The Beat Podcast
Speaker: John Violanti 
Organization: University of Buffalo 
Topic: Officer Suicide

Interview Transcript

[00:00]  Welcome to The Beat—a podcast series from the COPS 
Office at the Department of Justice.  Featuring interviews with 
experts from a varied field of disciplines, The Beat provides 
law enforcement with the latest developments and trending topics 
in community policing.
      
[00:16]  Jennifer Donelan:  I'm your host, Jennifer Donelan, and 
today we’ll hear from Dr. John Violanti.  He is a retired New 
York State police trooper and he's also a research professor at 
the University of Buffalo SUNY.  We’re glad you’re here.  The 
topic today we're discussing is Officer Suicide.  Give us a 
brief description or explanation of how you're approaching 
officer suicide and your personal interest in this topic.

[00:40]  John Violanti:  Oh, sure.  I think initially my 
interest started when I was a police officer and I had witnessed 
several of my comrades commit suicide or die by suicide and it 
kind of piqued my interest on what the association was between 
the work of being a police officer and getting to a point where 
you no longer want to live.

[01:03]  Jennifer Donelan:  Yes, it is and of course we 
understand your interest in the topic.  What is your role as a 
research professor at the University of Buffalo on this topic?

[01:13]  John Violanti:  My role is I'm a research professor and 
essentially what I do is conduct research, epidemiological 
research on police health, police stress, and suicide.  So, our 
role again is to find out what the scope of this problem is 
throughout our country, and once we do that, to determine the 
best sort of prevention strategies that departments can use.  
That's going to help in the long run.  And it's a long time and 
coming.  It's only recently that we'd become more aware of the 
mental strain placed on our police officers in this country and 
it's starting to take its toll.

[01:54]  Jennifer Donelan:  What are some examples that you 
found in your research of this mental strain or issues that are 
causing officers to consider as well as commit suicide?

[02:04]  John Violanti:  Well, we found for example that there's 
a high degree of depressive symptoms among police that we 
interview.  We give them measures for depression and we find 
that their scores are generally higher than those that we see in 
the general population.  We see correlates of hopelessness among 
officers where the fact that they're doing a job and nothing's 
happening, there's no change and things are getting worse, so 
they have no effect.  Because they go out every day and risk 
their lives, there doesn't seem to be any effect or any 
appreciation of that by the general public.  So, this has become 
very demoralizing and many officers are hurt by this.  And so, 
they just feel that they no longer want to invest their risking 
their lives for doing the job.  The stress they see, the trauma 
that they see, all of these things are affecting them 
psychologically.  And the thing with stress is that it's a 
cumulative process and the more they see, the more trauma and 
more stress they see, the worse things get.  They get to a point 
where they can't cope with it anymore.  Some may move to 
substance abuse, some may move to depression, and some may 
decide that ultimately they want to die by suicide.

[03:41]  Jennifer Donelan:  And just the day to day of being a 
law enforcement officer, going out every day and not knowing 
what may happen and that literally your life is on the line 
regardless of whether you're a beat officer or even someone that 
just works inside the office.  I guess in this modern age that 
we live now with viral video and everyone having a broadcast 
device on their person must play some role in the stress or the 
scrutiny that officer’s feel.  Can you expand on what your 
studies have shown, how things in times and circumstance as 
recent as 10 years ago must be different than they are today?

[04:17]  John Violanti:  Oh, certainly.  Ten years ago as you 
mentioned we don't have the technology for videos and cameras 
and cell phones.  I mean if you think about this, if you go to 
work every day and somebody's videotaping you with a camera 
while you work eight hours a day, it's got to be pretty 
stressful because you have to watch every single move that you 
make, and any move that an officer makes can be determined as 
the wrong move.  Many people in society don't understand the 
laws of the use of force and what looks like an excessive use of 
force in one situation may be one that's allowed by law.  But to 
the public, it doesn't look that way so the officer is 
scrutinized for that and he's brought in for internal 
investigations and so forth.  So, the cameras can be a real 
deficit but on the other side of that, the cameras can be a plus 
because they can exonerate an officer from an action that he or 
she has taken.  The thing we find from our data on police health 
is that stress can affect you not only psychologically but it 
can affect you physically as well.  And officers who have a lot 
of chronic stress also have indications of heart disease or 
cardiovascular disease.  We measure this in our clinic.  We can 
measure artery healthy.  We can measure the possibility of 
diabetes and many physical ailments.  And when we look at this 
and we look at the stress that officers have, we see 
associations going on.  The more stress, the more likely there 
are going to be physical ailments as well.  There is research 
out there now that says stress is actually -- and trauma that 
officers experience -- actually can affect the physiology of the 
brain, can affect decision-making out in the street.  So, a lot 
of these things add up to a difficult job that has chronic 
stress, that has people in it who are psychologically hurt and 
has people in it that are becoming physically hurt because of 
the stress they experience.

