When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
— VIKTOR E. FRANKL
The diminished health and wellness of first responders is extremely disheartening. The number one cause of death for police officers is suicide — there are nearly 200 such deaths every year in the United States (on average about 140 documented yearly, with unknown additional deaths improperly classified as “accidental” or “undetermined”). The rate of suicides for retired police increases tenfold. Military statistics are even grimmer. On average, 1 active duty soldier and 21 veterans commit suicide every day. Of all working police officers, 15 to 18 percent (about 120,000) have post-traumatic stress disorder, while over 200,000 vets suffer from this disorder. Suicide and depression have also become a serious concern for those in the fire service and for EMTs (emergency medical technicians).
It is estimated that 25 to 30 percent of police officers have stress-based physical health problems, such as high blood pressure, heart ailments, circulatory disorders, digestive disorders, diabetes, certain kinds of cancer, and premature aging. Stress can also cause significant sleep disorders, fatigue, isolation, irritability, anger, intrusive thoughts, depression, anxiety, paranoia, and panic reactions. A 2007 research study by Harvard Medical School, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reports that 40 percent of police officers have a serious sleeping disorder that causes significant health problems. Acute stress is a major factor in early retirement and career changes for first responders, causing the public to lose the service of many solid, experienced men and women. In my experience, about 50 percent of police officers and many other first responders retire early or leave on disability.
I still get nauseated remembering the seven hundred photos on a child molester’s computer depicting infants and small children being forcibly sodomized and forced to perform other sex acts. As much as I would like to forget them, those images will be seared into my mind forever, as will the details of the case where a janitor at an Alzheimer’s facility brutally raped an eighty-year-old invalid patient.
Several of my fellow officers have fought hand to hand for their lives; some very nearly became murder victims. Others were left with no choice but to kill another in order to save a life, or became the unwitting instrument of death in a suicide-by-cop. Try, if you will, for just a minute to imagine watching a dying man take his last breath — a man who deliberately forced you to kill him because he couldn’t take his own life.
Then there are the accidents, like the one where a young woman was trapped in her vehicle after a crash. She was incinerated right before the eyes of horrified officers at the scene, who frantically tried, and failed, to rescue her. The woman’s screams became more and more anguished until they abruptly stopped. The officers could do nothing but stand helplessly by, feeling the searing heat burn their own skin as the unforgettable stench of burning flesh washed over them. How do you forget a scene like that?
As a police officer I have walked into homes of such poverty and deplorable filth that I was unable to eat for a day from disgust. Such was the case after seeing a small boy covered in cockroach feces lying in a bed covered in his own filth. My partner and I quickly hustled him out of there, only to learn two days later that the social services agency had returned that child to live in the same home.
We have witnessed crime scenes of unimaginable horror: The kitchen of a small house where a butchered mother lay murdered on the floor, and a set of tiny, bloody footprints led to the rear of the house. There we discovered a four-year-old girl curled up on her bed in the fetal position. She had been stabbed to death. The body of a woman who came home early and surprised an intruder, who proceeded to stab her seventy-six times, finally breaking the knife blade off in her skull. Or the body of the man who was slashed repeatedly with a sword; we found his body lying in his living room with his intestines sprawled several feet in various directions all over the floor.
I have crawled on my hands and knees inside a body bag to search for and collect maggots so I could give them to an entomologist to approximate the time of death of a murder victim. I have chased armed robbery suspects at 120 miles an hour, eventually catching them. I have posed as a prisoner inside a jail cell to try to talk with a murder suspect. I have been involved in numerous fights, had my life threatened several times, been shot at, and had my police car’s rear window shot out. I have observed numerous autopsies, each time getting covered in a fine mist of skull dust when the medical examiner used a high-powered saw to cut through a skull to remove a brain.
I worked exhaustively to bring a child molester to justice twenty-seven years after he committed his crimes — at the time, the longest period between a crime and conviction in San Diego County history. I spent five years investigating a murder, even though the victim’s body was never found, and won one of the first no-body murder convictions in San Diego County.
As my years on the force went by, the dead and decomposing bodies became too numerous to mention. I saw the many different ways that people kill themselves; the unspeakable damage criminals inflict upon children; the broken bodies resulting from scenes of senseless gang-related or domestic violence; the mangled corpses of accident scenes. Each and every one of these scenes traumatized and hardened my soul a bit more, which no doubt contributed to the failure of two marriages. Still, I persevered while my spirit suffered.
