Officers' mental health is important for law enforcement agencies of every size. Still, small departments face obstacles that larger departments are often able to avoid in setting up mental health and wellness programs. Among Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act (LEMHWA) program grantees, an increasing number of agencies are including multiple departments in their peer support and suicide prevention trainings. In some cases, one larger agency will open trainings to smaller agencies, while in other programs, agencies of a similar size will coordinate to run trainings for multiple departments. Wisconsin is expanding upon this with a statewide peer support training initiative, the Wisconsin Peer Support Conference.

Stacy Lenz, a Training and Policy Advisor for the State of Wisconsin Department of Justice Division of Law Enforcement Services, is the creator and organizer of the event. She graciously gave her time to the Dispatch to answer the following questions.

What inspired you to start this conference? There are 566 law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin and, 70 percent have less than 20 sworn. They don’t all have the budget or the capacity to support peer support in-house.

What are your goals for this event? We intend to train at least one officer in every department. In addition, we’re going to build a regional network of peer supports so that they can collaborate, network, share providers, and have a larger community of support.

What were the highlights from the first training? First, we trained 464 officers from 163 different agencies. Just about a quarter of the agencies in Wisconsin were represented. We built the class based on IACP guidelines and best practices. We have a two-day course, 16 hours, we’ve divided the state into two regions, and they provide the training. The feedback from the students has been phenomenal. We actually have fire and EMS [emergency medical services] trying to get into the program.

What were the highlights from the first conference? We had more than 400 people come to the annual conference. I didn’t know what to expect; I thought 150–200 would be great, and then we got to 400. The feedback was phenomenal; I couldn’t have gotten a better response. There were lots of requests for small and rural agencies and requests for resources for correctional officers.

What do you see as next steps for your statewide approach to training peer supporters? I want to expand the basic peer support training. I’d like to incorporate more correctional officers and dispatchers and civilian staff. I marketed it heavily to law enforcement this time around, but all our employees deserve support. I would like to host quarterly refreshers so that we could get them some advanced-level trainings, and at every course, we get feedback to see what kind of advanced topics we need or specific requests. You know, we range from Milwaukee, which is very urbanized, to Polk County, which is pretty rural, and we want to make sure we’re supporting everyone.

Any thoughts for other states or regions who are interested in hosting this kind of training? We built an advisory committee out of local law enforcement, a committee of 14 members. We got instructors that are experienced and knowledgeable in peer support; we split the state into five regions so that we could keep travel down and spend the money wisely. It’s possible. You can build this program and spread the support across the entire state. It’s feasible.

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