Today the NY Times published a lengthy article about the high rate of suicide among police officers.
American policing has paid much attention to the dangers faced in the line of duty, from shootouts to ambushes, but it has long neglected a greater threat to officers: themselves. More cops kill themselves every year than are killed by suspects. At least 184 public-safety officers die by suicide each year, according to First H.E.L.P., a nonprofit that has been collecting data on police suicide since 2016. An average of about 57 officers are killed by suspects every year, according to statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After analyzing data on death certificates, Dr. John Violanti, a research professor at the University at Buffalo, concluded that law-enforcement officers are 54 percent more likely to die by suicide than the average American worker. A lack of good data, however, has thwarted researchers, who have struggled to reach consensus on the problem’s scope.
The reasons for the high rate of suicide aren’t hard to fathom. Police officers, especially those on patrol, see and experience a lot of trauma. They are routinely exposed to the worst society has to offer and for many it sticks with them. To put it bluntly, they see a lot of people they are sadly too late to save. The story describes the experiences of one officer in particular, Matthew Hunter, who works for the Des Moines Police Department.
Hunter responded to his first suicide call as a rookie, two decades earlier, when he was 25. He arrived at a high-rise building with his field training officer to check on a man who hadn’t shown up for work. While searching, they came to a bathroom door that wouldn’t open. They removed the door’s hinges and saw the man’s body wedged beside the vanity. He had shot himself in the mouth…
Hunter was surprised by the number of suicides. He and Morgan once arrived minutes after a man rehabbing a house hanged himself from the ceiling with an electrical cord. Hunter hoisted the man’s legs as Morgan tried to cut him down, hoping they could save him, but they were too late.
At another call, Hunter found a church pastor hanging in his garage; he had told his wife he couldn’t hear God anymore. Hunter would sometimes step out of his patrol car and smell death, an unforgettable stench, from the curb. He’d see newspapers stacked on the porch, flies trying to get inside, and know that a days-old body awaited.
And all of that escalated when his best friend and fellow officer Joe Morgan killed himself just outside his home. Hunter became obsessed with trying to understand why his friend, who had seemed fairly happy, had done it. He and Morgan’s widow kept circling back to a moment when things had changed for Morgan. He was asked to pick people for a simple assignment transferring a prisoner. He selected two officers. They picked up the prisoner and were driving down the freeway when a drunk driver going the wrong way slammed into their cruiser, killing himself, the officers and the prisoner. Morgan felt responsible because he had selected those officers and he started to doubt himself.
Midway through the story we finally get to the impact of the death of George Floyd and the hot summer of 2020 when BLM turned many in the nation against the police.
In 2020, during the George Floyd protests, Morgan stood outside police headquarters in riot gear as people threw bottles, bricks and rocks. For him, it was troubling to be so widely condemned. He began carrying his gun off-duty, and seemed to Jennifer to be hypervigilant, almost paranoid at times. He’d come home from work around 11 p.m. and make a drink, a new habit. Jennifer occasionally woke to find an empty vodka bottle in the recycling bin.
And there was another incident that same summer, one that seemed to have shaken Morgan. His friend Hunter went back and pulled up body can video of that call after his death.
He saw Morgan enter a bedroom where a suspect was hiding in a closet. As Morgan opened the door, the man flung out an ironing board, hitting another officer in the head. They Tased the suspect, who weighed about 300 pounds, to no effect. The suspect punched Morgan in the face, pinned him to the ground and then sank his teeth into Morgan’s cheek. Morgan screamed to the other officers: “He’s biting me!”
As Hunter watched the footage, he was struck by the sound of Morgan’s voice. He didn’t want to use the word “scared,” because cops hated that word, but his former partner’s voice was full of fear, almost desperation. In all the dicey calls they’d handled over the years, Hunter never heard his friend sound like that. He played the clip for another officer and asked, “Is that Joe?” The officer nodded. Hunter could only surmise that the primal brutality of the bite, the feel of a human’s teeth in his flesh, had deeply unnerved him. Hunter called Jennifer and told her what he’d seen. She pulled up the photographs Morgan sent her from the hospital that night, a bloody cut on his face. She didn’t see it then, but now she thought his eyes looked haunted.
It’s not hard to see how all of this ended so badly. Morgan had experienced a lot of trauma and then within a few months he became a victim of an insane attack, someone biting his face. And only weeks later there were mobs in the street chanting anti-police slogans and throwing things at him. He was literally putting his life on the line and in return he was hated by strangers who didn’t know anything about him.
Yesterday, the Free Press published a similar article focusing on the situation in Chicago. There too, officers see a lot of trauma that never leaves them. And while they are trying to do their jobs, they remain constantly under a microscope:
There might be no city in America that monitors its police force more than Chicago. There are at least six oversight agencies scrutinizing the department’s every move. There are even 22 civilian councils—one for each police district—tasked with moving grievances up the chain. Plus, noncitizens—“regardless of immigration status”—get to contribute their “perspectives and experiences” through a first-of-its-kind Noncitizen Advisory Council. Then there is the fact that since 2019, the department has been under a 236-page federal consent decree. That followed a lawsuit won by Black Lives Matter Chicago and other activist groups.
And the result of all of this trauma and pressure is a high rate of suicides among officers. The Free Press found 53 suicides in the past decade. But unlike the NY Times story, the Free Press account puts BLM’s role in this front and center.
After George Floyd’s death, Chicago’s police suicide rate nearly doubled, from 3.8 to an average of 6.5 deaths a year. By comparison, about five NYPD officers die by suicide each year—despite New York’s force being three times larger than Chicago’s.
Meanwhile, alleged victims of police violence have sued the city constantly and been paid millions of dollars.
In just the first four months of this year, Chicago has already spent more than $62 million of its $82 million budget for police settlements. A city council panel narrowly rejected a $1.25 million payout to the family of Dexter Reed, a black man killed during a traffic stop—though only because Reed fired the first shot at officers…
A 16-year police veteran on the South Side told me that he recently switched units just to avoid the stress of potential lawsuits. In his last role, which regularly involved confrontations with gang members, he said he was hit with multiple excessive-force complaints—even though, he said, he was defending himself against armed criminals.
“You are literally getting punished for doing your job. It’s a thankless career, it really is,” he said. “Everything is ass-backward in the city right now. The Democrats f***ed up a lot of s**t in this city, and there’s no cleaning it up.”
Policing still hasn’t recovered from the impact BLM had on it five years ago. At some point we need elected officials to do more than restore funding and distance themselves from “defund the police” language. It’s no wonder so few officers want to work in these deep blue cities given what they are asked to face and the lack of respect they get in return.
