Just a few days before Mara’s death – which didn’t make even the local papers – the nation was shocked to hear about two New York City cops who took their own lives, within a few hours of each other. Steven Laski, 30, though never charged, was implicated in a Harlem-precinct corruption scandal. His service revolver was taken away, so he put a .22-caliber rifle in his mouth. Dirk Kaiser, also 30, was charged with drunk driving less than a week after graduating from the Police Academy. Knowing he could be dismissed from the force, Kaiser shot himself in the chest with his handgun, surrounded by 24 beer cans and a shrinelike arrangement of his new uniform and equipment.
“It must be New York,” declared Robert Garristo of the Washington, D.C., Police Department. True, this year New York has had its highest number of cop suicides since 1987, with 10 deaths so far. That’s four times the rate for the U.S. populace as a whole. But like many other urban ills for which New York gets singled out, this one is turning up all over the country. Twice as many cops – about 300 annually – die by their own hands as are killed in the line of duty, according to an ongoing study by the National Association of Police Chiefs. One morning last week, Paul Broussard, 39, deputy sheriff of Alexandria, La., killed his wife, who was divorcing him. Then, after a 21/2-hour standoff with a priest and a police chaplain, he shot himself in the head. Last month Darrin Rush, 34, an Atlanta cop who’d been breaking rules at work and having financial problems, shot his wife and then himself. In July Michael Ryder, 46, chief of police in his hometown of Barre, Mass., who loved his job and had been reappointed 22 times, shot himself in the head.
“This is a national problem and has been for years,” says Gerald Arenberg, executive director of the police chiefs’ group. “It’s just kept an extremely low profile.” That’s beginning to change. Next month the organization’s annual meeting will for the first time include a session on aiding the families of officers who have committed suicide. Such deaths, often involving alcohol and romantic troubles, are sometimes underreported by fellow cops, to avoid stigmatizing the families and to allow them to collect insurance and other compensation.
As they start to acknowledge the problem, police departments are scurrying to improve candidate screening and provide better counseling programs. Studies show that more-educated cops cope better. Cops are reluctant to seek help they may need, because they know it can mark them as troubled and halt their careers.
Police psychologists are also working to understand what makes those who protect us so vulnerable. Easy availability of a lethal weapon is one part of the picture (physicians and pharmacists, with access to prescription drugs, have even higher suicide rates). Another factor is the changing nature of police work. Cities steadily grow more dangerous. “I came into the force when the Miranda rights just came on the books,” says John Violanti, professor of criminal justice at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. “It altered the job . . . The laws we’ve passed over the years have put a tighter rein on officers and that’s good. But it’s also made police work more frustrating.”
“Basically, we’re wallowing in the s–t of life,” says Chicago detective Al Barski, who was a friend of Joseph Mara’s. “You see all this stuff that the average guy doesn’t see. You see dead babies . . . battered wives and battered husbands . . . I’ve seen people thrown out of windows.” As a daily diet, it’s devastating, yet police are trained to hold back their emotions. “The No. 1 problem for cops is, has been and always will be image,” says Ed Donovan, a retired Boston policeman who in 1970 put his gun in his mouth but couldn’t pull the trigger. Instead he helped create the Boston Police Stress Association, a pioneering peer-counseling group. “You think you have to go out there and be Superman to your department and to everyone,” says Donovan, who today heads the International Law Enforcement Stress Association.
For beleaguered cops, some help is now at hand. The advent of “community policing” is a good step, says Mike Wright, director of support services for the Delray Beach, Fla., Police Department. “Now it doesn’t look like crime is just the police’s problem,” he adds. “It’s everyone’s problem, which reduces the pressures.” Ed Donovan’s Boston group also found a way to ease those pressures, by reaching out to troubled cops who had not sought help themselves. “They would be angry, but they wouldn’t hang up,” says Donovan. “They knew somebody was looking out for them.” Just how comforting that is probably can’t begin to be fathomed by anyone who hasn’t stood in a cop’s shoes.
