THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Streetwise Psychologist Helps the Police Cope With Their Job Horrors, and He Has Learned to Work Out His Own Problems : Arresting Cop Stress

The veteran cops were squirming in their seats even before their coffee got cold. To the group of mostly 20-year sergeants and lieutenants, the early-morning seminar on officer trauma sounded about as appealing as paperwork. Better to work out stress at a firing range or corner bar than with some touchy-feely shrink.

But the speaker didn’t look like a psychologist, not with his drill-sergeant scowl and broad shoulders. And he didn’t sound like one, either.

“I’m not a cop,” Larry Blum began, his New York accent barbed with attitude. “I never wanted to be a cop. I couldn’t tell you about police tactics, either. But I am gonna tell you why you guys die out there.”

Welcome to the in-your-face world of Dr. Deadlift, cop shrink. Maybe it’s because he grew up as a street kid in the bloody-nose Bronx, or because he practices triage psychology at crime scenes and emergency rooms, but Blum loves to get in that first punch.

Santa Ana Police Lt. Felix Osuna was in the audience that day. “I was sitting there thinking, ‘This guy’s a jerk.’ About 30 cops were ready to get up and walk out, me included. But by the end of that day, I was a believer. Larry knows what he’s talking about.”

Blum, who earned the Deadlift nickname because of his avid weightlifting, has believers in police stations across Southern California. They talk about his clinical successes, of course, but they speak just as much about his earnestness, his fierce loyalty and streetwise candor. Most of all, they know he carries the same burdens they do.

“I feel very protective of all of them,” Blum, 49, says while holding one of the police caps that line the shelves of his Santa Ana office. The hats, and the scores of agency patches that surround them, were left as thank-you gifts by former clients. “I’ve stood over them in hospitals, I’ve stood over their bodies, and held up their widows and partners.”

Blum looks up and smiles broadly. “I call all of them my babies.”

His “babies” bring in a parade of horror stories. Officers with trembling hands and shot nerves tell the big man about the mayhem and murders, the lost partners and innocent bystanders, and all of the daily adrenalin rushes served with a side of stress.

Blum shows them how to cope with their anxieties and, at the same time, tries not to carry their weighty problems home with him. Often, that’s not easy.

“When I started doing this work I was a very sensitive, emotional person filled with love of life,” he says. “With the first five years of my practice, and all the call-outs for shooting and violence, I started losing my value of life. I became numb, hardened. Some of my close friends still accuse me of cynicism. But I have never lost my humanism. I still love good people.”

The Long Beach resident’s 12-year-old practice has a client list that has swelled to 15 agencies, most in Orange and Los Angeles counties. Speaking engagements and requests to appear as an expert witness in assorted trials vie for his time these days. He recently testified on behalf of Sgt. Stacey C. Koon in the Rodney King civil trial.

Despite the other projects, he still spends most of his time doing what matters most to him: talking one-on-one with troubled officers.

He finds it easy to communicate with street cops, especially ones who patrol dangerous turf. A lot of that can be traced to his childhood, when he ran with the tough kids in a Jewish-Italian neighborhood in New York. His father was a salesman with a drinking problem that strained the household and led to his parents’ divorce when Blum was 14, leaving the boy with little supervision.

Blum says he still remembers the world view his father drummed into his head as a youngster: “Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Don’t take crap from anybody. That’s who I am. It probably helps me with the rank-and-file cops. They like the rough edges. But it’s not something I picked up at a university.”

Nor did Blum forget that street education when he picked up his doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan. Riverside psychologist Nancy Bohl, who also works exclusively with cops, says the two markedly different influences make Blum an attractive confidant to officers. “They trust him, they like him, and he can help them,” she says.

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Any bridge helps. Although officers are far more open to counseling and discussing their feelings than they were a generation ago, Blum says, there are still codes of silence that come with the badge. Many prefer to swallow pain rather than show it. “It doesn’t just gnaw at them, it rigidifies, it locks up inside them.”

One of his former clients, for example, arrived at a domestic dispute to find an infant who had been shot point-blank in the head. The shooter, a boyfriend of the child’s mother, had committed suicide after the heinous crime, and the officer walked away horrified by the sight and burned by his own helplessness. He told himself to shake it off and keep going. But it wasn’t that easy.

