First, New Hampshire, and now on July 16, 2022 the City of Chicago, IL has agreed to pay line of duty death (LODD) benefits to officers who die by suicide. Each of these cases are complex and I am sure some form of assessment of the individual officer’s case will be carefully chronicled. I can imagine this is going to be slow going as I am not sure whether there are some strings attached to the individual suicide. 

“Chicago is kind of like ground zero with the number of suicides that are happening on a monthly basis now at this point,” said Daniel Hollar, who chairs the department of behavior and social science studies at Bethune-Cookman University in Florida. Dr Holler hosted Dr Doug Joiner to Chicago for a symposium in 2019. Dr Joiner taught us much of why officers kill themselves. He says they become embittered, they feel a deep sense of thwarted belongingness and grow increasingly detached with and higher risk. “These are police officers answering calls of duty to protect lives. We (need to) do our job to make their jobs safer.” After an officer suicide, personnel try to reconstruct what was going on in the person’s mind by systematically asking a set of questions, in a consistent format, to the people with the greatest insights into the person’s life and mind—family, co-workers, and friends.” This is known as a psychological autopsy. I have been writing about this for 9 years in these pages. This must include a 3-month list of calls the decedent answered including those for which he or she were given debriefing, defusing, or time off for respite from the job. I would want to understand how the call volume may have triggered underlying acute stress of were there calls that triggered new trauma?

NH Governor Sununu signed House Bill 91 on July 8, and it goes into effect Sept. 6. Sponsored by N.H. Rep. Daryl Abbas, R-Salem, it drew bipartisan support. He is the Link:

The New Hampshire law will go into effect on September 1, 2022, and allow officers to feel that their families are secure with benefits of They should die in the line of duty which now include dying by suicide.

Dr Hollar is organizing the forum in Chicago the first of these I participated in with my colleague Dr Leo Polizoti from the Direct Decision Institute, Inc. in Worcester, MA. Among the issues up for discussion is what role Chicago’s relentless violence problem plays in officer suicide. Hollar said they will also talk about other factors, including whether familiarity with death makes suicidal officers more likely to follow through with their plans as reported in the March 2022 Chicago Tribune Sometimes a law-enforcement officer will begin to question whether they may have arrived at the scene earlier by driving faster, or whether there was something else they could have done to prevent a loss of life, said Rivera. This can add up to behavior that may place an officer at risk if he decides he needs to get on scene faster the next time around. Some begin to believe that the world may be better if without them. Many are angry and become hopeless and embittered for a variety of reasons, like feelings of resentment and misunderstanding.