Thinking of the James Desmond case immediately brings on a feeling of horror like no other. Every detail is clear in my mind as I once again stand over the lifeless remains of a body discovered lying in an obscure alley, minus its head and hands. These appendages had been savagely sawed off with some sort of manual tree-trimming saw and discarded elsewhere, never to be found. As I stood over the partial corpse of what until very recently had been a living, breathing man, I wondered yet again what kind of sociopath could do something this horrible to another human being.
Movies and computer games have accustomed general audiences to scenes of shocking violence, and CGI (computer-generated imagery) effects have become more and more realistic. However, nothing can come close to the real-life grisly sight of a bright red open torso where a head was very recently attached. I wondered about the fear the victim must have felt just before his murder and shuddered to imagine his agony. My spirit suffered a tremendous blow working over such a grotesque scene — a scene that will never leave my mind.
That day marked the beginning of seven years of emotionally exhausting and frustrating work on this most difficult case. We ascertained that the victim had been a middle-aged man named James Desmond. There was no crime scene — he had been killed and cut up at another, unknown location. There were no known witnesses, no confessions, no cause of death, no murder weapon, and no DNA — no fingerprints, hair, or other trace evidence of the killer left at the scene. In fact, there was no physical evidence of any kind left by the killer. Still, I refused to let such a heinous murder go unpunished. For the next seven years I didn’t work the case; I lived it. Living the case meant immersing myself in an underworld of gangs, prostitutes, pimps, and drug dealers.
I gradually became a different person while working the Desmond murder. My perspective on life and the way in which I viewed other people and the world at large changed significantly for the worse. My suspicion and distrust of people, even family members, grew exponentially as I endured death threats and was followed home by an accomplice of the suspects. I was constantly looking over my shoulder. I became emotionally distant from my wife and stepkids as I obsessed over every detail of the case, wanting to try anything and everything in my power to solve it before the murderers killed again. Losing myself in such a dark world was consuming my very spirit.
I did not work in vain. Seven years after we discovered the body in an alley, two members of the Los Angeles Crips gang were convicted of the murder of James Desmond. I had done what I had promised his family I would do. However, I was no longer the person who had stood over his mangled corpse in horror. I was in real danger of becoming another victim of my profession, brought down by the accumulation of too many haunting experiences. I was having serious difficulty sleeping, I felt emotionless, and I was becoming increasingly more isolated and distant and less and less able to cope with stress. I realized that I had to develop my own emotional- and spiritual-survival practices or I would not survive.
I take the “protect and serve” aspects of the first responder’s job as sacrosanct. It is our sacred duty to protect life and provide help when people need it. It is our responsibility to maintain emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual wellness in order to be there for those who need and depend on us. Our fellow citizens deserve nothing less than a dedicated, healthy, and complete first responder who is emotionally stable, fully invested in the job, and willing and able to do everything in his or her power to serve those in need. It is my great hope that this book will give you the proven, effective tools to be your very best: a hero who enables the rest of us to live a safe and secure life.
Initially, it is important for you to realize that to cultivate and sustain wellness, all the components of a person must be addressed: the mind, the body, and, most important, the spirit. It is your responsibility to use the information in this book to develop your own emotional-survival and wellness practices based on the initiatives described.
In this book I share what I have learned in my twenty-five years on the job and from my own personal trials. I offer practical, effective solutions and proactive wellness initiatives that have worked to heal and protect my spirit and the spirits of many others. The essential survival principles, beginning with the warning signs and self-awareness discussed in chapter 1, offer a practical resource guide to all first responders who seek to bulletproof their spirits. Chapter 2 explains many ways to nurture, sustain, and shield your spirit; and chapter 4 offers several survival lessons of other first responders. Methods to mitigate the hypervigilance cycle and to prepare for and allay the effects of acute stress and trauma are described in chapters 3 and 5. The many benefits of the BeSTOW (Beyond Survival Toward Office Wellness) philosophy are listed in chapter 6; peer-support concepts are discussed in chapter 7; and the many ways your loved ones can support you are described in chapter 8. Chapter 9 tells of the essential ways a chaplain can heal and sustain your spirit. Chapter 10 discusses how faith can shield your spirit, which Officer Tim Purdy describes, too, in chapter 11. All of this information is vital. It was vital for Officer Purdy, as you will read, and he credits it with saving his career, his marriage, and possibly even his life.