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KEY POINTS
- Three officers, one man and two women, died by suicide between Dec. 15 and Dec. 22 in Chicago
- A total of seven police officer suicides were recorded in 2022
- Over a dozen deaths by suicide have been reported in the police department since 2018
Three Chicago police officers died by suicide in the last weeks of 2022, putting the total number of police officer suicides last year at seven.
A 58-year-old female Chicago police officer was found dead of an apparent suicide on Dec. 15.
The second officer, a woman in her 30s, was found dead in her home from suicide on the morning of Dec. 20.
A 51-year-old off-duty Chicago police officer also took his own life on the morning of Dec. 22, WLS-TV reported.
“It’s a tragic trend that’s been going on for years,” retired Chicago Police Department chief of detectives Eugene Roy told Fox News Digital, explaining that city leaders have engaged in a policy of “benign neglect” that is “costing people their lives.”
“What we have here is we have a failure of two things,” Roy said. “We have a failure of management and, more importantly and more critically, we have a failure of leadership.”
Roy talked about how leadership can make improvements within the department, including the alleged lack of privacy in the public waiting room of the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) office, which officers visit if they wish to seek help for mental health issues.
According to Roy, the police department also sent an email to every sworn officer on the day of one of the reported suicides letting them know about the complaints against them, which he believed showed a lack of sensitivity and leadership skills.
Twenty police officers in Chicago are believed to have died from suicide since 2018.
A Justice Department research study in 2017 found that officers in the Chicago Police Department are 60% more likely to die from suicide than officers in the average police department.
Meanwhile, Tania Glenn, a trauma therapist in Austin, Texas, for 30 years and the president of Tania Glenn and Associates, which provides mental health services to first responders and veterans, told Fox News Digital that Chicago police officers face a “multifaceted” set of circumstances and problems.
With Chicago’s high record of violence, officers are exposed to a lot of crimes and critical incidents, Glenn said. There is also a “staffing shortage” and the issue of “prolonged shifts.”
“When you take people who are exposed to high stress and you also expose them for very long periods of time, what happens is, of course, they’re in this constant state of fight or flight and their cortisol is pumping,” Glenn said. “And when they are off, it takes so long to decompress from that constant engagement of fight or flight but even when they are off, they don’t sleep well.”
Glenn said that the lack of sleep caused by working a lot of overtime also contributed to people not thinking rationally and mental health damage.
In addition, according to Glenn, one of the biggest challenges officers face is overcoming the stigma and embarrassment associated with reaching out to superiors for help.
“I think every officer who gets good help wants to tell other officers to get that help, and if we can multiply how many officers get really good care, they’re going to be the biggest influencer for other officers to go get help,” she said.
If you have thoughts of suicide, confidential help is available for free at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Call 1-800-273-8255. The line is available 24 hours a day.
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