Police still searching for answers in officer’s suicide
BRIDGEPORT — More than a year after Bridgeport Police Officer Thomas Lattanzio took his own life, Police Chief Armando Perez said he still wishes Lattanzio had confided in him.
Lattanzio died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. City cops had a moment of silence on the radio waves at 5 p.m. Dec. 4, the first anniversary of his death, in his memory.
“To this day, I just don’t know why he didn’t just come up and talk to me,” Perez said.
Lattanzio had been on the force for 17 years. On Dec. 4, 2017, just one week shy of his 54th birthday, he drove a car to Seaside Park, parked across from the beach and shot himself.
“Tommy was a very special person,” Perez said. “He was not perfect, but he was a good man.”
Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A 2017 study by the Ruderman Family Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation, found the suicide rate for the general population is 13 out of 100,000 and the rate for police officers is 17 out of 100,000.
Police are also more likely to kill themselves than to be killed on the job, one study found.
The Ruderman Family Foundation study showed that in 2017, 140 U.S. police officers committed suicide and 129 cops died in the line of duty. On average, the study said, cops witness 188 “critical incidents” during their careers.
That repeated exposure to trauma can lead to various mental health problems. Post-traumatic stress and depression rates among police officers have been found to be as much as five times higher than the rates among the civilian population, the study found.
“Being a police officer might be one of the most stressful jobs I can think of,” said Dr. Jeffrey Deitz, a psychiatrist on the faculty at Quinnipiac University’s medical school.