He lasted eight days in police uniform before his first suicide attempt.
“I just went back to work like nothing happened,” he says. When Thomas returned to Newark, the police department offered no services for returning veterans, and he says he probably wouldn’t have applied for help anyway, fearing a stigma.
Most law enforcement agencies, because of factors including a culture of machismo and a number of legal restraints, do little or no mental health screening for officers who have returned from military deployment, and they provide little in the way of treatment.Hiring preferences for former service members that tend to benefit whites disproportionately make it harder to build police forces that reflect and understand diverse communities, some police leaders say.Veterans who work as police are more vulnerable to self-destructive behavior - alcohol abuse, drug use and, like Thomas, attempted suicide.Some other conclusions about military veterans in the police force emerged more clearly: Reporters obtained data from two major-city law enforcement agencies and considerable anecdotal evidence suggesting veterans are more likely to get physical, and some police executives agree.īut any large-scale comparison of the use of force by veterans and non-veterans is hampered by a chronic lack of reliable, official record-keeping on police violence. To the obvious question - are veterans quicker to resort to force in policing situations? - there is no conclusive answer. But an investigation by the USA TODAY Network and The Marshall Project indicates that the prevalence of military veterans also complicates relations between police and the communities they are meant to serve. They bring with them skills and discipline that police forces regard as assets. The majority of veterans return home and reintegrate with few problems, and most police leaders value having them on the force. Even as departments around the country have sought a cultural transformation from “warriors” to “guardians,” one in five police officers are literally warriors, returned from Afghanistan, Iraq or other assignments. What has gone largely unstudied, however, is the impact of military veterans migrating into law enforcement. The debate over the militarization of America’s police has focused on the accumulation of war-grade vehicles and artillery and the spread of paramilitary SWAT teams. This was the second time since returning from war and rejoining the police force that he had tried to take his own life.
He collapsed onto his stepson’s bed, calmly waiting to die. Six hours earlier, Thomas, a decorated narcotics investigator and a veteran of the New Jersey Air National Guard, tortured by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of his service in Iraq, had downed a fistful of prescription sleeping pills with an entire bottle of Bermuda rum. To his dismay, he was still very much alive. A team of police officers and medical technicians had strapped his limbs together, stuffing his body into a mesh sack to restrain him after he tried to fight them off. William Thomas, a retired Newark police sergeant, left his home in a body bag. Watch Video: Video: When trauma comes home
0 kommentar(er)
