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Dr. Sobo adds. “If you are concerned about somebody, ask them, ‘Hey, are you OK? I’m a little concerned about you and here’s why.’ Continue to have the conversation. More and more officers are having the conversation that begins with, ‘I know that incident you just responded to had to be really difficult. Let’s talk about it.’”
The Chicago Police Memorial Foundation sponsored the 10th annual Police Suicide Awareness and Prevention seminar. The day of speakers included Chicago Police Officer Alvaro Navarro talking about alcoholism and its effects on job performance.
The event also served to reinforce just how suicide awareness and prevention touches so many aspects of the job and literally every member of the Department. Liza Franklin, who was head of the division of the City’s law department, which defends de- fends officers in internal misconduct cases, presented findings built from reviewing lawsuits she worked on that indicated a need for a substantial increase in attention to officer wellness.
Franklin had planned on talking at the seminar about stress- ors, particularly those related to being sued. But she spent her time asking attendees what they would do if they knew a col- league was having trouble. Or, more precisely, what happens when everybody knows a colleague is having trouble but they just walk away.
“If we are the family that we say we are, then we know that when one of ours is in trouble, the next step is to do something,” charges Franklin, who is currently in a clinical psychology doc- toral program at Rutgers University in New Jersey and hopes to work for the Professional Counseling Division when she finish- es.
“The white shirts can do that as well,” she continues. “If you see somebody whose toes are turning black, you’re going to tell them to get that checked out. This is no different. If you see a problem of character, you say to them, ‘Something is wrong
with you. I’m taking you to get help.’”
Franklin has seen how the job can push officers to the brink.
She talks of an officer-involved shooting incident and inter- viewing the non-shooting partner who was so distraught that he looked like he was going to leave her office and walk right out into the middle of traffic.
During the seminar, Franklin presented a situation that showed how much the job is pushing officers to the brink. She recounted the story of an officer who everybody knew was hav- ing trouble and went home one day and shot his estranged wife in front of their kids.
“Every time I tell that story, they come up to me afterward and guess the wrong district where this happened,” Franklin shares. “The fact that everybody says a different district says something profound to me. I tell another story of an officer who committed suicide during the pendency of a lawsuit, and the same thing happens.”
Franklin hopes all officers who attended the seminar take away the reinforcement that suicide prevention and awareness starts with knowing that there is no shame in seeking help or trying to convince somebody to seek help. She reminds that there can be no shame for people who have to run toward the sound of automatic gunfire or have to look for body parts of a child in the Jackson Park lagoon.
And one of her final points emphasized that the notion of harming yourself is like mission creep. You stop playing with your kids at night. You stop doing things you liked to do outside the job. You start putting yourself in a box. You stop being the person you were when you got on the job. That’s the creep.
“It’s not like you wake up in the morning and say, ‘Today is the day I’m going to kill myself,’” Franklin states. “I hope that officers are seeing this is not just a question about suicide. You have to honor that and do anything you can to help with that.”
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