Police Suicide: Why Are the Rates in Some Places So Low? (From Suicide and Law Enforcement, P 407-416, 2001, Donald C. Sheehan and Janet I. Warren, eds. -- See NCJ-193528)

• NCJ Number: 193564
• Author(s): G. Terry Bergen; Alecia Deutch; Sarah Best
• Date Published: 2001
• Length: 10 pages
• Sale Source: US Dept of Justice
• Publication Format: Document
• Publication Type: Statistics; Literature Review
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: A paper submitted to the Suicide and Law Enforcement Conference, FBI Academy, Quantico, VA, September 1999.

Annotation

A number of significant studies show that there are times and places where police suicide is quite low; the study reported in this article identified the circumstances associated with these minimal rates and developed methods for lowering elevated rates of police suicide in those departments where they were high.

Abstract

The published police-suicide literature is often unreliable due to serious measurement problems that undermine accuracy. These methodological problems include the unreliability of small samples, lack of statistical-significance testing, comparison of different time periods, use of different sources of data, use of different summary measures, and the misclassification of police suicide deaths as accidents. Despite reports of high rates in some police suicide studies, a number of studies report a minimal incidence of police suicide. One of the soundest of such studies was that by Stack and Kelley (1994). They reported a regression analysis of 33 police suicides, based on death-certificate data, in 16 States in 1985, which showed no significant impact of the police occupation on whether or not death resulted from suicide. Reiser and his colleagues at the Los Angeles Police Department reported very low suicide rates for their officers through 1990 (Josephson and Reiser, 1990). Since 1991, these rates apparently have increased somewhat from the remarkably low levels of the previous 20 years. There are a number of factors under the control of a police department that can affect the suicide rate in that department. A well-developed and proactive psychological services unit can provide support for officers' natural coping strategies. Several Texas police departments report low levels of police suicide in the last 10 years. These low rates are, in part, directly attributable to the effective delivery of psychological services in these departments. This Texas Model of support delivery has five features: respect, independence, broad and proactive focus, officer acceptance, and vertical integration. 1 table