“Every time this guy looked at his own baby son in the crib at home, he got sick; he would vomit,” Blum says. “He couldn’t do away with that image. Until he talked about it and got OK with what he felt. Until he did that, he wasn’t gonna be able to enjoy his own kid.”

Blum says two in three officers will suffer some degree of post-traumatic stress symptoms in their career, and one in three will have a profound reaction. The symptoms can range from nightmares to gastric problems to freezing up in the field. The treatments include debriefing, counseling and sometimes biofeedback.

Cops who die in the field often have put themselves in a compromising position, Blum says. Distractions, anxieties and, in some cases, complacency cause them to overlook danger signs or leap into situations that they otherwise would avoid.

Typically, an officer in treatment can be counseled back to health in a matter of weeks, except in extreme trauma cases or when the emotional wounds have gone untreated for a long time, Blum says. “Every cop who is worth his or her salt carries baggage. I help them deal with it, manage it, so they can become or stay healthy.”

A few years ago, Blum forgot how to manage his own baggage. The burned-out cops, the late-night visits to hospitals and the Manila folders bulging with lurid crime-scene photos began to darken his after-hours life.

“The way I did the work was by saying to myself, ‘OK, this is not my wife who’s been stabbed 26 times with hands and feet bound. This is not my daughter lying here raped and murdered.’ That’s how I did it, but everything got too close.”

As the horrors got closer, he pushed his wife and children further away, afraid they might be touched by it. As his father had done years before, he turned to the bottle for solace: “Vodka. I had no time for beer. And I never really learned the meaning of the word moderation. “

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Jim Harris has worked closely with Blum since 1986, and he saw the changes in his friend during those tough times.

“I’ve seen so many cops walk away from the job as just hollow shells of who they had been because they’ve taken all the heartache and agony and held it inside,” Harris says. “He finds ways to let them let it go. He’s like this sponge soaking up their pain. Sometimes, though, you got to squeeze and let it back out.”

The pressure built until Blum and his wife, Paula, separated briefly in the late 1980s. “It was the worst time in my life, no doubts about it,” she says.

The couple had met in New York as teens and had finally found success in California, but everything was being pulled down by the gory secrets he kept in his head.

“Because of confidentiality, he would never tell us about what his cases were, nothing specific, only a global picture,” Paula Blum says. “All this stuff was tearing his insides out, but he would keep it in. When he drank, all these terrible emotions would come out of him, just rotten things. We were all walking on eggshells.”

The separation made Blum think hard about his options. “Either find a way to remain healthy in the way you do your work or lose your family, that’s what it came down to,” he says.

The first step was to cut off the part of his practice that had him drafting suspect profiles and helping police with interviews of murderers and rapists. He decided he would counsel and evaluate only officers. “I only work with the good guys. That helped a lot.”

He quit drinking, too. The couple celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary this year, and Paula, the director of senior services at the Long Beach Jewish Community Center, says the marriage is reaching a new level of success.

“Although for a while I was trying to convince him to buy less weight equipment so we could buy a dining room set,” she jokes.

Four years ago, Blum turned to weightlifting to relieve the stress in his life and the pain in his back. A spinal injury had him facing the prospect of extensive and painful surgery, but instead he took a suggestion from one of his “babies,” a Pomona cop who loved power-lifting.

Dr. Deadlift was born.

“It is the joy of my life,” says Blum, who strengthens his back and eases his mind with the burn and sweat he finds among the clanging free weights. Earlier this year, he locked out with 600 pounds in the dead lift at the national police olympics. He laughs when it is suggested that maybe lifting great weights helps him carry the burdens his patients leave behind in his office.

“I’ll tell you this,” he says. “I’m helpless to prevent cops from being harmed, and that is my biggest wound. I can control the weight in the gym. It’s just me against the bar. And if I’m tough, tough enough, I can pull that weight.”

Blum is now planning his retirement. His son, Noah, 23, and daughter, Nicole, 20, are in college now (“They like me now that I can’t tell them what to do”), and in five or six years he hopes to scale back his practice and just advise police departments on how to create in-house trauma-response teams. He has already helped to create such programs in Brea, Huntington Beach and South Gate.

