myAIPMA Chief’s Role in Preventing Suicide
John W. Morrissey | Police Chief Magazine
"Let’s stop officers from ever getting to the point that they consider suicide as an option."
"Just imagine your phone rings at 4:11 a.m. on a warm June night in 2010. As a chief of police, you are expecting it to be a phone call about a homicide or a traffic fatality, but when you answer, the person on the other end of the phone tells you that one of your officers took his own life.
When you hear the officer’s name, perhaps you’re not surprised—maybe your first thought is “I just served him a sick leave abuse letter yesterday morning taking away 10 percent of his pay.” Once you make sure the department is aware of the death, you meet with the family. As the days and weeks after the funeral become months, you think about the death now and then, but you change nothing, because no one is shocked in this particular case. Just imagine your phone rings again at 4:02 a.m. on October 31, 2010, and the person on the other end of the phone says an officer from your department took his own life. It happened again within five months of the first one. This time, no one can believe the officer took his own life. He couldn’t have; he was one of the most beloved and respected officers in the department. There is outrage in the department demanding that the officer be given a full funeral as if he died in the line of duty. There is outrage both internally and from the family because when the first suicide happened, nothing was changed to prevent future ones."
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A Chief’s Role in Preventing Suicide, John W. Morrissey, Police Chief Magazine, 2020