of course, those of us who are a little closer to the problem weren’t too surprised. Suicide among cops has always been our crazy aunt in the basement.

Suicidal tendencies, and mental illness generally, is one of those things that we see in our colleagues and look the other way. Alcoholism is another. Cops might rat out a colleague who is a thief, a child molester, or a drug user (unless the drug is an anabolic steroid, which I’ve discussed before), but mental illness and drinking too much are just those things that come with the territory. Although cops don’t like to admit it and the movies make it look otherwise, there are lots of jobs that are deadlier than police work. The U.S. Department of Labor keeps track of these things , and law enforcement usually comes in around the high 20s or low 30s in the list of America’s most deadly occupations. The difference between police work and the more lethal lines of work is that, for the most part, cops won’t die when something falls on them or when their foot gets snagged in the rigging of a fishing boat. When you’re a cop, you have to contend with the idea that people are going to start their day with the hopes that they can off a pig before they go to bed, and they occasionally succeed at it. The physical dangers of police work are overrated. But in psychological terms, it takes a back seat only to soldiering on a battlefield, where just about everyone will become a psychological casualty if you leave them there long enough.

So, why won’t cops protect their brother and sister officers when they see that one of them is going off the deep end? Why don’t they come forward and tell their supervisor that Dave or Sally is considering The 9mm Solution? It’s because reporting Dave or Sally makes it highly likely that Dave or Sally will lose their badges and be cast out of the family, and that is the worst thing that can happen to a cop.

Law enforcement agencies are not optimal sources for positive strokes and caring. Where line employees are concerned, they are (mostly) as cutthroat as the most hostile workplace you can imagine. If an officer appears to be a liability, either because they aren’t behaving as desired on the street or because their loyalty to their masters is questionable, someone is going to be planning a way to show them the door. Even if you ignore the humanity factor and quantify the officer in dollars and cents, an officer may represent an investment well over $100,000 in costs of recruiting, training, and experience. If the officer were a $100,000 piece of equipment that was broken, there would usually be some thought given to fixing it, rather than throwing it away. That philosophy doesn’t apply when the machine has a soul and runs on hamburgers.

Even more oddly, in an era where cops are supposed to be more attentive to the personal needs of citizens and sensitive to their cultural mindsets, the cops who are most adept at this are going to be the ones who are most at risk for psychological injury. Police officers who are more cerebral and in touch with their emotions leave themselves open to being hurt. It’s not like they will collapse into tears the first time an arrestee insults their pedigree, but this kind of thing is like nuclear radiation. It’s cumulative, and while you can treat the symptoms, you can’t purge the poison.

Is this just one of those things that is an immutable part of the job, or can we do something about it? As for the root causes, those are here to stay. People are always going to resent authority figures to some degree, and find a way to transfer the source of their troubles to the person who catches them in the act. People who can’t endure being condemned by the folks they are trying to serve need to find a good truck driving school.

The way officers are treated by their employers can change, though. First, psychological injuries have to be recognized as occupational hazards, just like heart disease, back injuries and the occasional bullet or knife wound have been. When an officer sustains such an injury, the employer should be committed and obligated to making them whole again. Like with other occupational injuries, that may mean medical retirement, but there should first be a priority to treating the officer and restoring them to full duty. There will be some cops who will exploit this and make claims of mental illness so they can retire earlier or with elevated benefits, just like some cops do with other claims of on-the-job injuries. Take steps to prevent this, but also consider which is the lesser of two evils: paying some fraudulent claims, or burying more cops who kill themselves?

Second, educate both street cops and managers to the perils of mental illness and the successes of treatment. In my day, there was zero training in the police academy on the risk of infectious disease, even though hepatitis A, B & C were already hazards, and we were just becoming aware of an infection called AIDS. Now, bloodborne pathogen training is standard in both law enforcement and in many private industries, even though he number of cops that have contracted AIDS through occupational duties can be counted on the fingers of one hand (unfortunately, the numbers for hepatitis aren’t so encouraging). If we can train to prevent one significant hazard, why not for another? In addition to periodic physical exams, schedule “wellness checkups” with psychologists with training and experience in counseling police officers. Characterize it like a chest x-ray; no, we don’t think you have lung cancer, but if you do, we’d like to take care of it before it can’t be taken care of.

Finally, and this is the tallest order: cultivate change in the police culture to remove both the stigma of mental illness and the reluctance to report it. This will take commitment to the first two objectives and a complete buy-in from management. Create an atmosphere where an officer is no more reluctant to discuss his bout with depression than with his treatment for a knee injured in a foot pursuit. Make it as explicit as possible how psychological injuries will be handled, what an injured employee needs to do to return to duty, and what will happen if the injury turns into a disability. Ensure that everyone knows that being on a course of psychoactive medication, such as an antidepressant, is in most cases no more of a bar to regular duty than taking pills to lower cholesterol.

Fear of the consequences stems from fear of the unknown. Mental illness is scary enough already.