During my 23 years as a Police Officer from the oldschool you didnt see that but now you do. You see that probably because of social media and more exposures to a bad health can do to you. I think also young officers are more apt to go for psychological help if they need it. Again the oldschool probably not so much. One of the sad things i have seen in my research into ptsd is that when they look up a mortality studies of Police Officers, Police Officers compared to the general population die at a younger age. Some 10 years younger on average than those in the general population. So we are seeing greater numbers of death of cardiovascular disease among younger officers which is kind of surprising and kind of shocking. The thing you should understand about stress is its cumulative as you are continually exposed to trauma day after day and stress day after day eventually is going to wear your system down. Some of our Research Shows for example the body becomes this regulated under chronic stress. There are certain hormones like cortisol as an example that becomes so does regulated that the body cant adjust any more to the effect of that stress. When that happens it opens the body up for disease so we are seeing greater problems with disease and death among officers. I think if you shorten the number of years of retirement thats a great idea but i dont know but economically feasible given the cost of training Police Officers today and given the cost of lost experience. I think 20 years is reasonable if you have resilient people and i think dr. Ramey is accurate in saying we need to increase the resilience among officers and if we can do that we can cut down the effect of stress so i think thats important. I think most officers would love to see retirement at 15 years instead of 20 but again it may be a difficult task. I dont have them parable Empirical Research so i will fall back on my research working with officers. A number of officers who i see in the middle and late stages of their career undergoing psychological problems and stress family problems and so on a sort of know on one hand that they are getting burned out but they dont want to quit. There are couple of reasons they dont want to quit. They dont want to be seen as a quitter and let their colleagues down seeing as knuckling under pressure and so on but other times the reason may be very practical. Maybe 10 years ago five years ago they want to get invested in their full pension and then leave. What happens is you have office two at best posting and it worse underperforming on the job because they are too burned out to function adequately. How they got that way as a whole different issue. What might be considered as opposed to an either or Retirement Plan is perhaps a flexible type of time system whereas if you work your full 28 your benefits but perhaps a the nonstigmatized way at retiring at 10 or 15 and what you get partial Retirement Benefits but you are perceived as a burnout case and it doesnt have to be on the basis of disability. Therefore offers theirs who for whatever reason god bless them cannot do the job anymore they have a facesaving way of leaving Law Enforcement and not being out there and perhaps being a liability for the agencies as a whole. The other end of the spectrum is what you are seeing is this more fascinating world decent people live in. The culture has changed too. Years ago when he joined any company whether Government Agency or private company a sort of had a womb to tomb type of coverage and career. He started off early and were 20 or 30 years and at the end they gave you retirement with a gold watch and you are considered having a good career. Today most Companies Hire people with independent contractors and very few people have full employment so how can people have responded is saying well that theres no consistency or loyalty among big organizations a high rest we will jump for from one situation to another as it suits us. Ironically Police Agencies are one of the few places where if somebody wants to and is able to they can have 20 years of full employment with the generous benefit package. Many officers are going to policing do it partly for that reason alone so i think we need to do things to strengthen systems officers feel if they put their time and they will be able to serve their time and retire with honor and the practical benefits go with it but have a more flexible way of dealing with this because if an officer can do the job anymore we have to allow that office who is otherwise faithfully served if facesaving way out. Dr. Miller reminded me of plan ive seen in some industries where they call it a face at retirement. Another were to work fulltime for 15 years and then he would phase out for the next five years perhaps work threequarters time for one year the next year and a quarter time and then out. This seems to work well in industry but i dont know about policing. Something that might be possible. Thank you very much. Jose lopez followed by Brittany Packnett. I think i have two questions. I wanted to return to the question that tracy asked earlier on the panel. The discussion was a discussion around mandatory counseling of some sort for officers. And so i guess the first question is a twopart question. The first part for mr. Orr, im just wondering as a union wrap and if someone who is actively engaged in discussion with rankandfile officers is Something Like mandating counseling something that you think other union reps across the country could get behind and do you think that is something that the rankandfile officers across the country would want their union reps to push . The second question or the second part of the question is for mr. Violante or anyone on the panel. This part of the question