Firefighters Do It Better...

By Metropolitan Alliance of Police Board Member John Holiday

That’s right I said it. In fact the small town volunteer fire departments do it best. What do they do? They take care of each other and themselves. They debrief after each critical incident they handle. They talk about what went when well, what went bad, and what images they would like to erase from their mind.

What do we do? We get back in our squad, by ourselves, and go to the same domestic battery call we go to every week. You know the one. The one where the couple wants you to fix 10 years of abuse in 5 minutes.

Sean Riley, the founder of Safe Call Now, recently spoke at our annual seminar.  He talked about how we are trained to do the job the vast majority of the population are unwilling or unable to do.

Think about it. There are 325 million people in the United States of which only 765,000 are sworn law enforcement officers. That’s 0.2%. We take 0.2% of the general population and train them to not think like the rest of the population.  We train your brain to do the exact opposite of what other people’s brains tell them to do. We train you to run toward the gunfire, run toward the danger, and go down into the dark basement where someone is screaming for help. We train you to have a “Warrior Mindset.” Then at the end of a 12 hour shift, we expect you to turn it all off, forget everything that happened, and go back and function with the other 99.8% of the population. We are very good at training you how to do the job, but we have zero training on how to go home at night. 

That’s why the firemen have it right. They talk about things with each other. We don’t. In fact until a few years ago we weren’t even allowed to talk about getting help for ourselves. We would go home, kick the dog for tearing up the house (because we have been gone for 12 hours), trip on the kid’s toys (and yell at them), and dismiss your wife’s question of “How was your day?” Then we grab a six pack (which later turns into a 12 pack and then a bottle of booze) and go down to the basement or out to the garage and stare at the TV while we try to get our mind around what happened during the day. Well actually, we are trying to bury it so we don’t have to deal with it. If we don’t get help, if we don’t acknowledge we see horrible things no human should ever have to see, we end up becoming a hidden statistic of police officer suicide. We lose more fellow officers by our own hand then by that of offenders. There are great programs like Below 100, which work on getting line of duty deaths under 100 each year. Yet we have nothing to try to get the number of suicides under 100. According to Badge of Life, we lose one fellow officer ever 81 hours to suicide.

If you are struggling or you know someone who is, Safe Call Now is a hotline staffed by and for first responders. They have a strong reputation for helping first responders get the help they need. They will listen to you and give you some guidance on how to help yourself out of the hole you are in. If it is serious, they can find a treatment center out of state and allow the officer to keep their FOID card and return to work.  Let’s start taking care of each other off duty as well as we do it on duty. Stay Safe.

Safe Call Now is a CONFIDENTIAL, comprehensive, 24-hour crisis referral service for all public safety employees, all emergency services personnel and their family members nationwide.

Make a Safe Call Now: 206-459-3020