Climbing OUR Mt. Everest

12 November 2014 was the hardest day of my professional law enforcement career.

Several weeks earlier, I had sent a memorandum to the chief of police.  In it, I explained the need for us, as an agency and as a law enforcement community, to do more for our own when it came to mental wellness.  I use the term wellness instead of health because, well, because mental health sounds bad, taboo, to cops and wellness, which is usually used in the same context as fitness, is a more appropriate word anyway.  I timed the memo to coincide with a tragic call for service that my teammates responded to and will probably never forget.

A former county canine deputy sheriff and her husband, a law enforcement officer from a neighboring county, lived in the city, literally like a few blocks from the police station.  Sadly, we had responded to numerous calls for service at their residence before throughout the years.  Almost exclusively domestics.  And alcohol was regularly involved.  Although it's mainly speculation, I would venture to say that much of their mutual issues arose from the pressures, stresses, and traumas of the jobs they both endured.  Add a terminal illness to the canine deputy and you can have a very unstable person and situation.  So, when the call came in for a suicide that just occurred, it wasn't totally a surprise.  Still, it was horribly tragic.  I was off.  Not working.  But my team was and responded, the initial on scene officers.  Talking to them the next day and the days after, they said it wasn't pretty, hard to maintain focus.  But we talked, individually and collectively.  It was harder for a few of them as they knew the deputy personally.

But there was my window.  It was my opportunity to take that first step in trying to overcome the greatest stigma in the law enforcement community: mental health.  Over the course of a few months prior to that incident, I had disseminated a mental wellness questionnaire to gauge where our department officers had issues regarding mental wellness.  I had gotten the idea from a study I read by Dr. Ellen Marshall who wrote about Cumulative Career Traumatic Stress, or CCTS, as she labeled it.  CCTS is similar to PTSD in its symptoms and subsequent effects on the individual.  It's simply the cumulative effect of many traumatic events over the years versus PTSD, which is the result of a singular event.

The surveys were anonymous and voluntary.  I got just under a 35% return rate.  Not stellar, but not too bad considering most police officers are petrified to discuss or even elude to anything mental.  Still, the results were astonishing and heartbreaking.  Here are a few...

• 70% have flashbacks of an incident
• 80% have difficulty concentrating
• 80% have trouble sleeping (falling asleep or staying asleep)
• 70% have experienced a change in appetite 
• 42% have experienced intense fear, helplessness, or horror
• 70% say that stress from the job affects personal relationships 
• 75% use alcohol to relax

And my two biggies...

• 25% have thought about suicide 
• Another 25% think that a line of duty death is better than suicide

Law enforcement posttraumatic stress and depression experts that I have conferred and shared the survey results with all agree...these numbers are conservative, underreported.  And very scary.

I felt, however, that in order for anything to start rolling or any progress to be made that this venture, this challenge, had to be personalized.  So, I personalized it.  I bared my soul to the members of my department's command staff...from my initial major traumatic incident in 2001, to the subsequent and compounding trauma and stress, to the toll it took on me and my personal life, to the collapse of my marriage, to therapy, meds, and, yes, to suicidal ideations all before talking about how I had overcome those demons by working hard and being proactive in my healing.  This was not about self promotion or propping myself up.  Not even close.  It was all about my brothers and sisters-in-arms who suffer silently, everyday, too afraid to reach out because of this oppressive stigma in the police culture about mental wellness or mental anything.  It was about the guy next to me and getting shit started and done for him.  I wanted to tell them, through my story, that, no, PTSD or depression or anxiety for a  police officer is NOT a career death sentence.

So, the climb has begun...I'm at the base camp of law enforcement's Mt. Everest.  Staring up, but not undaunted.  I may have just one or two other committed professionals with me at the start...but we'll pick up more as we ascend, climb, and eventually conquer this horrible stigma that is killing...literally...killing police officers across this country, and the world.

In 2012, ODMP reported 125 officers killed in the line of duty.  In that same year, Badge of Life, a police suicide prevention organization, surveyed the internet for media and police reports and found 126 police suicides.   Out of the 125 LODDs, 48 were by felonious gunfire.  That means between 2-3 times as many cops are taking their own lives by their own hands than are being killed by another.  NLEOMF reports a LODD occurs once every 53 hours...according to the IACP, a police suicide happens once every 17-18 hours.

We need to help our brothers and sisters.  Look out for one another...what you say could save a life of someone in blue.

Nuck aus der Fischerei (Part 1)

I sat there.  Broken.  And now, stunned from the blinding angle from which I took this next devastating blow.  I replayed his question a million times in my head within those few seconds it took for him to ask me again.

"Did you kill your dog?"

