Police Suicide: A Special Newsline Series - Part 2

Police Suicide: A special Newsline Series, Part 1
Police Suicide: A special Newsline Series, Part 3

Part 2: What we know

Editor’s note: This special series ran previously in the Street Survival Newsline but the importance of the information contained in it remains extremely timely and relevant.

The Street Survival Newsline continues its coverage of the conference, “Police Suicide: An Unnecessary Means to an End,” sponsored in Largo, MD, by the Center for Criminal Justice Studies:

How’s this for a double irony?

1. Most people, including cops, who commit suicide don’t kill themselves because they want to be dead.

2. In most cases, the underlying emotional, personal or relationship problems that seem so hopeless that they motivate the suicide are, in fact, fully treatable.

“It seems contradictory, but what is sought is not necessarily an end of life,” says Conference panelist Dr. David Jobes, a suicide expert and associate professor of psychology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. “The person is trying to escape unbearable pain, and that’s different from wanting to die.

“The vast majority have a diagnosable mental disorder — most commonly, depression or alcohol/drug abuse — and this is certainly true of police officers. PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is often a factor. That does not mean they’re crazy, but they do have significant problems.

“Suicidal crises are often transient. If you can get help, you can go on with your life. Reaching out for help is central.”

The underlying problems can usually “respond to intervention,” meaning they can be alleviated via professional therapy or medication. But officers often don’t seek help because they feel caught in a “double bind": they believe that professionally they “can’t be weak or show any kind of struggle,” yet they feel they can’t approach a department shrink for help in coping with inner turmoil because that therapist’s “confidentiality will only go so far.” The problem, Jobes says, becomes “how to get help without sacrificing your career.” And the frustration in feeling that there is no answer to that dilemma may result in suicide.

Although law enforcement ranks within the top 2-3 professions for suicide, the general statistics show that “cops are not the only people who aren’t working well with this subject,” Jobes says.

• There’s a suicide in the U.S. every 17 minutes — 85 every day. Suicide is the 9th leading cause of death.

• Males take their own lives 4-1 over females (and since most PDs are still numerically dominated by men, that statistically increases the risk for officers).

• Over 60% of suicides are committed with firearms (and the easy accessibility of guns to cops again increases officer risk significantly. Officer suicides almost always kill themselves with their own gun.).

• Nobody knows why for sure, but the highest suicide rates are in the Western mountain states, with Nevada consistently ranking No. 1. (The lowest rate is in Washington, DC.)

• There are 25 suicide attempts and “hundreds of thousands” of contemplations for every death by suicide (among attempters, females predominate, 3-1). Attempts are often “not rational,” fueled by intoxication.

• For every death by suicide, there are 6 survivors, people who has lost a loved 1 and are affected by the death profoundly. This may include fellow officers, not just family members. With 85 suicides per day, there are 510 new survivors every day. One in every 61 Americans is now believed to be a suicide survivor.

• Suicides often appear in clusters — 1 touches off others — especially among younger people. “There’s a modeling effect,” Jobes explains. “If you are at risk and struggling, you get the message [from another person’s suicide] that it’s ok to do it.”

• There may be genetic factors involved. For instance, studies have shown that suicides tend to have lower levels of serotonin in their spinal column than what’s typical. But the relationship, if any, between this and self-destruction is not known.

• Although “some people go off and kill themselves and never give any clue that they are depressed,” usually there are “clear signs that something is going on. Suicide is directly or implicitly suggested.”

If you look at the period from 1950 to 1990, you see police suicides waxing and waning, like that of the general population, Jobes says. But since 1970, there has been a steady increase in police suicides. Jobes considers this continuing surge “startling and alarming,” and believes the numbers would be even higher if police suicides were accurately reported.

Instead, there appears to be considerable “misclassification” of officer suicides as accidental or mysterious deaths. Much of this seems to be a deliberate effort by their agencies to dodge the stigma of a suicidal incident. (Another panelist, Terry Morrison, who was quoted in our last Newsline, told of an officer who was reported to have died of “renal failure"—he shot himself in the stomach—and another whose cause of death was listed as “pneumonia"—he contracted pneumonia in the hospital after shooting himself in the head!)

Jobes would like to do a national, in-depth study of police suicides to find out more about how they vary from civilian ones and, hopefully, to discover what more can be done to prevent them. To find answers, he needs to “go beyond a description of what it’s like to be a cop,” to explore “something more than just the fact that police work is stressful.” All officers feel stress from the job, “yet not all officers kill themselves.” He wants to know why.

“At the moment, we don’t know a lot about this problem,” he says. “This is a hard subject to study, because the people we most want to research and understand are unavailable—they’re dead! We do have access to attempters, but they are very different.”

He envisions being able to fly researchers into communities where there are officer suicides and reviewing personnel and medical records and interviewing co-workers, family members and other intimates to construct a “psychological autopsy” of the deceased. Among other possibilities, he thinks it might be revealing to compare suicides to officers “who don’t kill themselves,” such as those who are feloniously murdered, for example.

Jobes figures the project would take about $800,000. But he fears that there is an obstacle beyond money that may keep a research effort from ever bearing fruit.

He sees “the police culture,” with its internal secrecy and its strong suspicion of outsiders, especially academics, as “a barrier to finding out more.” He says: “The biggest obstacle is gaining access. People have to open up, agencies have to open their files, we need to break into the police culture” to do the kind of research that is revealing and meaningful. He is frankly concerned that he “may not be able to overcome this” and thus may not be able ultimately to shed important light on the riddle of police suicide, which would be a great tragedy.

“With study,” Jobes explains, “we can potentially make a difference. The difference is life and death.”

COMING UP in Part 3: The special pain of being left behind.

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