Police Culture Suicide

When considering suicide, how can we better educate our selves to help prevent less frequent occurrences through out our culture? Especially within our police culture. To help prepare and prevent suicide we must educate our selves on what are the causes and triggers leading up to suicide. Where does it all begin, and what satisfaction of one who decides to commit suicide? Focusing on a specific culture towards suicide, we can take a look at the police culture and suicide. Most may think that the police community would never have an issue with suicide. When in reality it is the police community whose suicide rates are the highest and continues to grow. According to the National Study of Police Suicides “suicide rate for police officers are 17 of 100,000 and the suicide rate for general public consists 11 of 100,000” (French 2012). So why is it that we the public very rarely hear of incidents like these? It can be known that “officer suicides may be intentionally misclassified as ‘accidents’ to protect the reputation of the officer and/or the department” (Burns 210). In the film Behind the badge: Preventing police …show more content…
In the film Breaking the silence: Suicide prevention in law enforcement, one of the sergeants mentioned that a police officers day can vary it is never the same, it can go from writing someone a simple ticket to getting a call over the radio to another frantic officer about a death or something of that sort. Trauma’s like these can affect the personal lives of police officers. Suicide risk factors and warming signs that can be seen in a individual include, “talking about death, dying or suicide, increased alcohol and drug use, feeling trapped, hopelessness, anger chronic anger, irritability, outbursts or relationship problems” (Spencer 2014). Many times symptoms like these are covered up by officers who try to maintain or uphold the image of a tough police