It was June in San Mateo.  Which is to say, it was hot as shit.  We were working.  Really working hard.  Learning how to mesh together as a team.  I was in canine handler school with my dog, Nuck aus der Fischerei.  Of course, there was no way in hell I was going to be calling him that on the street.  So, he was just Nuck.  And for anyone who has been a K9 handler or knows one, handler school isn't really about teaching the dog.  They're already ridiculously smart.  It's about teaching the handler how to read the dog; how to notice the minor changes in his behavior or body language as he picks up the scent cone and starts working a track.

Ever since I can remember, our family has always had dogs.  It was my mom who initially had that deep love for them.  We had Blackie.  A mangy mutt who ended up having his throat ripped open after a fight with another neighborhood dog.  And there was Birfy, named for the way I said birthday as a toddler.  According to mom, "Birfday".  Mom was crazy about him, to a fault.  I can still remember, vividly, the day Birfy attacked me.  I was probably 6, maybe 7.  He was lying down around the corner between the kitchen and the living room.  I walked up from behind him wanting to play.  I had no idea that he was working on a bone he'd just been given.  He wanted no part of playing and clearly saw me as a threat.  I had almost no time to register the foreboding growl before he lunged at my small face.  Instinctively,  I put my right hand up for protection.  His fangs sunk into my soft flesh, almost going through to the other side.  I screamed with every ounce of breath I had in me.  My mom came running and saw the wound and the blood that followed.  As a registered nurse, she had little difficulty tending to my injury.  I'll never forget that moment.  Years later, Dandy, would come and remain in our lives for many years.  

Then I went to college.  And, I would assume as many enterprising young men do as they move through the ranks while entertaining secondary education, I moved into a house with seven other guys.  One of these housemates, adopted a younger dog from the local shelter, only to turn around several weeks later and threaten to take her back.  Instead, I rescued her.  Codi.  She was a gorgeous Rhodesian Ridgeback and was my ever sweet, ever faithful companion.  When I moved to California to pursue my law enforcement career there, she remained at home with my parents until I graduated the academy.  Then my best friend brought her with him as he road tripped across the country.  She stayed with me until I settled into my new place.  Codi soon developed kidney failure.  And one night, I discovered her lying on the couch after working an evening shift.  Despite her depleted state, she managed to pull herself up to her favorite spot one last time.  I was heartbroken as Codi had been with me during many of my major life changing events.  But before leaving for California,  I had rescued another dog, a yellow Labrador I named Neshana, after the Lenni Lenape Indian word neshanic, meaning two creeks.  She, too, was heartbroken when her companion Codi died, but we rebounded together spending many hours hiking and overnight backpacking trips exploring the local mountains or traveling to the Eastern Sierra Nevadas.  Neshana would be my rock and, ultimately, the connection that lead me to my wife.  After almost a decade and a half of unquestionable devotion and sincere love, I had to make my most heart wrenching decision ever...to end her life.  Although she still had the spirit of a young puppy, Neshana's body had worn down.  In July 2013, exactly 14 years after "asking" a muddy, matted, but happy Lab into my Jeep, we had to say goodbye.  Now, it's Kamali and me.  She's a spunky, yet super smart Border Collie mix.  Again, another rescue.  (That's all I'll ever do, by the way, rescues.)  So, through the years, I've had my share of canine companions and experiences.  I love my dogs.  I simply cannot envision my life without them.  They give such unquestionable friendship.  And I often go to a passage by the author, Rick Bass from his book about one of his dogs, that describes how I feel about my canine companions far more eloquently than I could ever hope to imagine...

"Back then it was just sweet and clean and wild and fresh; and on many days, most days, the best days, it still is: and when I am in the company of one of my dogs, and am speaking to him or her as I would to a human friend - just shooting the shit or conversing about how the day has gone - or when I am admiring the sunlight in their eyes, or patting their heads, marveling at the physiographic fit between the curve of the palm of my hand and the top of their broad heads - as if we, or someone, has sculpted them just for that fit - or perhaps someone has sculpted us, for that fit - on those occasions,  I do not concern myself with my inability to feel such comfort amidst humans (other than with a very few friends and family), but, rather, am simply thankful that at least dogs exist, and I'm humbly aware of how much less a person I'd be - how less a human - if they did not exist.

I don't mean to say that a human without a dog is somehow less of a human.   What I mean is that I think there are those among us who are more dog people than others - and a dog person without a dog is missing something."

~ Rick Bass, Colter

Yet, there I was, in August 2001, rolling that question over and over again in my mind.  "Are you fucking kidding me?!", I thought.  "Did I kill my dog?!  There's no fucking way I would ever intentionally hurt any of my dogs.  Ever!"

But Nuck was dead.  And I was his handler.  My world had collapsed around me...