Training Police to Handle Trauma [rwjf.org]

A veteran police officer in Cicero, Illinois, is quick with an answer when the therapist asks him: “What’s the worst thing you’ve witnessed on the job?”

Instantly, it’s 2010, an icy Valentine’s Day, and Officer Joseph Melone is staring in horror as flames engulf a three-story house. Melone is an arson specialist, and when the fire subsides, it’s his job to pick through the rubble. Seven people are missing. The oldest is 20; the youngest is that man’s newborn.

Melone finds the remains of the three-day-old baby.

“The 911 call from inside that place will haunt me until the day I die,” the 47-year-old Melone, now a sergeant, recalls. “You can hear the fire crackling around the caller and nobody could get in there.”

The story spills out from Melone as part of a training to give officers with the Cicero Police Department better tools for dealing with trauma in the lives of crime victims, as well as their own. The 8-hour course was built from scratch and tailored to the needs of the Cicero Police Department by local nonprofit staff from Youth Crossroads and the domestic violence agency Sarah’s Inn, as well as a psychologist from the local school district.

The idea for the course arose from a conversation the two of us had in early 2017 about the high suicide rate for members of the Chicago Police Department, which was 60 percent more than the national average, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. While the police department in Cicero is a tiny fraction of neighboring Chicago’s—160 versus 12,000—the pressure bearing down on officers is the same.

We recognized that in a community like Cicero, which is recovering from a history of gang violence, police need the tools for dealing not only with their own exposure to trauma, but also for helping community members overcome the effects of adverse experiences. It’s a way of shifting how law enforcement approaches and interacts with the citizens they are sworn to protect.

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