The teams are staffed by officers who quickly assemble and respond when a fellow officer experiences trauma in the field. With their training, they can reach out to their troubled peers.

“It’s great because the cop hears from another cop that, ‘Hey, I’ve been where you are now. The things you are experiencing are nothing but normal reactions to a traumatic event,’ ” Blum says.

He blanches at the suggestion that he is a frustrated cop wanna-be, and adds that it’s a job he could not handle. “I don’t have the self-control. Take a guy that beats up a lady or a kid. I’d beat the hell out of him.”

He also says the pressure cooker that his “babies” work in these days would be too much for him to handle. Southern California has become a high-scrutiny, low-tolerance place for police officers since the fallout from the Rodney King beating in March 1991.

When Blum testified as an expert witness on behalf of Koon, he explained to jurors that an officer’s account of a traumatic event might be blurred or incomplete because of a tunnel vision of sorts that kicks in during times of duress. It’s likely this tunnel vision accounted for some discrepancies between the videotape of the incident and the officers’ firsthand reports, Blum testified.

Blum says that although he is not a “big fan” of Koon’s, he was dismayed to see him decked out in jail fatigues. “There is something very, very wrong with that.”

And far more alarming, he says, is the message sent to law enforcement by the backlash against cops. He says probable-cause arrests and “bad-guy hunting” have been toned down by increasingly tentative officers who are afraid that aggressive law enforcement will land them in court.

“We have made a grave error,” he says. “We’ve told police, ‘Don’t get involved, because if you do, you can go to jail or lose your house.’ As a society, we’ve betrayed the very people who would save us.”

Hoping to chart the impact of the King beating and trials on area police departments, Blum is organizing a research project with the help of officers on the front lines. He hopes the street-level cops will be able to provide data on changes in stress, morale, public perception and the way officers conduct themselves.

He only has to thumb through his patient files to find anecdotal evidence of the pressures coming to bear on today’s patrol officers. Montebello Police Sgt. Tim Mahan was a wreck when he walked into Blum’s office after a shooting three years ago.

Mahan had been directing traffic on Whittier Boulevard when he found himself staring down a stolen sedan with trio of carjackers. Mahan leaped from the car’s path, but was sure he would feel a hot blast rip through his gut from the shotgun leveled out the passenger window.

The 23-year veteran officer got off two rounds before he hit the ground, killing the 15-year-old holding the shotgun. “I couldn’t believe I was alive,” he remembers. He walked away with no visible wounds, but he was shaken more than he knew.

His anxieties were compounded by the criminal investigation and trial, and the civil case, that followed and the surreal sensation of being treated as a lawbreaker instead of a lawman.

He saw his name listed on a police report next to the word “homicide.” In court he felt awkward sitting at the defendant’s table after years of automatically taking a spot on the table to the right side of the courtroom, the prosecutor’s side. His trial was in the afternoon in a courtroom that hosted one of the King trials during the morning, adding a circus feel to his own case.

Mahan was vindicated in both of his trials, but not before months of worrying that he might lose both his job and home. The memory of the shooting had left him with nightmares, and the emotional pressures he felt were manifesting themselves as physical ailments, making him miserable with bouts of stomach pain and diarrhea. Worse, other cops were beginning to whisper about his hand tremors.

“I didn’t trust Larry, or any shrink for that matter, so I walked into his office emotionally armed and fearful,” Mahan says. “I was from the old school, too, where you don’t say you’re hurting; you play it off. I thought anything I said would cost me my job. But the healing began as soon as I began trusting him.”

Blum told Mahan that the stomach ailments were tied to the shotgun wound his mind had expected his body to suffer. The nightmares were because the carjacker was the same age as Mahan’s son. Able to put a name to anxieties and recognize that they were normal reactions, not signs of weakness, Mahan was able to begin mending and eventually return to the force.

“Larry saved my career, no doubt about it,” Mahan says.

To Dr. Deadlift, the man who bench-presses the dead weight that burdens his beloved clients, that makes it all worthwhile.

“The good ones are the truest heroes and heroines you can imagine,” Blum says. “They literally sacrifice their own lives to save strangers. Think about that. Who does that? Some of the sweetest, finest human beings I have ever met wear badges. I’d do anything for those cops.”