Officer Suicides-Breaking the Silence 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 Hello and welcome. My name is TeNeane Bradford and on behalf of the COPS Office I’d like to introduce to you Deputy Chief Thurnauer, with the East Hartford Police Department. He’s here to talk with us today about officer suicide. Chief, thanks for joining us today. Beau Thurnauer 00:24 Thank you for having me. TeNeane 00:26 We’re very sorry about the loss of one of your officers to suicide. You shared your experience of losing an officer to suicide at the IACP national symposium, Breaking the Silence of Officer Suicide. Can you please share the story with today’s audience? Beau 00:42 Sure. The presentation at the symposium was rather lengthy and I’ll do my very best to summarize that presentation. At the same time, I want to try to keep the same emotion that I had used because it’s such an emotional subject for all of us. On March 12, 2013, here in the city of East Hartford, Connecticut, we were having a weekly staff meeting. The best way for me to really describe what happened is to summarize what one investigator wrote. I’ll quote directly from that report that said, “I heard what I immediately recognized as the sound of a gunshot coming from the direction of the investigation main hallway. Members of CID moved quickly into the hallway, using a tactical approach to look for the origin of the gunshot. We cleared the CID office, sergeant’s office, and kitchen area. Officers attempted to clear the north bathroom but found the door unlocked but barricaded. The door was forced open and, once inside, officers located the officer who had an apparent gunshot wound to the head.” And so started a miserable March day in my department. The rest of the symposium dealt with, not only how my department and our staff responded to it but some of the things that we have done to prepare our officers, the advent of this kind of event, and what we’ve done since to try to prepare—not only our officers for the event, but to try to do everything we know how to do try to keep this from happening again. TeNeane 02:22 As a leader in the organization, how was the situation shared with your department after it occurred and what impact did it have on your agency? Beau 02:30 I think that it’s pretty well known in the police circles that news like this travels fairly quickly. A lot of the informal communication avenues were immediately taken advantage of, cell phones, etc. We wanted the information to be accurate. We used our call-out system. We did send notice out to everybody in the agency describing what happened, which actually was a pretty difficult task just in itself. You try to look for the exact right words. You try not to offend anybody. You try to make it so that the information is clear to what happened but without having an edge in it or sounding too objective. Putting together a package to do that, we sent it to voice mails and we sent it to emails. Unfortunately—and of course, there’s an awful lot of second guessing sometimes with these—we also sent it to the home of the subject officer. We had already made contact with the family so that wasn’t an issue, but it was a little bit harsh sounding when the wife of this officer got an email message or a voice mail message. It took away a little bit of the emotional impact that we wanted to have and the caring, that feeling we wanted to instill on the part of our officers to the family of this poor guy, his wife and kids. TeNeane 03:58 Okay. Has your agency done anything differently since that incident to help officers with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder? Beau 04:07 I can tell you that prior to this incident, we had a very well established peer counseling group in our agency. We had, I think, all our officers into awareness programs to try and recognize personnel characteristics that somebody might display if they were, in fact, in some kind of crisis. The challenge is keeping it on the radar screen. We try to do our very best here to try to have ongoing training. Every police department does, I think, in lots of different areas. How do we keep this in the mind of everyone who works here? How do we keep our supervisors appropriately on edge to see those symptoms that we talk about all the time, those reactions to an incident that’s a little bit different, or asking for a different assignment, or taking extra sick days? All those things that are key in recognizing that something’s going on with an individual. As far as moving forward, we continue to do those classes. We’ve sent more and more people to some might say higher-level training or training we might not have utilized in the past. But again, for us the real challenge is even after we send them to class and now it’s a month later or two months later or four months later, how do we keep it in everybody’s mind, how important it is and how it’s a threat all the time for all of us. TeNeane 05:40 Okay. Based on your experience, what would you recommend to other agencies on handling the aftermath of a suicide and the considerations regarding officers and families? Beau 05:50 Well, I can’t stress enough, and it sort of fits in to some of the comments I’ve already made: you have to be proactive. These things don’t resolve themselves on their own. It’s our responsibility as managers and command staff people and it filters through the whole organization, certainly not just supervisors. We have to understand what’s going on, recognize symptoms, and get immediate, immediate intervention of some sort. That’s going to change from agency to agency. We have to make it really comfortable to talk about. I know that when we go to lineups or briefings or whatever terms we use around the country, sometimes it’s really uncomfortable to talk about police suicide. It’s something we shy away from, we really don’t want to deal with all the time. Open, honest communication—really in an informal setting, even just having a coffee, not necessarily just in the formal classroom or lineup sessions. The more we talk about it, the more comfortable to discuss it, the easier it’s going to be to recognize and get people help. We do have a peer counseling system. We have to be really, really careful that we select these peer counselors carefully. It certainly can’t be a popularity contest. We all know we have some people who may want to step up and be a peer counselor but may not be the perfect person or the perfect fit to bring some information down to the staff. We first thought that we’d give extra training to our peer counselors. What we ended up doing was we trained everybody. In a lot of ways, everybody’s a peer counselor here because everybody has those certain relationships they form with people they came on with or they went to the academy with or they work in a specialized unit together and created a bond. We need everybody to be part of that trained employee to help recognize the different signs and symptoms. We can’t train once, either. I know a lot of departments talk about, “Well, we train all our officers.” Four years down the line, coping skills and observation techniques, do they last? Is it still priority? Do we still practice it every day? Not only do we emphasize training everyone, we want to train everyone for... and it’s hard to really pick how often, but at least once a year, or maybe a couple of times a year, or maybe once a year and then a couple of less formal sessions to bring it to everybody’s attention and keep it really high on the priority list. TeNeane 08:29 Are there any other recommendations or thoughts that you want to share with our audience today as we’re closing? Beau 08:36 Well it’s interesting that the wife of the subject officer talked to us a great deal afterwards and she had some really good suggestions. In policing, sometimes we hear discussions or we hear suggestions from people that aren’t sworn and we dismiss them, but let me tell you, we took these suggestions to heart. I’ll just give you an example. It was very important for our officer’s wife to think that we, as command people who probably don’t spend as much time on the street as we used to, to get out there and experience what the guys on the street are experiencing. I think that is just a fantastic idea. It had been a while since I worked midnights. It’d been a while since I got into a verbal or physical altercation on the street. Without question you lose your edge and you forget some of the stressors that people go through. Even the fact that I said I hadn’t worked midnights for a long time, but boy it seems like yesterday that I was changing shifts every 28 days and I was cursing everybody on the second floor because this was an impossible schedule to keep and my body wasn’t adjusting. I felt crummy all the time. My eating patterns were shifted and I couldn’t cope with it. We forget that so easily and it is so important for us as commanders and supervisors to get back and really understand all these things that the guys on the road and girls on the road are going through on a daily basis. Let me share one other thing that was brought to us by the wife of our officer. She talked about absorbing the emotions of the people that he came in contact with. I think we all have officers who do this. They go out into the street and just connect subjectively with people in a way that maybe some others who can’t keep this whole policing profession on a totally objective level. Everybody can’t do that. Some officers who really absorb the emotions of others sometimes react differently than those who can’t. We really need to look at each officer as an individual and try to help them through whatever they’re going through as far as stressors on the road. TeNeane 11:05 Very interesting and all important things to share with the audience today. Deputy Chief Thurnauer, thank you so much, on behalf of the COPS Office, for being with us today and sharing your experience. Beau 11:18 It’s my pleasure. I’m hoping the COPS Office is going to continue looking into this and I know that IACP has more scheduled development sessions coming up in the future to deal with this same subject. Voiceover: Beat Exit 11:32 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 11:48 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. 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