Confronting police officer suicide

EmailPrintTalk BackRegisterBookmarkRSSWhat's This

Editor's Corner with PoliceOne Senior Editor Doug Wyllie

Resources and related articles:
Survivors of Suicide
20 tips for helping a traumatized officer
Police Officer Suicide: How to cope, how to heal
Practical pointers for preventing "suicide by inches"
P1TV: Dave Smith interviews Charlotte Rappley about officer suicide
Police officer suicide: Recognizing the signs and helping our colleagues in distress
“The Pain Behind the Badge”: Powerful new documentary explores officers’ trips to the edge—and back

This week, we suffered the suicides of two police officers. Officer Kyle L. Kovac, a five-year member of the Kansas City, Kan., police department, committed suicide Saturday after a fatal crash killed his friend and fellow officer, Mark Jaramillo. NYPD Lt. Michael W. Pigott was found Wednesday at a former airfield in Brooklyn, dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, just days after he had been involved in an incident in which a naked, distraught man fell to his death after being struck with a stun gun.

There is no news we at PoliceOne regret more deeply to deliver than the death of an officer – particularly one in which he or she has taken their own life. Yet it has been our responsibility to do so altogether too many times. Only two months ago, Lt. Derrick Norfleet of the Oakland Police Department died in his Vallejo home from what authorities said was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Little more than two weeks ago, Chicago Police Officer Dannie Marchan shot his two young children, killing one and leaving the other critically injured, before fatally turning the gun on himself.

We at PoliceOne have sought to address the issue of officer suicide as delicately and deftly as is practicable, and hope that in some small way we can help the friends and families of these officers to deal with the aftermaths of their deaths. Further, while we fully recognize that some things simply cannot be foreseen nor can they be prevented, we hope to provide resources to help avert, to the extent possible, these kinds of tragedies from occurring.

“In the wake of the tragic loss of two officers to suicide this past week, we urge you to take a moment to read the information available on this critical topic,” says PoliceOne Managing Editor Scott Buhrmaster. “Be sure you’re able to recognize the signs of potentially suicidal behavior, both in yourself and in fellow officers, and that you feel confident enough to take the appropriate steps to help stop a potentially devastating downward spiral. Emotional survival is just as critical as physical survival. Our deep condolences go out to the family and fellow officers of the two who were lost.”

Dr. Lawrence Miller has addressed officer suicide for PoliceOne in several outstanding columns. In one such article Miller says: “First and foremost, the problem needs to come out in the open. Both command and line officers need to educate themselves as to the nature of police stress, syndromes of impairment, and good and bad ways of coping. Next, officers should receive training in crisis intervention skills that they can apply to fellow officers in a similar way as they do with distressed citizens on patrol. This is, in fact, the rationale behind the peer counseling programs that have been set up in many departments.”

Buhrmaster, writing with Dr. Alexis Artwohl in an article on PoliceOne says that the first, most important step is to initiate contact – advice that is equally valid in the wake of an officer suicide as it is for overtly (or inadvertently) helping to prevent one.

Artwohl and Buhrmaster write: “For some, it may be difficult to make contact with an officer who has just been through a traumatic event because you’re not sure what to say. It’s easier to act like nothing happened or to nod knowingly in the hall and wait until a later time when you can talk about something else. Having the courage to make contact through a phone call, e-mail or note can be of great value to the traumatized officer. All you need to do is let the officer know that you’re thinking of them and that you’re there to help in any way you can. When you make that contact, be sure to mention that you’re there to help the officer’s spouse and family as well. Remember, too, that in shooting incidents the non-shooting officers may be traumatized as well so keep them in mind and reach out.”

Warriors protect each other
PoliceOne columnists and Street Survival Seminar instructors Dave Smith, Betsy Brantner Smith, and Jim Glennon each spoke this week with PoliceOne on the subject, which relates directly to what is taught in the “Emotional Survival” segment of the Seminar. It’s important to note that while there are times when you simply cannot know that someone is thinking about suicide, you can sometimes see changes in behavior that may serve as signals, and that obtaining training and risking caring are two fundamental ways that can help officers become disablers, rather than enablers, to a fellow officer’s suicidal thoughts.

