Fifty-Three in Ten Years

A truly shocking and disturbing number of CPD suicides:

• It’s hard to imagine a more stressful job than policing.

  In police academies across the country, recruits begin each day by reciting a code of ethics. Different police departments use slightly different versions, but the essence is the same: to protect the weak, act without favor, and uphold the Constitution.

  Yet the brutality of urban life tests those ideals every day. “It’s like Fallujah out there,” one retired Chicago police officer told me. “And the whole time, I’m like—I didn’t sign up for this.”

  American police officers train for an average of five months. Then many of them are sent into some of the most volatile situations a city can produce. They are expected to act with the patience of a nurse, the judgment of a lawyer, and the precision of a Navy SEAL.

  In recent years, that job has only grown harder as cities like Chicago have become more violent and their residents have turned against policing itself.

We can't adequately quote the article as it is actually quite involved. You really need to go read it all. 

This statistic really jumped out:

• Through public records requests, The Free Press was able to uncover that 53 officers, including 12 retirees, have committed suicide in the past decade. The situation is much worse than previously thought, with past estimates putting the figure at “more than 30 police employees.” The Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago, which distributes police pensions, told me that one out of every five deaths they logged since 2015 was a suicide.

This article was cited across two or three of our regular reading sites, nationally known bloggers read by hundreds of thousands of people daily. We got more emails about it than we've gotten about anything else in quite a few years.

Will it make a difference? No idea. We certainly hope so. Fifty-three Officers (twelve retirees among those) is near incomprehensible. Any other profession that had fifty-three suicides over ten years in the tiny slice that CPD represents would be a national outrage, resulting in a complete re-evaluation of policy, procedures, methodology, rules, regulations, oversight, accountability, etc.

But not for the police in a blue city, blue state $hithole where they've been demonized and dehumanized for far too long.