Chicago police shaken
Seven suicides in 8 months put spotlight on officers’ mental health
CHICAGO — A dozen or so police officers gather once a month in the basement of an office building and talk — about handling holidays with families, about nightmares so bad that they are reluctant to share a bed at night.
Most of the officers were involved in a shooting while on duty, and at the meetings they share stories of what that has meant. Sometimes they cry.
“This is what trauma looks like,” says Carrie Steiner, a former Chicago cop-turnedtherapist who runs the counseling center. “This is what PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) looks like.”
Responding to that trauma is now a top challenge for the Chicago Police Department, where alarms are sounding after seven officers killed themselves over the past eight months.
After the seventh suicide earlier this month, Superintendent Eddie Johnson convened a small meeting of command staff officers and told them that police-officer wellness is now his priority. To keep neighborhoods safe, his officers need to be healthy, he told the group.
Johnson formed a task force to examine the department’s mental-health services, according to his spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, who was at the meeting.
And in a sign of changing attitudes, Johnson also sent his officers a note about the latest death, saying, “We must do everything we can to ensure that our fellow officers have the support needed to get through the challenges of this very difficult job.”
Such acknowledgment of suicide among the ranks — even in private messages to his officers — is something Johnson started doing only recently, Guglielmi said.
This comes two years after the U.S. Justice Department warned the department that its care of officers was severely lacking. National experts are calling for immediate action to understand what is going on and what needs to be done.
“It’s definitely worrying and suggestive of a problem I think really demands attention,” said Florida State University professor Thomas Joiner, a leading researcher on suicide who was in Chicago last week for a forum on suicide in law enforcement.
Since 2011, the number of Chicago police officers who have killed themselves each year has fluctuated between two and four. But the pace quickened last summer.
Two detectives, three officers, two sergeants. Five were men, and the average age was in the mid-40s. Three either were in their squad car or parked outside their district station.
While suicide in general is on the rise in the United States, research suggests there is an elevated risk for suicide among law enforcement officers. One 2013 analysis found that the risk for officers was as much as 69 percent higher.
“Chicago is kind of like ground zero with the number of suicides that are happening on a monthly basis now at this point,” said Daniel Hollar, who chairs the department of behavior and social science studies at Bethune-cookman University in Florida. “These are people who are answering calls of duty to protect lives. We (need to) do our job to make their jobs safer.”
Hollar is organizing the forum in Chicago. Among the issues up for discussion is what role Chicago’s relentless violence problem plays in officer suicide. Hollar said participants also will talk about other factors, including whether familiarity with death makes suicidal officers more likely to follow through with their plans.
The urgency to understand what is happening — nationally, not just in Chicago — is supported by national figures showing that more officers die by suicide than in the line of duty.
In 2016, 171 officers across the country were killed in the line of duty, while 140 committed suicide. In 2018, 163 died by suicide and 150 in the line of duty, according to Blue HELP, an organization launched four years ago to raise awareness about officers’ mental health.
“I think it’s a call to action, a wake-up call, telling our administrators (and) command staff: ‘Isn’t it time you do something?’” said Nicholas Greco, who serves on Blue HELP’S board and trains departments and officers on wellness.