Police Suicides Rise as Hidden Epidemic Sweeps the Country : Law enforcement: Specialists say that officers take their own lives at a rate at least double that of the general population.

The man didn’t show up for work so Cindy Goss phoned his home. No answer. She jumped in her car and rushed to his house. He was there, a bottle and a glass at his side.

“Trust me,” she said to him. “You must trust me now.”

Her heart pounding, she slid her finger between the trigger and the trigger guard and eased the muzzle of the gun from his mouth.

Cindy Goss is one of America’s more successful battlers against what one forensic psychologist calls a hidden epidemic: police suicides.

It is hidden because suicides tend to be hushed up, in part out of reluctance by police authorities to admit they may be work-related. And, although “epidemic” may not be quite apt--there is nothing contagious about suicide--there does appear to police psychologists to be an undeniable increase lately across the country.

In America, about 16 of every 100,000 adults commit suicide annually. At least that is the figure generally accepted among psychologists studying the problem.

In the New York City police force of 30,000, the nation’s largest, at least 63 officers have committed suicide in the last 10 years. That’s 31% higher than the average. Last year’s eight suicides were nearly double the average.

In the Jacksonville, Fla., force of 1,200, tiny by comparison, four suicides in the last two years is 10 times the general rate.

“I don’t see any tie directly to the job,” said Jacksonville’s director, W. C. Brown. Neither did New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. All eight suicides on his force, he said, stemmed from “domestic problems,” not police work.

There are no government statistics on the suicide rate of police officers, but the Occupational Safety and Health Administration reports that police officers have a life span eight to 11 years shorter than the average. Specialists who study police suicide say the rate on a national scale is at least double that of the general population and possibly higher.

You could not persuade Cindy Goss that the reason has nothing to do with the emotionally draining work. Police, incidentally, refer to their work as The Job, as if no other fits the definition.

Goss is a certified counselor for drug and alcohol abuse. She went to work with the employee assistance program for New York’s Erie County and met with success in every county office except one. “In the Sheriff’s Department,” she said, “nothing seemed to work.” She set about discovering why.

What she discovered about The Job others in the field have discovered as well. To oversimplify, the progression from idealistic police academy graduate to depressed cop with his gun in his mouth goes like this:

Graduate frequently exposed to blood, gore and danger. Does not unburden these horrors on spouse. Spouse wouldn’t understand. A few drinks with the guys after work helps to unwind. Fellow cops understand. Can’t trust civilians. Can’t admit troubles even to fellow cops; would be considered a wimp. Can’t trust fellow cops. Drinking increases. Spouse takes off. Gun is handy.

The gun Cindy Goss removed from that officer’s mouth was only one of five similar rescues she has made in as many years. All five men are back at work.

There’s no telling, of course, how many lives the program she devised five years ago might have saved. But the decrease in absenteeism, sick leave, turnover, tardiness and other measures of departmental performance are so marked that the program has become mandatory in every police agency in Erie and some other New York counties and has leaped the border into Canada. No agency to adopt it has recorded a suicide since. More obvious, say colleagues, are the hundreds of careers, even marriages, saved long before the progression reaches the gun-in-mouth stage.

“Cops are well screened before they sign on,” said Harley Stock. “Most have a mentality more like a social worker than a soldier. Over time and in increments, they don’t recognize their personality gets chipped away and changes.”

Stock, among other specialties, is a screener. He knows the progression well, both from textbooks and experience.

He has earned a handful of degrees, including a doctorate in police psychology, a narrow but expanding specialty. He’s a certified SWAT team member and hostage negotiator. He worked with two dozen police agencies in Michigan and was police psychologist in Broward County (Ft. Lauderdale), Fla. He now has his own treatment center, “Interphase 911” in Boca Raton, exclusively for police officers and entirely confidential.

“Typically,” he said, “the cop who commits suicide is a male, white, 35, working patrol, abusing alcohol, separated or seeking a divorce, experiencing a recent loss or disappointment. Typically, a domestic dispute is involved.

“Cops are controlling individuals. When a cop loses control in his own home he can’t handle it. For 24 to 36 hours he is acutely suicidal. He barricades himself in his house and makes all kinds of threats. If he can get beyond that point he gets himself back together very quickly. You don’t see that in the general population.”

“Also,” said Stock, “about 90% of the time the cop is drinking heavily when he shoots himself.” (That was the case in all five of the men Cindy Goss took the guns from.)

“Here’s a statistic with lots of supporting data to back it up,” Stock continued. “About 10% of the general population who drink become alcoholics. Among cops the figure is 23%. Cops also abuse drugs.

“And here’s another solid statistic: The suicide rate among alcoholics in the general population is 270 per 100,000”--far above the 16 per 100,000 in the general population.