Dave Smith: “You’ve got to look out for risky behaviors – self destructive behaviors, aberrant behaviors based on what you know their typical behaviors are – changes in their behaviors like cleaning up their locker, checking on their insurance. Sometimes you can see some patterns in behavior but then sometimes there’s no pattern and sometimes there’s just nothing you can do. And here’s the problem: you can’t measure the suicide that didn’t occur – it’s that law of negatives. If it didn’t happen because you did an intervention in your own way – just risking caring – and your partner or friend or colleague doesn’t kill themselves, then you’d never know. There’s no ‘atta-boy’ and you may never know you’ve had that positive impact on someone.

“That’s why it’s a risk. Every day we risk our lives but we sometimes just don’t risk caring. And it’s hard to do, but you’ve got to risk caring.”

Betsy Brantner Smith: “We’re trained to see the signs in the public. We’re trained to look at a teenager and say, oh, boy, that kid has some issues...we need to talk to his parents. We’re trained to look at even an elderly person saying she’s not really loving life anymore.  And we have the authority – here’s the thing – cops have the authority to evaluate somebody instantly on the street and say: ‘you know what, I think you’re going to hurt yourself,’ and throw them into the ambulance and take ‘em to he hospital. Not many people have that authority. And yet, the minute we walk into the back of the station house, all that goes out the window, and we quit looking at each other that way.

“Our job is obviously to care for the public but our job is also to care for each other. That’s what Warriors do – Warriors protect each other, and part of good Warriorship is not only protecting each other physically but protecting each other emotionally.”

Jim Glennon: “We have mandated training in cultural diversity. We have mandated training in domestic violence. Why don’t we have mandated training in suicide awareness and prevention? And I think that the problem is, what signs are you looking for? Whatever signs you’re looking for aren’t going to make sense unless you’ve gone through some sort of training. I look at the guy – my buddy who also is a friend of Betsy’s – who killed himself. The day before, he’s talking to me about some issue and he’s making a big deal of something that I didn’t think was a big deal. We were both on a homicide task force – he worked for me but he was senior to me in a lot of ways – and he was in Betsy’s department. He kept saying ‘you’ve gotta have the forensics do this, you gotta have that’ and I said ‘I’ve got it handled, don’t worry about it’ and he kept pushing me. He finally said something to the effect of: ‘You know, I’m not always going to be here to take care of you.’ He said it jokingly –– I thought. And then the next morning, he shot himself.

“The main thing is to look for significant changes in behavior. One of the things that Mark did – and he was very obsessive – was giving all of his cases away, which was unusual. The problem we have is that cops are not a prying type when it comes to personal issues. We just don’t do it, so I think the way you start is to have mandated classes in it. I think everybody should go to one – every few years or something – because there are so many other mandated classes we go to and there’s nothing like this in there.”

The truth about officer suicide
On PoliceOne you will find an item from the Force Science Research Center entitled “Latest findings and recommendations about traumatic stress,” which concluded that while police officers experience a wide and “potentially devastating range of mental and emotional reactions to life-threatening encounters…very few actually leave law enforcement or suffer permanent damage from their traumatic encounters.”

Some studies have shown that a police officer is two to three times more likely to commit suicide than die in the line of duty, but the common misconception in the mainstream media (and the general population) that suicide among officers is higher than other professions is exactly that: a misconception.

However, the fact that doctors, or dentists, or psychologists, or actors, or artists – or anyone else for that matter – may hold that unenviable distinction is irrelevant to our purpose here.  We want to help people in Law Enforcement protect each other. To wit, we encourage you to use the resources available on PoliceOne – from articles such as those listed in the links above to the secure, LEOs-only P1 Forums – and to talk with, and take care of, each other.

Be well, do good, go get ‘em.
–– Doug Wyllie, PoliceOne Senior Editor

EmailPrintTalk BackRegisterBookmarkRSSWhat's This