Officer Suicides—Badge of Life April 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. Debra McCullough 00:08 Hello and welcome. This is Dr. Debra McCullough at the U.S. Department of Justice COPS Office and I’m here with Mr. Ron Clark, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Badge of Life Foundation. The Badge of Life Foundation is composed of active and retired police officers, medical professionals, and surviving families of police officer suicides from the United States and Canada. The Foundation is committed to reducing the number of suicides and supporting a healthier police force, ultimately improving the quality of service and enhancing officer safety. Badgeoflife.com offers police officer suicide prevention programs and education. Ron is here with us today to discuss this topic of police officer suicides. His credentials include being a military veteran and being a retired sergeant from the Connecticut State Police, with 23 years of law enforcement service. Welcome, Ron. Ron Clark 01:10 Thank you, doctor. Glad to be here. Debra 01:13 Ron, how did you become interested in the topic of police officer suicide? Ron 01:18 I actually got involved in 1975. I was teaching at the academy here in Connecticut, the State Police Academy. During one of my in-services, I had a trooper that came up to me afterwards and he wanted to talk but he got called out on an emergency. That night he committed suicide. We just couldn’t figure out what had happened. He was a model employee, a great cop. With my background as an RN, I started to just nose around. We didn’t really have any type of programs back in those days; that was the ancient times. So I really started to work on it. We hadn’t had a suicide in a great amount of time. We said, what types of things are in place and what could we do to help? We started—I was in a good position at the academy as an instructor. I got to talk to all the state cops in the agency on an annual basis. We started to venture into the area of—it wasn’t exactly called mental wellness—but it was an area of beginning to address what happened to this particular trooper. That’s how I got in. Debra 02:37 Based on your experience, then, what do you think are the greatest obstacles that impede officers in seeking out help when they’re experiencing depression or post-traumatic stress disorder? Ron 02:50 If you look in law enforcement, at PTSD and officers with depression and anxiety, I think the number one, from my observation—I’ve been around law enforcement around 50 years—would be stigma. We only thought the civilian area was stigmatized for mental illness. Law enforcement is much, much more difficult in that particular area. It’s the fear of discovery, fear of rejection, basically being seen as incompetent, not able to do your job, fear of a loss of the job. And yet, in the 21st century, here we sit, well aware, that PTSD is a real fester. It’s been around, been diagnosed since 1980. Yet law enforcement, for whatever reason, is now—slowly now starting to venture into this area. I think our studies have shown that suicides are twice as great as felonious killed officers. The question becomes, “How does law enforcement in the 21st century deal with mental illness?” Right now it’s a stigmatized aspect. Officers don’t come forward, they just hide because their fear is, “If I report it, I’m going to lose my job.” Yet, statistically, we estimate there’s 100,000 officers with symptoms of PTSD out in the field out there. Yet, here we are, right to today, right now, we’re still denying there’s PTSD and it can kill. There’s a lot of work to be done. We look at this stigma: there’s got to be a cultural change on how we view the aspect of mental illness. Debra 04:47 Now you’ve talked a little bit about the stigma and the sense of being incompetent or feeling incompetent based on your work and research through the Badge of Life. Are there any other common misconceptions about depressed officers? Ron 05:05 Doctor, we train our officers very well at the academy. They’re trained to put a mask on. They’re trained to not show anything. Our studies have shown somewhere between 80 to 85 percent of officers commit suicide and nobody even sees it coming, and they’re surrounded by people who are considered experts in observation. I was a training instructor at the academy for a long time. Basically we need to get the officers to take their masks off. Until we can educate our recruits and, to an extent, our officers in the field, that they are responsible for their own mental wellness, we won’t see anything coming. How do you deal with a person that you don’t even know what they’re thinking and have no idea they want to kill themselves? Everybody knows someone who’s depressed, who has anxiety, who has symptoms of PTSD, that’s the hidden secret in law enforcement. The question is, we need to do a lot more proactive work at the academy so our recruits, and out in the field, end up prepared to come into law enforcement from a psychological perspective. They do a great job on everything else— weapons, I was a weapons instructor—but in this field of mental wellness, we don’t do a great job. What type of work are we doing? What are we doing at the academy? What are we doing in the services? What are we doing to educate our chiefs and our leaders in law enforcement? We just think that mental wellness should be something that is enhanced within law enforcement. If you want to reduce suicides, you have to get proactive prior. Debra 06:55 Can you tell us a little bit more about the work that the Badge of Life Foundation does? What are some of the psychological survival resources that your website provides for police officers? Ron 07:09 Badge of Life is now about nine years old. It was started by an individual out in California. His name is Andy O’Hara, he’s a sergeant in the California Highway Patrol. Andy started this with the aspect of suicides. We went along—I joined about a year after it got started. We began to look at the aspect of what types of things could we do. We were teaching classes out in the field at that time. We’ve done three studies, 2008, 2009, and 2012, on suicides in law enforcement; the largest ones ever done that looked at the numbers. We were hearing, “You can’t deal at the problem until you know what the problem, what’s the size of the problem.” All of us heard, over the years, it was 800, 900, 1,000 officers committing suicide. They were dropping like flies. We couldn’t wrap our head around that, nor could some of our researchers, because it would have put us at the world’s highest suicide rate of