# Departments Increasingly Look to Help Officers Cope



## kwflatbed (Dec 29, 2004)

*Kevin McKenzie *
*[email protected]*
*The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)*

One moment the man who had just fought Millington police officers lay handcuffed on the ground, ranting.
Then he stopped.
Police Sgt. Troy Walls said paramedics had just arrived to treat an officer whose knee was injured in the fight, but Walls directed them to provide care instead to the now silent man.
Malcolm J. Carruthers, the subdued man later found to have suffered from heart disease and mental illness, died that day in March. Walls said he and the other three officers involved will never forget.
"Do I hate it for his family?" Walls asked in a recent interview. "Yes, my God, they have to live with it in one way every day.
"We have to live with it in another way every day. Does his name ever leave our heads? No, he's with us, somebody we barely knew is a part of our lives as long as we live," he said.
The public seldom hears from officers thrust into what are known as "critical incidents" - traumatic deaths and injuries, at times even caused by decisions an officer makes.
Traditionally, cops rarely talked about the emotional toll that the incidents take on their own lives. Like macho Western movie actor John Wayne, they clammed up and kept going. Talking about it would make them appear weak.
Higher-than-average rates of suicide, alcoholism, divorce and shorter-than-average life expectancies followed.
"I know of one particular officer that I can tell you without a doubt that he died over the stress of a traumatic incident that he was involved in, because he just grieved himself to death," said Shelby County Sheriff's Office Inspector Mark Dunbar.
But in recent years, a process known as "critical incident stress debriefing" is providing law enforcement and corrections officers, as well as other first responders, with an outlet to vent pent-up emotions.
Shelby County Sheriff Mark Luttrell, 60, who has fostered the process for deputies and jailers since becoming sheriff in 2002, described it as "cops taking care of cops."
"Has it worked?" asked Dunbar, 47, commander of special operations and coordinator of critical incident stress debriefing.
"I can give you cases, upon cases, upon cases of officers that basically say that it saved their lives," Dunbar said.
Within days of a critical incident, officers involved are gathered together with volunteer mental health professionals and other officers who have experienced similar trauma.
The privacy of what is said in the meetings is protected by state law.
After Tennessee State Trooper Calvin Jenks, 24, was shot to death in Tipton County in January, about 150 people, including troopers, deputies and officers, gathered in small groups at Hope Presbyterian Church, said Luttrell.
"At the end of the day there were a lot of tears on the floor, a lot of wet eyes, and people left there a little bit emotionally drained but certainly emotionally more stable than they'd been leading up to that," Luttrell said.
Similar debriefings took place after seven teenagers were killed in a single car crash outside Millington in 2004.
Trained officers from Shelby County and elsewhere in Tennessee journeyed to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to debrief officers there after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Largely among rural sheriff's offices and small police departments across the state, critical incident stress debriefing is taught by the Tennessee Public Safety Network.
Peter Cove, 59, a former Massachusetts corrections officer who discovered the need for the peer process after his own downward spiral, leads the network, financed with federal grants and affiliated with the Tennessee Sheriffs' Association.
Cove said that traditionally, officers developed street armor, where they just shut down and dealt with emotions alone for fear of being seen as weak.
"What happens is they find out that they are not alone," he said.
Walls, 40, and a married father of four, has been trained in critical incident stress debriefing. He and other officers who struggled with Carruthers were determined to have broken no laws or department policies.
"Officers go through critical incidents every day," he said. "They see everybody's brother, cousin, aunts, mama, uncles - dead, for whatever reason....We have to deal with it."
Dunbar said deaths and injuries to children are the heaviest emotional burden.
Walls said it's certainly not the money that motivates men and women who wear badges. On the job and through volunteer efforts such as coaching, they want to help and protect.
"Ninety percent of the day we deal with the worst part of society, but on good days that other percentage that we get to see, we help a lot of people."
The day Carruthers fell silent was the second critical incident for Walls since he joined the department as a reserve officer in 1993.
In October 2004, Walls fatally shot a man, Mark Chumley, 34, on Harrold Cove after Chumley refused to drop a shotgun.
"At Christmas time, you're thinking about, did he have kids? It's not something that it happens and it's over," Walls said.
"It becomes part of you, and you have to live with it every day."

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