Caveat Emptor

My wife and I attended a post-incident stress workshop down south a few years back. The welcoming environment and genuine southern hospitality we found in the participants and staff proved quite healing. On the first day, all of the police officers were asked to fill out a questionnaire listing the different types of traumatic incidents we had taken part in throughout our careers. With over 25 years in service, all of which were in uniformed patrol, my list proved to be quite exhaustive.

That night, as we lay quietly in bed, my wife asked in the darkness, “do you think there is anything on that list that you forgot?” As her words reached me, a rush of memories flooded into my mind without warning. One of the questions had been regarding suicide and if we had ever actually witnessed one occur instead of attending them after the fact. I had answered no, confident in my memory. But as I lay there, I realized the truth. Years earlier, following a long traffic pursuit of an armed domestic violence suspect, I had, in fact, watched as a young man took his own life. The chase ended with him shooting himself through the head with the same handgun he had held to his girlfriend’s temple only minutes earlier.

The fact that such a tragic and violent scene could be somehow buried in my memory shocked me to my core. How could I have forgotten something so undeniably real and memorable? Was it the setting? Was I overwhelmed with other emotions as I rolled back the years of trauma in my head? I wondered, then and now, how many other memories were trapped in there, what dark secrets lay hidden within. It is no mystery how many cops become jaded as they go through their careers, their natural defense mechanisms taking over to save what is left of their sanity.

Police officers see many tragic things throughout their careers, even in so-called “slow” police departments. While the physical dangers are real, as my multiple trips to the hospital emergency room can attest, the actual threat has always lain with the injuries that cannot be seen. A routine medical call for a heart attack leaves you sitting alone in a house with two young children who just watched their father die. An unknown trouble call on Thanksgiving turns out to be the 19-year-old son found dead in the shower from a heroin overdose. A simple welfare check leads to the discovery of a suicide, a father, distraught over the end of his marriage, hanging from a beam in his basement. A call for a child locked out of their house after school ends with the mother found murdered in an upstairs bedroom, her long time abuser beside her in bed, wrists opened with the same knife he used to stab her to death. All of these things happened in so-called peaceful white suburbia. For the cops unlucky enough to work in the inner city, the tragedies come even faster and with far less time to regroup before the next one.

It is currently somewhat in vogue to speak of “officer wellness” and the overall focus on mental health in policing. This is a good thing, and I hope that the trend continues. In my younger days, such attempts were sneered at. Once, after witnessing, along with most of my platoon, the tragic death of a young man trapped in a burning car, I was told that our agency’s leader had shut down attempts to put together a post-incident response policy because “we don’t need that here.” Any change from this stone-aged mindset would be welcome. Perhaps with better screening in recruitment and through early, intensive training in stress management, we can avoid some damage. Suicide rates among police are far higher than the rest of the population. I have personally known several officers who have committed suicide, and rates of alcoholism, domestic violence, and divorce in our profession are far outside society’s norm. Any measures which mitigate this should be welcomed for the benefit of the police and the public they serve.

But I fear that the sad reality is simply this; policing should come with a warning label, much like a pack of cigarettes or any other risky activity. Years ago, when I tried skydiving, I signed a liability waiver package so long I thought I was buying another house. I sometimes feel that the job should have come with a similar cautioning, though I suspect that my 23-year-old self would have laughed at the thought of any potential psychological damage the job might cause. Perhaps that is why we recruit police officers at such a young age, we get them before they know any better, and by the time they figure it out, they are already broken.