Cop Killer 2.0

In 1992, rapper Ice-T performed his infamous song “Cop Killer” advocating the murder of police officers. Well, as it turns out, we didn’t need his help, cops have taken care of that on their own. Today, in 2024 the number one killer of police officers in the nation is cops themselves. Suicide is the number one cause of death for active-duty police officers in America today. It outpaces line-of-duty deaths, murders of police officers, gunfire, traffic accidents, and the like by a multiple of three. In 2022, 150 police officers died by suicide, and only 64 were killed by gunfire in America. These statistics, however, are not accurate, as we now know that two out of every three police suicides go unreported. Suicides amongst law enforcement are now at epidemic proportions.

There is most definitely a war on cops today, and the greatest perpetrator is ourselves. Why is this happening, you ask? How did we get to this point? That is not an easy answer and is multifaceted. After starting the “Cover Now” foundation in 2018, we have dealt with over 150 law enforcement suicides across the nation. Unlike anyone I know, I have had the awful and unique opportunity to speak with police partners, girlfriends, spouses, boyfriends, and best friends of police officers who have killed themselves. Through them, I have gained a deep understanding of this terrible and silent epidemic.

Police officers are six times more likely to kill themselves than those in other professions. As won’t be a surprise to you, police officers deal with the worst of the worst in society. There are over 350 million calls for service each year in America to law enforcement agencies. Every single one of those is a negative contact. No one calls the police because something is going right. So, every contact starts with a negative. Police officers are trained to mitigate those negatives and turn them into positives, but nonetheless, every contact is because something went wrong—someone potentially broke the law, someone is suspicious, someone is being victimized. Even a traffic stop is made because someone did something wrong. Police officers see the worst: horrific traffic accidents where bodies are mangled and destroyed, murder-suicides, dead babies, and angry people cursing and screaming at them for merely doing their job. These incidents, over time, coupled with life’s normal problems of relationships, finances, rebellious children, and so on, make the statistic I just gave understandable. The bottom line is police officers suffer with mental health and are in a quagmire to get help.

Why hasn’t anything been done about this? Well, there have been noble attempts. In 1980, the Los Angeles Police Department started “peer support” as a way to give officers an outlet and understanding to help deal with these factors that I just mentioned. The thinking was that in any line of work, people relate to the peers they work with. Since then, peer support programs have traveled across the nation to almost all 18,000 state and local police departments. However, since the support programs started, suicides in law enforcement have increased off the charts exponentially. While it was a noble idea, the challenging and winding road to deal with mental health crises and suicides in law enforcement shows it has been ineffective, at least for that purpose. Why?

This is the question that everyone asks me—families of dead officers, police partners, union leaders, and even chiefs. After spending seven years exclusively dealing with law enforcement suicide, we finally know the answer. Simply, they don’t feel safe talking.

Let me unpack that. You see, if you work for an insurance company, a car wash, or McDonald’s and you tell your boss that you are having a mental health crisis, you can probably get assistance; they will probably help you seek out a therapist and even allow you to keep working while getting treatment. This is not the case in law enforcement. Police officers and deputy sheriffs have an awe-inspiring, dangerous and high standard job. They enforce laws, even physically. They have great authority, carry deadly weapons, and are expected to make life-and-death decisions in a moment.

The big boss, the chief or the sheriff, has a primary responsibility: to protect its citizens, as it should be. So the quagmire that I was talking about earlier is this: every cop knows that if they are mentally struggling, even having suicidal thoughts, if they reach out within their department to peer level support, their first-line supervisor, chief or sheriff and admit to a mental health crisis in their life, at the very least that badge and gun need to be taken for a while. At worst, they could be labeled by their peers as unfit, unreliable, a pariah, and fear losing their career for good.

You see, every cop knows that, and every cop reading this is shaking their head up and down. If I tell my peer support buddy who loves me, if I tell my sergeant, if I tell my chief or sheriff who deeply care about me that I am having suicidal ideations, I know what will happen next. So, therefore, cops don’t reach out.

We conducted an internal poll of mainline police officers around the country. We asked 100 police officers, “If you were suffering with severe depression or suicidal thoughts, would you reach out to anyone—and I mean anyone—within the bureaucracy of your police department or sheriff’s office?” 100 out of 100 said no. So why don’t they just reach out to their own primary care insurance provider and get help with mental therapy? We received similar answers. Things like “an average therapist does not understand the job we deal with.” Or, “What if they turn me in to my department?”

I know the next question you’re asking. If this is the case, why has nothing changed?

Again, while experiencing firsthand this crisis, speaking to union leaders, administrations, and police chiefs and sheriffs all over the nation, the answer was terrible and blinding, but understandable. They just don’t know or see the widespread severity of the problem.

Let me contrast it with the United States military. There are four major branches of the armed forces, actually five, but for the purposes of this article, who gives a crap about Space Force? I don’t think those guys are offing themselves at alarming rates. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have four distinct bosses. One dude at the top. Each one has hundreds of thousands of personnel under their command. That’s right, four bosses in total. At the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, those four bosses were getting reports back of their soldiers committing suicide at alarming rates. They could see the numbers clearly; it was ever-present and in their face.

In contrast, law enforcement does not have four bosses. Law enforcement has 18,000. There are 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies in the country, and they are all autonomous. Chiefs answer to their city council, sheriffs answer to their constituents, and all are paid to be concerned about the four walls of their own police departments or sheriffs’ departments. Here’s the simple breakdown. Of the 18,000 agencies, 84% have less than 50 officers, 12% have 51-250 officers and only 4% have more than 250 cops. So, over 80% of the 18,000 police agencies have less than 50 cops each spread out over the entire United States.

With that said, some departments may not experience suicide for a decade or longer. If there were only four bosses in law enforcement encompassing the 1 million cops in the nation, they would see the epidemic of cops killing themselves. But with 18,000 bosses spread over 1 million cops, they just don’t see it. Some of the larger departments, like NYPD, LAPD, and Chicago PD, definitely see the epidemic, as those departments have thousands of police officers. But the rest don’t, so there’s no national cry for change. However, when the four bosses of the military cried out for help, Americans and the federal government and lawmakers came running to their aid. In 2022 alone, the VA allocated 13.2 billion for military mental health, the DOD allocated billions as congress acted and appropriated monies, grants and initiatives to stop this crisis within our military. Not to mention military charities give over a billion dollars annually towards the needs of our amazing service men and women in the military.

However, since the 18,000 bosses of law enforcement are not crying out, there is practically nothing given to our nation’s law enforcement for the mental health epidemic that has now unfolded with our nation’s protectors. I’m not advocating that we take any of the billions of dollars given to the military for mental health support, but the disparity is overwhelming. Of the 2 million servicemen and women in the United States military, only about 10% of them are direct-action combat soldiers. The rest are in support roles. That means we give billions and billions of dollars for the mental health of approximately 200,000 U.S. combat soldiers. In direct correlation, every police officer carries a gun and engages in direct action for their entire career. We ask them to deal with the worst of the worst in society, and it is incumbent upon us as a nation to protect them when they suffer injury, and I don’t just mean physically.

At Cover Now, we are tackling this national crisis head on. Working with medical groups, advocating for our police officers at every level, including private funding, corporate sponsorship, state and federal government legislators, we are striving to save the lives of those who put their lives on the line for us every day. Exposure is key. May this article spread far and wide for the sake of those that stand in the void, for us.

For my brave and amazing brothers and sisters who carry the badge,

Jeff Stine
CEO | Cover Now