has more to do with that piece around mandating and anything that is mandatory any agency or organization oftentimes is seen as i dont need you to mandate anything else. So what if the process was that maybe it wasnt mandatory that every officer automatically had opted in and had to create some form or fill out some selfevaluation in order to opt out. There is still an opportunity to make it feel as if its not mandatory but it will take significant work and some selfreflection to be able to kind of appeal and say this is something i dont think im in need of and something that i want to opt out of. Thank you and to address your question regarding mandated counseling and my perspective as a union leader counseling as a service. Its not an additional duty that is being opposed impose upon us to comply with some new form we have to learn how to fill out or something in the courts regarding caselaw where we are exposed to liability for the normal training. Counseling is a service so counseling in itself i dont see how it could be a problem. My Union Perspective is that i would need to know what consequences could result from that and whether or not there are opportunities for the office to take that counseling in their own direction rather than be mandated into a certain direction for through the perspective of some administrator. And then the obvious question for me also would be privacy and confidentiality. It would have to be a requirement to that and discipline could not result from anything that was exposed during the counseling. So just to rehash Counseling Service i think its a great thing. I have seen some policies where its mandated after Critical Incident but confidentiality has to be paramount in the consequences have to be monitored by the employee and the union. Discipline cannot result in the office has to have some say in the course that counseling takes if its a longterm thing. I agree with sergeant orr. I think confidentiality is key. As far as mandatory that does cause a problem i think when you force a Police Officer to do something that he or she doesnt want to do you are going to run into resistance from the union and the office themselves. One of the suggestions i was thinking about was putting a positive spin on this. In other words if you do go for lets say a Mental Health check a voluntary Mental Health check and in some way you are rewarded for that, perhaps incentive of some sort. That might work. In other words dont make it mandatory, make it voluntary but do it positively. Thats just an idea i was thinking about. I like the idea of seeing maybe not a psychologist but peer support. A Police Officer who is trained in peer support, officers would rather talk to another Police Officer than they would to someone else first. Psychologists are needed certainly they can, after but i think peer support is an important key to getting officers to go for help. I had a comment. Go ahead. One thing that works can you hear me okay . To present the opportunity to officers to have what is called a tele meter session. A confidential session with a mentalhealth professional outsider the organization. What i found have found over the last couple of years but this is if you can encourage an officer to participate in one of those sessions i would say at least 50 come back and say can we have more of those rather than just one so doing an incentive like john said to get people to see what its like, that is not as threatening as you might think it is actually helpful. The other experience i have that over the years working with milwaukee and other departments is even sitting down having the opportunity to tell your story to somebodys very powerful. I had a captain one time the set i feel like i should write you a check for their best therapeutic i session i have had and it was just a simple session to talk about what was on his mind. My recommendation would be at least make things accessible and try some of these programs that have some builtin telementoring sessions whatever you want to call it so officers can test that in a confidential way to see if thats something they believe will help them. Thank you. Is that many of the topics here today the devil is in the details. The number of agencies i work with have a bifurcated model and that is certain types of incidents for example officer involved shootings. Any officer involved in officer involved shooting is mandatorily me to go for a Critical Incident followup which is a single session. There is no stigma attached to it. Everybody goes so its not like one person will be affected more than anybody else. The way we conceptualize it is that they general checkup to make sure everything works. Overwhelming majority of cases the office assuming the administrative aspect if handled psychologically the Office Square back to go to go backward. Occasionally an offer is made accessible but not necessarily mandated. There might be other situations such as hostage scenarios and so on but the vast majority of officers who are experiencing stress there relates to some combination of personal stress and work stress the other way to do it is to make the these services accessible. That is we have a panel of individuals within the community that if you wish to go see a Mental Health professional for your own reason just the same as any other patient who walks into my office. The key is whether or not the people within that department encourage that. If somebody says you know lieutenant im having trouble dealing with something and the lieutenant slapped him on the back and says, on buck up if very little chance that person will seek counseling. If the sergeant says get the help you need and do we need to do and as long as the person comes into Mental Health professionals