Officer Suicides March 2014 Voiceover: Beat Intro 00:00 This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. TeNeane Bradford 00:08 Good morning. My name is TeNeane Bradford and I am pleased to introduce John Firman, director of research programs and professional services division at the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Alexandria, Virginia. Prior to joining IACP, he was an appointee of the Governor of Illinois, serving as associate director of the Illinois Criminal Justice Authority from 1985 to 1994. During his 44 year career in law enforcement and criminal justice, he has directed law enforcement court, corrections, and criminal justice system planning and research studies at the federal, state, and local levels throughout the United States. Since joining the IACP, he has created and managed the National Law Enforcement Policy Summit Series, addressing current and emerging issues in the police profession. Mr. Furman, please tell us about IACP’s role in addressing the prevention of officer suicides. John Firman 01:00 About a decade ago, IACP started receiving a lot of calls, anguished calls, from law enforcement agencies around the country who were experiencing high levels of police officer suicides. One department actually had lost an officer every month for seven months. Calls to IACP were for help, clearly for help, with those departments saying, “What are we doing? What do we need to do? What are the things you need to be ready for and prepared for if you’re trying to reduce or stop officers from killing themselves?” Our attention was drawn to this, obviously—by the field, who was saying, “This is of concern to us.” We’re not sure what the right things to do are. Once those kinds of calls come in from our membership then we know it’s time to act, and act aggressively. TeNeane 01:54 OK. A few months ago IACP hosted a national symposium on breaking the silence of law enforcement suicide. Can you please describe the purpose of the symposium and how the day was organized? John 02:07 Before the symposium, just stepping back a little bit, after those calls started to come in, many, many years ago, what IACP did initially was to go after the problem and go around, basically very quickly, go around the country and collect best practices and find out what departments were doing who were aware of this and attended to it and trying to come up with solutions. We were able to gather an amazing amount of good best practices from local departments saying, “Look, we’ve had the problem and we believe these are the right ways to address it.” We put together a compendium, a CD, on preventing police officer suicide. We did that with BJA and it was an excellent initiative. That was many years ago, but that CD is still out there, still available on our website. That sort of began the process, putting the CD out and saying, “There are things you can do. Here are some of those examples.” The summit brought us to, I think, a much larger threshold of activity where we decided that there still wasn’t enough consensus on the right things to do and the ways to respond to this problem. To answer your question, our national policy summits are always multi-disciplinary. We very simply went out and found about 75 people around the country who we thought were experts in the issue of police officer suicide. That included police, psychologists, doctors, medical professionals, advocates, counselors, people who had experienced—survivors of police officer suicides, family members, chiefs who had lost an officer, a very distinct but very different and multi-disciplinary group of people. We brought them all together here in Washington; as a matter of fact, we brought them together at the Alexandria Police Department. We held a one full-day summit to basically drive them to consensus and say, “You all come in here with different perspectives but can we get consensus of the top things that you think have to be done to support police to reduce officer suicide?” TeNeane 04:06 OK. Following that, then, can you then highlight a few of the recommendations that emerged from the symposium? John 04:13 Yes. First of all, one of the outstanding things that caught our attention at the summit was the sheer scope and size of the problem. If you think about officers killed in the line of duty, the first discussion at the summit was, what is our context, what is the situation like comparatively? If you look at officers killed in the line of duty over the last several years, the number of officers who died by felonious assault over the last year or so, was about 70, 72. The numbers killed in traffic accidents in the most recent year was about 66. There’s no real accurate number of how many officers take their lives. We believe, comfortably, with the research that’s been done, that the number of officers who’ve killed themselves was at least double. The number discussed at the summit was around 145. The numbers are inordinately high when you think about the fact that traffic deaths and felonious assault deaths are only half that number. That drove the participants to be very aggressive in their solutions. The answers—they won’t surprise you, and I think they’re smart. The first one really goes to organizational responsibility. What has to happen here is it can’t be one person or two persons or three within a department to say, “We care about officer suicides.” The entire agency has to come together around responding to the problem and making it clear to every officer that resources are available. So that’s number one. Number two is the proactive nature of the work the police department has to do. It’s one thing to say, “I don’t want a police officer to take his or her life,” but it’s another to say, “Here are the proactive steps that you can take to ensure that your mental health, your stability, your approach and outlook on life are stable enough to keep you away from the event of taking your life.” So the second critical thing was that these actions have to be proactive. The third thing, again, I don’t think will surprise anybody, is resources. No police department can credibly say they’re going to stop or slow the process of officer suicide if they don’t have a significant set of professional resources, counselors, programs, peer support, all kinds of things. If they don’t have the resources available when an officer steps forward and says, “I want some help here,” then that program’s not going to work. Those are, I think, the most important things to us. TeNeane 06:33 So what do you think is the greatest challenge for police agencies today in breaking the silence to discuss and address the prevention or aftermath of a suicide. John 06:43 Culture, culture, culture. Law enforcement—and by the way, it’s not the only culture to do this, that has a problem with this—law enforcement traditionally has a culture that, “You’re a cop. You have to be tough. You’re going to see a lot of bad stuff. You’re going to participate in a lot of things that are going to hurt you, emotionally, psychologically. Your job is to flip a switch, walk away, and say ‘I’m fine.’” The second assumption in the culture is that, “You came home. You came to work today from a home. Everything at your home must be perfect. Fine. You don’t have family problems, medical problems, financial problems, children problems, spousal problems. No, you must be fine today because you’re a cop, you have the uniform, and you can do the job and you’re fine.” Our culture of, “You’re fine, you’re OK, walk away, turn the switch, go to work,” is absolutely the wrong culture, a dangerous culture to be in if you’re having emotional problems, any kind of depression, any anxiety, any mental health issues, because our culture has always been, “We don’t want you to talk about that. We don’t even want to know about that.” Culture is the issue. The question becomes, “Can you do a 180? Can you turn that culture into one that is supportive and one of awareness and one when you acknowledge immediately that there’s all kinds of problems that can happen to you as an officer; you are vulnerable. There’s help here for you.” The good news is that the answer is yes. There are plenty of examples out there of departments that begin at the academy by saying, “You could have and you may likely have emotional problems, depression, anxiety. These things that happen to everybody else in society, they may well happen to you. We’re going to help you when they come. We want you to be aware of it. We want your family to be aware of it. We’re going to give you help when you need it.” TeNeane 08:24 Sounds great. What are IACP’s next steps for applying the recommendations identified in the symposium? John 08:31 Next steps are pretty straightforward. Our real goal is, we have a summit report that’s about to come out. When that summit report is released then we have a pretty significant responsibility at that point to push those results and recommendations to the field. We have 22,000 members. Our job will be to move these recommendations out and say to every department that’s interested, “Let’s help you get these recommendations in place.” That’s a pilot process. We’re going to pick and choose some institutions around the country. It’s almost like an experiment. We’ll say, “Here’s a very—we think—well written and well thought out summit report. Can you, if you will, please take a look and dive into this report and go ahead and start to make changes in your culture, in your policies, in your protocol, in your training, to adopt these recommendations?” It won’t be a perfect process. Every department will do that differently. Some departments will struggle with some things. Others will find certain recommendations that they like more than others. In the end our goal will be to pilot this out there and see how it works. TeNeane 09:42 All of this sounds very, very good. Director Firman, I just want to take the time to thank you, on behalf of the COPS Office, for providing us with this information and your expertise. John 09:53 I appreciate the opportunity. I want to thank the COPS Office, obviously, in return, so thank you. Voiceover: Beat Exit 09:59 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice, COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems. Voiceover: Disclaimer 10:16 The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.