NCJ Number
193567
Date Published
2001
Length
10 pages
Annotation
This article reviews current perspectives on police suicide and offers suggestions for prevention and future research.
Abstract
A section on theories of police suicide addresses Freud's concept of aggression and self-destruction. Henry and Short (1954) added a social dimension to Freud's model by relating aggression to societal as well as individual frustration. Nelson and Smith (1970) hypothesized that officers are continuously disintegrated from society by their jobs, increasing the potential for suicide. Bonafacio (1991) proposed a psychodynamic approach to police suicide that attributed police suicide risk to exposure to human misery and death, which may exacerbate feelings of inadequacy already present in an officer's personality. A review of research on police suicide encompasses epidemiological studies and suicide rates. Regarding suicide-rate studies, the author advises that the validity of police suicide rates is questionable, since officer suicides may be routinely misclassified as accidents or undetermined deaths. Further, the author assessed the risk of suicide, homicide, and accidental deaths among 2,611 police officers and then compared this risk to municipal workers (Violanti et al., 1996). When compared to municipal workers, police officers had a 53-percent increased risk of suicide over homicide, a 310-percent risk of suicide over accidents, and a 265-percent risk of suicide over homicide and accidents combined. Following a review of the limitations of police suicide research, a section of the article focused on suicide prevention issues. A prevention model has the following components: psychological assessment, tracking high-risk officers, access to firearms, family involvement, training, stress awareness, professional intervention, and retirement counseling. A discussion of future research considerations focuses on hypotheses and measures with regard to the psychological "autopsy" of police suicides.