office that information is confidential. The only exceptions are the exceptions i would apply to anybody. They are engaging in child abuse but that applies to everyone. Mandatory in limited isolated cases we want we want to make a universal but it voluntary but supported in cases where a wellmeaning office wants to get help for themselves. Thank you very much. Brittany packnett followed by Roberto Villasenor. We had a little the tape delay with technology so if you want to Say Something feel free. Here is my second question. The one piece that i did want to comment on on the confidentiality piece was that i think at a minimum one of the things that we have heard and that has been up for discussion is when an officer is deemed unfit or unstable to work on a force that there has to be some flagging of that so that the office cant just move to a different location and be picked up by any department. Thats one thing just to state for the record something we have been discussing is part of this as part of the deliberations and we have heard on other panels. I guess mike second question is around the role of the department and without actually does happen. When an officer is deemed unfit or unstable what is the role of the department now to continue to offer support to the office who probably for a long time was a member of that family and its not much what should be the departments responsibility and making sure that office has a Mental Health support plan. I think its a crucial question. This relates to the whole issue of fitness for duty in general. With a Critical Incident its important to emphasize the office and all Police Agencies i work with tell the office when they comment when you come in for an officer involved shooting where you have had an experience and you may have after effects of it this is not a formal fitness duty evaluation. This is not because somebody thought he did something wrong or somebody that you underperform. This is separate and apart from any investigation and may be going on. This is simply to assess her psychological state to see if you are okay. If for some reason you feel you cant go back to work or i feel you cant go back to work this will be dealt with as a clinical issue not a performance issue. A formal duty evaluation is a specialized evaluation where the offices miss performing are underperforming and someone believes its due to a psychological reason. That has to be very carefully separated from a Critical Incident followup or any other kind of Mental Health treatment that occurs and unfortunately in some of our panelists said you have a poorly trained psychologist who sometimes conflate the two. A person comes in for help in the office gives the symptoms to a Mental Health practitioner and they jump to conclusions. The next thing they know they write down not fit for duty. You are talking about a man or womans career and life when you make an assessment of fitness of duty. It should not be done and less formal request has been made. So barring that i think its important that officers realize information is going to be confidential because again we all know somebody once said in a Police Agency is like a class of fifth grade girls. If somebody comes to me for psychological treatment i guarantee everybody in the department knows they are going before i do. So talk about confidentiality we know that cops are the worst blabbermouths in the business the confidentiality, we are the professionals and we are the Mental Health or vegetables and you are the supervisors and need to keep things confidential. They want to talk about thats fine but as far as we are concerned unless it involves a formal mandated referral mandated referral means something for evaluating and that is mandated by the department and the results go to the department. Barring that if an officer wants to seek help the lieutenant in the sergeant say i dont want to know what you told that guy. All i wanted to do is get better and if he can maintain that distinction will be clarified and that is what i mean about the government details. Youll have to get Mental Health people on enforcement and legal people union reps to hammer this thing out. This is going to be a tough thing to put together but if you do it right it will be a powerful force for getting Police Officers to seek help when they need it and make sure officers that cant perform their jobs arent out there doing so. Thank you very much. Brittany packnett followed by our final panelist Roberto Villasenor. I have two quick questions. One is to any of you and in your oral testimonies there has been mentioned of issues of domestic violence, child abuse in other ways in which the stressors that Law Enforcement officers deal with. My question is have you seen any models or do you have any concrete suggestions around the kind of counseling and Mental Health support provided for partners and children and other incidents of Law Enforcement officers such that i mean the statistics talked about the impact of personal life being one of the primary reasons for those unfortunate suicides so im wondering how we can ensure that families are supporting those personal stressors are mitigated . I can address that real quick. The Employee Assistance program is in existence its pretty vast and officers can seek that out themselves for any type of counseling from financial problems. They can be networked with Financial Advisers and if you are going to that type of crisis. Mareno crisis, problem with children, Substance Abuse and officers can seek that out themselves. Ive seen that happen pretty good and the guys will go for that on their own or maybe get a nudge from a friend. They can also be mandated for an administrator if there is a workrelated issue and they can be push