A fourth NYPD officer has committed suicide in the span of a month. There’s a lot of discussion about the stress of the job. I guess some people just gotta surround themselves with platitudes, it saves thinking.
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/off-duty-nypd-officer-commits-suicide-fourth-nyc-cop-this-month-1.587918

Is police work stressful? It can be. It can also be the most fun one can have with their clothes on. I was a cop for thirty years. As a rookie cop it amazed me that the city would actually pay me to do the job. Thirty years later that thought still popped up. Not as often and without the same sense of wonder. Overall, I would say I never worked a day in thirty years.

The four NYPD officers shared a common employer, NYPD. One was a deputy Chief. He was facing mandatory retirement. That is a far cry from a thirty-seven year officer and Detective, another suicide. The other two were assigned to patrol. One had twenty-five years on the job.

Nobody is served by saying, “must be the job.” That statement makes it seem an acceptable and foregone conclusion that a certain number of cops will eventually “eat their gun.” It is neither.

I don’t know what happened to make these guys take the action that they did. I do know that performing the actual job tasks were never stressful to me. Three of these guys had a 100 years of combined experience. I suspect that they had put the job and all that it entails into a context that they were able to live with.

Let me qualify that, yes, the job entails stress. Go through a 1000 doors on hard entries. Try driving a patrol car at 70 mph into a 30 mph turn and making it. Walking down a dark alley looking for an armed individual is likely to grab anybody’s attention. I guess my point is my stress, fear, or heebie-jebbies was within acceptable and expected limits. I never experienced a level of stress that was out of bounds, while on the street.

In the police station is another matter. We used to have a saying, “They can kill you, but they can’t eat you.” Those that ascribed to the saying were pretty sure the concept applied on the street. They hoped it applied in the station. Some of the biggest scumbags I ever ran across could be found in the station and without restraint.

A police Chief from a medium sized Texas department and I got in a discussion about a police chief that I had worked for. This was back in the 1980’s I was running a regional police academy. The Chief asked me my opinion of my former boss. This was an unusual question. The police chief mafia doesn’t countenance adverse comments about fellow chiefs from underlings.

I replied, ” the rookie class is watching a video of Henry Lee Lucas.” (Henry was a serial murderer suspected of dozens of murders.) Having worked for that chief and watched Henry Lee Lucas’s confessions to murder, there isn’t a doubt in my mind. Henry Lee Lucas is a finer, more upstanding, moral person than my old boss.”

My new found friend kind of rocked back, as if I had struck him. He replied in a low voice, “I think you are probably right.”

Does being a police officer change the way one interacts with friends, family and the public. Sure, is that change a reaction to stress? I guess that depends on one’s understanding of stress. Stress isn’t necessarily bad. It provides incentive to adapt to a chosen environment. It causes people to identify and assume successful behaviors so that they can function in a given setting.

Here’s a thought exercise. Next time you are at a neighborhood cookout button hole the electrician, plumber, nurse or carpenter and regale them with your expert opinion on how they ought to do their job. Time how long it takes them for their eyes to glaze over. Every occupation looks on the outsider as a schmuck that will never understand.

To a degree, everybody deals with incompetence, lies, double dealing, dishonesty, acts of courage and cowardice. The difference is Joe Citizen occasionally ends up with a bad haircut, poor customer service or a product that doesn’t meet expectations. Cops run into the same thing, possibly more frequently and with a higher degree of criticalcality when they fail.

There are 55,000 police officers in New York city. In the last month four of them committed suicide. They did that for individual reasons. Musta been the job is a throw-away explanation for guys that deserve better.