LAPD Honors Officer Who Helped Start Peer Counseling Program

For too long, said Lt. Barbara Guarino, the Los Angeles Police Department’s motto, “To Protect and to Serve,” seemed to apply to everyone but police officers themselves.

Sure, cops suffering from stress, personal or professional, could visit a staff psychologist, she said.

But for those too macho or too frightened to seek professional help, there were virtually no options, according to Guarino, officer in charge of the LAPD’s investigative analysis section.

But that has changed, Guarino said, since the 1981 formation of the LAPD’s Peer Counseling Program, in which trained officers serve as volunteer sounding boards for fellow cops suffering from drinking, marital, physical or job-related pressures.

“We were the first police force in the country to do this--we’re the pioneers and we’ve had great success,” said Guarino, who heads the steering committee for the program, which protects the identity of participants from the department.

On Wednesday, the LAPD paid tribute to an officer instrumental in founding the program, Lt. David Brath, who died in an off-duty traffic accident in 1982.

Along with Brath’s family, more than 30 fellow officers, many of them peer counselors themselves, crammed into the small outdoor terrace of the Police Academy chapel for the dedication of a bronze plaque memorializing Brath.

“Dave left us with a gift, a legacy--to protect and serve each other,” said Sgt. Sam Barber, who worked with Brath on the program. “I can’t help remembering his overwhelming enthusiasm.”

During his 19 years on the police force, Brath held a number of jobs, including a lengthy stint during the 1970s as the adjutant to then-Police Chief Ed Davis, now a state senator.

While working as the LAPD’s medical liaison officer in 1981, Brath helped establish the peer counseling program in conjunction with several officers who had suffered problems as difficult as the inability to cope after mistakenly shooting an innocent citizen.

“A lot of people are paranoid about going to the Behavioral Science Services because they think it’s ‘the company shrink,’ ” said Detective Bill Martin, who coordinates both the peer counseling program and the department’s drug and alcohol abuse rehabilitation program.

“(Here we have) one brother officer talking to another about something they have gone through,” said Martin, who himself sought the aid of a peer counselor during the program’s early days to help overcome a drinking problem that he said nearly led to a suicide attempt.

” . . . The benefit is that when somebody calls me and they are suicidal. . . what I have to offer is that I’ve been there too. . . . They start to talk and I begin to defuse them, get them past the desire to do it. And then I steer them toward a professional for treatment.”

Psychologist Martin Reiser, head of LAPD Behavioral Science Services, said his office works closely with the peer counseling program, which he called “highly professional--a great service at practically no charge.”

The program has more than 200 counselors, all of whom have participated in a three-day workshop in sensitivity training. Counseling subjects include coping with death, marital stress, sexual harassment, alcoholism, shootings and job-related disciplinary problems. Counselors reported 1,851 sessions last year.