Among cops, after-shift drinking bouts are so endemic to The Job that they have a universal euphemism for it: choir practice. If the pitfalls of choir practice aren’t obvious, Stock explains:

“Alcohol at first releases tension, but if you drink enough it becomes a depressant. So if you have an underlying depression, it makes it worse. The suicide rate among people suffering from depression is 230 per 100,000.

“What you have, then, is a psychologically panicking cop full of alcohol, depressed, with access to a weapon. Bad combination. Bad combination.”

In a recent study of 20 suicides in one large Midwest police department, 13 of the victims were alcohol abusers.

Joseph Wambaugh, the writer, has long studied the progression from idealism to despair. Wambaugh was a Los Angeles police officer for 17 years. His books, fiction and nonfiction, are as much about how police do their jobs as what The Job does to them.

“Cops, of course, see the worst of people, but they expect that when they sign on,” he said.

“What they don’t expect--and nothing can prepare them for it--is to see ordinary people at their worst. This works on their sense of belief, I would say, and they tend to become prematurely cynical.

“Even people who come from war can rationalize it by telling themselves that that was war and in war people become savage barbarians. But this is not war and people are normal and good. And here he is in the middle of the night in a normal person’s home seeing normal people at their absolute worst. He begins believing that all people are barbarians and savages.

“I’ve had young cops confess to me in a patrol car at night that when they go to the grocery store they wonder who the grocer is ripping off, whether he will try to cheat them. When they go to church, they wonder what the preacher does when nobody’s around. That’s pretty cynical.

“An old saying among cops is that everybody is garbage except my partner and me and I’m not sure about him. When he begins to include himself, the erosion of self-esteem is complete, the cynicism is complete.”

Wambaugh, Stock, Goss and others all seem to recognize these same steps toward depression and use the same phrases to describe other traits of The Job.

The John Wayne syndrome, for example. This is the cultivated swagger of authority--and its corollary, the macho refusal to admit a weakness or ask for help. “Eventually,” Wambaugh said, “the badge becomes almost heavier than he can carry.”

There’s also the Minority Group syndrome: The embattled minority in blue refusing to associate with outsiders (who can’t be trusted) but only with fellow cops.

And another phenomenon of recent years:

“There used to be limits,” said Stock. “Even the worst criminal, unless pushed to the wall, would not shoot a cop because he knew it would be all over for him.

“Now they ambush cops. The cop has to wonder whether a man-with-a-gun call is real or a setup. We had a case in Florida recently of two teen-agers shooting a cop in the head and riding away on bicycles. When a cop stops a car with an expired license, he has to wonder whether a guy with an Uzi is sitting behind the tinted glass.”

Recently in Buffalo, N.Y., someone drove by a precinct house and sprayed the building and the cruisers out front with automatic rifle fire. The cops assumed it was someone “sending them a message.”

Police work is not the most dangerous occupation. Statistically, firefighters, roofers, miners and others have more hazardous jobs.

“But with police officers it is the anticipation of danger that causes the stress,” said Lt. Timothy Tate. “The stress never ends and it is overwhelming. Every cop in this area knows about the Buffalo shooting. A cop may not get a call his entire shift, but he drives around for eight hours with that knowledge.”

Tate is a 15-year police veteran in East Aurora, a suburb of Buffalo. Before that, he was a cop in Tampa, Fla. Like countless others, his career was interrupted by the way he chose to deal with that overwhelming stress. “I came to a point where alcohol was destroying my life.”

Now Tate, who is completing a doctoral dissertation at Syracuse University on police stress, supervises the Law Enforcement Peer Support Group in Erie County. Stress. Peer counseling--cops helping cops--is a key element in the Cindy Goss program and every other successful rescue and rehabilitation effort.

“As a supervisor,” said the lieutenant, “I also recognize a very practical reason apart from the obvious humane ones to keep a cop from falling by the wayside. It’s cost-effective.

“It costs $50,000 and up and about five years’ experience to put a productive cop on the road. Full-blown treatment costs $10,000 or less. Doesn’t it make sense to save the trained cop rather than replace him with another $50,000 rookie?

“The new federal proposal to combat the increase in crime and violence would provide money to put more cops on the street. That’s great. But wouldn’t it be more productive to address the stress problems of cops already on the street and keep them on the job? Otherwise, I’m not sure hiring new guys and training them will even keep up with our current attrition rate.”

That’s what Tate and the other peer counselors, all volunteers, are doing, and with commendable success. They are trained to catch the signals from their fellow cops that, being cops themselves, they recognize all too well. They are as aware as novelist Wambaugh, former cop, of what could happen if the telltale signals are missed:

“When you put that blue steel crucifix against the roof of your mouth and squeeze, nobody walks away.”