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Special Report: You’ve Got a Friend
Help Yourself
Lodge 7 lends a helping hand with initiatives to provide members with much-needed mental health resources
n BY MITCHELL KRUGEL
Can you hear the soundtrack reverber- ating from that cover photo of the president and his pooch?
How do you feel by the end of the day...Are you sad because you’re on your own?
No, I get by with a little help from my friends... Gonna try with a little help from my friends.
Lodge 7 President John Catanzara explained the tran- quility of sitting with his best friend, Bruce – the admission that all Chicago Police Officers need a little help from a friend – in his President’s Report on page 5. He was moved to simi- lar emotion during the March 24 general membership meeting when recounting the way the Department responded to 19th District Officer Jim Daly taking his own life on March 1.
Lodge 7 First Vice President Mike Mette was the field rep on call when the incident happened at 2:52 a.m. Mette called Cat- anzara, and they arrived at 019 about an hour later. They rec- ognized the virtue of taking all district beat cops off the street and calling in other districts to cover. Catanzara complimented the honesty of Chief of Operations Brian McDermott telling the officers, “I really don’t know what to tell you. I just want you to know, I appreciate everything you’re doing.”
“But,” Catanzara added, “I think that was probably the most well-received message that night.”
Fast forward to 6:30 a.m., when the ET’s were wrapping up their work on the scene. Catanzara noticed First Deputy Super- intendent Eric Carter and Deputy Chief of Police Yolanda Talley. He asked them about the plan to clean up the locker room bath-
room where the incident occurred. They told him facil- ities management would
be handling the clean-up.
“I told them we have a service for these kinds of things, that we could have them here in an hour and they could make it spotless in no time flat,” Catanzara shared. “I told them we would pay for it. But they said they had it
covered.”
Fast forward to 3:30 p.m., and clean-up had not been com-
pleted. Two afternoon roll calls had to walk past that bathroom seeing people in hazmat suits cleaning up blood and debris.
“[The Department] is so tone-deaf on what really matters sometimes,” Catanzara added. “They had no clue. I was so liv- id.”
And because the Department has not provided a reliable, viable or valuable response to addressing the ongoing threats to officers’ mental health – or will not – Lodge 7 is taking mat- ters into its own hands to give members the resources, support and confidentiality they need. And to get the reliable resources, wouldn’t you rather get a little help from your friends at Chica- go Lodge 7?
Clearly, your union has a dog in this fight. The loss of Daly and Officer Jeff Troglia a few days later has led Lodge 7 to up the urgency on deploying its plan to fill a void of accounting for members’ mental health and wellness.
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