any group in the whole world. Andy and company started, they did the 2008. It’s well known, it was 141 officers. They did it in 2009 to validate the first one. It was 143. And then we did an extensive one in 2012, same methods, same everything, and it was 126. It’s far different from 400 or 500 or 600. Our whole purpose—we make no bones about it—was to steer law enforcement from its fixation on suicides to in fact looking at the broad global aspect of looking at police officer mental wellness. Dr. John Violanti was a key part of this research aspect. He’s a well-known person in the police suicide field. You come into our site, there’s a whole bunch of different types of information, latest information, and a whole number of resource books and things like that, that people can come look at and get an idea that there is a better way. We’re a strong proponent of peer support officers. I’ve been a peer support officer now for 40 years, way, way back when nobody knew what a peer support officer was. We’re strong proponents of EAPs, even though we know that officers are somewhat distrustful of EAPs because they’re connected with the department; we see that. But our other aspect, doctor, is that we said way in the beginning—the officer has the responsibility for himself or herself. Thereby, we have fostered and talked about annual checks where you go to somebody, a licensed mental health professional, and you talk over your year. You talk over what’s happened in your year and what can you do to help yourself—outside the department, outside of everybody’s aspect, where you go to a person that has no connection to the department. We think this is one of the better ways. It seems to be picking up as far as if you have a critical incident, if you go through something really, really bad you have a person that you know. Just like going to your dentist or going to your doctor if you have some medical problem. We think it’s similar. We’ve fostered this and we’ve said it is a lifetime mental wellness for an officer, up to and including when he retires. Those are the things that we’ve been trying to do. We put a lot of information on the website so people can look at it. There’s different programs on there. There’s different programs for the academy. When I was doing work at the academy, we ultimately had a psychologist and a peer support officer and did a 40-hour—literally—mental wellness program in the latter part of the 70s and early 80s. I know it can be done. It’s education, ongoing from the time you’re in the academy until you retire. Debra 11:25 For an agency who is looking to play a more significant role in reducing the potential of one of their officers committing suicide, are there any recommendations on actions that they can begin taking? Ron 11:40 The first thing is—and it takes the highest levels in the department. It literally takes the chief of police to, in effect, identify that this is an important area—the first thing, from our perspective, is that departments are more and more now considering having peer support officers in house, police officers, sworn officers. The peer support officer takes a one-week training program—it’s not a counseling program or therapy program—it’s none of that. It’s simply an officer gets the skills for active listening, the ability to help an officer to get to the right mode of where they can get help, etc. Peer support officers have been around now since the early 80s, probably mid-70s as a concept. If you’ve ever heard of this guy—Dr. Wayne Hill, came from Texas. He was an officer in Dallas. He happened to be a PhD in psychology. He was a strong advocate when nobody knew what it was. So by putting the officers inside the department, by training them officer to officer works. If you pick the right officers as peers, officers will in fact talk to other officers they trust. Officer talks to somebody, there’s marital, this, that, or the other, sometimes all he needs is an active listener. You sit there for two hours and listen and the person stands up and says, “Jeez, I feel a lot better,” and they walk away. Because all they want to do is talk to somebody. Other times it’s more complex than that. There’s even such a thing now as advanced peer support officers. I think the critical aspect is that if the chief supports and departments look at the available things. EAPs are an excellent source. They’re independent, in a sense, from the department. They’re all professionals. They’re all mental health professionals. Back to the peer support. If you have officers in the department who believe in this stuff. Some of the toughest cops I know, have ever known, were peer support officers. Peer support officers become the go-to people. Officers that are injured, God forbid officers that are killed, officers that commit suicide. They become the resource people. They become the supports of families, of injured officers at home, or just officers that need to talk to somebody. The stigma is what we need to push down on, but it’s doable. We’re very encouraged by what we’re seeing, both at the national level and at the local level. Every department has to formulate their own plan. You can’t mimic another department because it won’t work. You have to do it under your own demands. It’s important that departments can have resource libraries. Have a small section of books that make sense—and there’s a lot of them out there—that would help the officer to understand things about mental wellness and why it’s important, things like that. Those are the areas that seem to be pretty straightforward. It’s getting supervisor training, sergeant level, street-cop level, front-line supervisors, so that they have an awareness of their officers. They have a sensitivity, a sensitivity that this stuff’s important. If we had more time, we could go into some of the examples of what’s happened to cops who did not have that sensitivity; they’re not with us anymore. These are important things. Mid-management training, programs. We think that every department probably should have a resiliency program. Cops are resilient, but they need to have more of a formal training for it. The old saying is, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” That’s cops! Debra 15:41 Ron, I would like to thank you on behalf of the COPS Office for your time and your expertise today about the Badge of Life Foundation and about the topic of police officer suicide. Thank you so much. Ron 15:54 Thank you. Voiceover: Beat Exit 15:56 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice, COPS Office. 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