[06:34]  Jennifer Donelan:  So, what is preventing an officer 
from saying, "This is stressful.  I’m just going to work at 
Target"?  Why do they continue with this line of work?  What is 
it within a police officer that causes them just to keep going 
with employment that might eventually be detrimental to their 
psychological and physical health?

[06:55]  John Violanti:  When we test officers to come out into 
police work with psychological testing, we find that they there 
-- they think this is a helping profession, so they're here to 
help people.  And as the years go on, that kind of dissipates a 
little bit when they really see what's going on out there.  But 
to some degree, despite the stress, many of them, they are 
resilient people and they stay in the career because they think 
there’s sometime and somewhere there's one incident that saves 
them from all this.  Maybe they've done something heroic like 
rescue a baby or someone from a burning car or save someone's 
life by using CPR or done something good.  And those are the 
things that carry them on, the fact they contributed in some 
way.

[07:47]  Jennifer Donelan:  Okay, I would assume just as a 
layperson that if their stress level is like at this, eight out 
of 10 area that they might have these good things that will 
abate that eight out of 10 for a while.  If their stress then 
happens again, it doesn't restart at zero.  It's still up there 
near that eight level.  Am I correct as a layperson in 
understanding how that stress can affect a person?

[08:10]  John Violanti:  Yes, it can.  And as I mentioned 
before, it's a cumulative process and the body keeps score, and 
after a while it gets to the deterioration point.  But what 
we're afraid of is that when they retire, that the vestiges of 
these problems are going to follow them into retirement.

[08:30]  Jennifer Donelan:  So, for the research that you're 
doing right now, take us a little bit into that.

[08:33]  John Violanti:  What we do right now is we're involved 
with the Centers for Disease Control.  We're using their data to 
look at suicide rates.  What we do basically is compare the 
suicide rate of police officers to that of the general United 
States' population and we see if there's any difference, and 
there is.  I think we looked at one three-year period and there 
were an average of 90 police suicides per year over that three-
year period.  If you equate that to what epidemiologists do, we 
talk in terms of risk -- if you look at the risk factor, a 
police officer by virtue of their occupation has a 69 percent 
greater risk of dying by suicide than does a worker in the 
general population.  So, it's a staggering statistic and it's 
scary because the job you work may be a risk factor for suicide.

[09:37]  Jennifer Donelan:  And with this data you're gathering, 
what’s your end goal with the data, getting it out and trying to 
make effective change, I guess helping reduce officer suicide?

[09:46]  John Violanti:  Policing is an occupation that's not 
only dangerous in the street, it's psychologically dangerous and 
you need to provide some services to help them deal with this.  
Services like psychologists, there are plenty of police 
psychologists out there now in many of the departments that 
help.  Services like peer support groups.  Peer support works 
very well because it's officers talking to officers and they 
have a better understanding of the job, and a lot of officers 
like using peer support when they have a problem.  One of the 
biggest problems I think in getting officers to get help is the 
stigma of mental health problems.  You know, it's okay to go to 
the doctor if you have a broken arm and maybe the guys will come 
in and they'll sign the cast on your arm.  If you go to a 
psychologist because you're depressed or because you have 
suicidal tendencies and you come back to work, nobody's going to 
sign your cast, nobody's going to talk to you because of the 
stigma associated with mental health.  There's not an 
understanding in our society and in policing that mental health 
is really just the same thing as physical health, it's in a 
different domain.  

[11:15]  Jennifer Donelan:  So, I assume that our listeners, if 
they want more information on the work that you're doing or this 
topic are free to contact you?

[11:23]  John Violanti:  Sure.

[11:24]  Jennifer Donelan:  Fantastic.  And that would be V-I-O-
L-A-N-T-I @buffalo.edu.  And if there's one thought that you 
could have our listeners think about as we close this podcast 
today, what would you want them to leave with?

[11:37]  John Violanti:  Well, if I were an officer who was 
having problems, suffering from depression and problems with the 
job, I think the best advice I could ever tell you is go get 
some help.  Don't be afraid to be afraid.  Get help.  No one's 
going to hurt you if you do this.  If you have a leader that 
understands the situation in which we're hoping leaders are 
trying to understand it, we may save your life.  Or if you're a 
buddy of an officer who you see in that officer something going 
on, say something.  Do something, say something.  Help him get 
through it.  He may thank you for validating his feelings and he 
may thank you for getting him to go somewhere to get some help.

[12:30]  Jennifer Donelan:  Thank you so much, sir, for 
appearing on The Beat today and for the work that you are doing.  
We look forward to hearing more about your findings and things 
that can be done to prevent officer suicide, and to save lives.

[12:42]  John Violanti:  Well, thanks.  Thanks for having me.

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[13:41]  The opinions contained herein are those of the authors 
and do not necessarily represent the official position or 
policies 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.

[14:06] END
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