"My Client Suffered a Traumatic Event"

Today was a shitty day.  I spent the entire day in court and I only had one case.

Fridays are domestic violence, or DV, dockets in Montgomery County.  The one I had was a bad one.  Both the victim and suspect, her lover and the father of one of her children, had been drinking alcohol.  Apparently though, this time she had had enough and got angry with him.  Shouting followed.  And soon, it broke into a physical fight.  She was no match for him.  She got one good lick in and that was it.  He punched her in the face and then the belt came out.

I saw the marks.  Two very distinct loops on her back.  Bloody and bruised.  Red with a black hue.  There was also blood that had dried in her right ear from a blow.  A large lump grew on her forehead.  Soon I saw more smaller marks covering her arms.  She was drunk.  But that probably helped her in the end.  Maybe preventing her from feeling the full extent of her pain.   Maybe...I could only hope.

I arrested him for assault and reckless endangerment.  The endangerment alone carried a maximum of 5 years.  And, although this was Montgomery County, I still held out hope that justice would be served.

But I already told you, I had a shitty day, so you can probably imagine the outcome.

And that was just my case. The whole fucking day was DV shit.  This one shitbird put his hands around his baby's mother's throat, trying to choke her.  Probably over money.  After the judge heard his case, he talked about how "disturbed" he was by the facts of it.  And then proceeded to sentence him to 60 days in jail for the second degree assault.  He quickly followed that up by suspending all, but 58 of those days because the abuser had already served 2 when he was initially arrested and booked.  No fine, just court costs because when the public defender talked about his client, he talked about what a model citizen he was and how he's already gone through yada yada treatment or counseling programs and then the defendant vowed it'd never happen again.

They all say the same goddamn thing.  Its fucking sick.  There's so much emphasis in our judicial system, particularly this county, to ensure that none of the accused's rights are skirted.  Fuck the victim.   And the betterment of society.  During one of these defense narratives, his lawyer stated that her client experienced a "traumatic" event when he spent 2 days in lock up.  What?!  Fuck him.  He's lucky he's not castrated.

And it was like that ALL day.

One defendant's victim, now former girlfriend, was so afraid of him, she stayed in a secured room to avoid him as much as possible.  Another who got thoroughly beaten invoked her marital privilege, a one time free pass in Maryland for the wife beater to get off scott free because the wife still "loves" him.  Or is completely petrified of him and what he'll do to her if she doesn't invoke it.

My favorite though was a dude who is active duty military.  Now listen, I'm in the military reserves, but even if I wasn't, I'd still be a huge supporter.  So, this guy is an alcoholic and supposedly this was his first out of control episode.  Well, I guess, if you're gonna do it once, you might as well go big...A neighbor calls 9-1-1 and reports the domestic assault, says it been going on for a while and they can hear a woman screaming.  The call taker can hear the victim pleading in the background, "I didn't do anything!" as the defendant is dragging her into the middle of the apartment complex courtyard.  He beats the fuck out of her...rupturing an eardrum.  But the defense gets to tell everyone how great of a guy he is, what a decorated servicemember he is, how he's changed, gone to programs and all the other complete bullshit.  He brings 3 members of his branches' command cadre to speak on his behalf and say what a good dude he is and how he's taken this seriously.  Then he speaks...reads a fucking novel that he wrote.  And it's all about him.  He tells everyone what's he's done and that it took courage to tell his command.  He says he really wishes he could walk up to his victim and tell her he's sorry...to free his guilty conscience, right?  Screw what'd it do to her mentally.  But he can't...she's got a protective order out against him she's so damn scared.  Throughout it all, he's never humble, he never mentions the sheer terror he must've put his victim through...and never says jackshit about her permanent physical injury, the ruptured eardrum.  His attorney pleads with the judge to give her client PBJ, probation before judgement, so that, when he faces his military trial board in February, he can say he doesn't have a conviction.  Fuck.  That.

But he made out...he got the same sentence as the others...all suspended sentences.  No one got any jail time.  Not a day.  They got a stern talking to, maybe some probation with the threat of jail "if you ever do that again", and a few got actual fines.  That's it.

How am I, let alone a victim, supposed to have any faith in our judicial system?   Obviously, there are significant affects on the victims, but there's also fallout on the officers that handle these calls for service one after another after another.  And the holidays are a hotbed for domestics.  Never fucking ending.

I left court sick.  Exhausted from the mental and emotional drain of utter frustration and anger.  20+ years of shit like that piled up inside of me.

My guy...pled to a lesser, amended charge.  He was sentenced to 60 days with credit for 2 and the remaining 58 were suspended.   No fine,  just $57.50 in court costs.  Twelve months probation and he must complete the county's Abused Persons Program.  Done deal.

Oh...I almost "forgot"...the military defendant?  He's a chaplain.  And you bet your ass they rode that pony until she dropped...

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.