There was a time when police officers who experienced a traumatic event — a hostage situation, a fatal accident, an ugly mob scene — might be told to “tough it up, this is the job.”
Officers on the North Shore are going in a different direction with the Law Enforcement Critical Incident Stress Management Team. Volunteer officers from 10 local departments were trained recently to help their peers through stressful incidents.
There are plenty of such incidents. Just recently, a Salem police officer was assaulted and part of her ear bitten off as she broke up a fight outside a restaurant. Police officers respond to teenagers dying of drug overdoses, gruesome fatal accidents, murder scenes, incidents of child abuse. They are threatened, punched and occasionally shot at.
Now, after a traumatic event on the job, local departments can arrange a defusing session for their officers with a handful of the trained volunteers, typically at the end of the shift. All meetings are confidential and take place outside of the police station.
The volunteers listen to the responding officers talk about the call in an effort to help them process it, and then “forecast” what symptoms they may experience.
“This is about cops helping cops,” said Peabody Police Chief Tom Griffin. “It’s something we need to get ahead of.”
Griffin brought the idea of the peer support unit to an area police chiefs meeting, and helped get it off the ground over the past few months. Twenty-seven volunteer officers from Salem, Beverly, Peabody, Danvers, Marblehead, Swampscott, Lynn, Salisbury and Saugus will go to any willing department on the North Shore following a critical incident.
[For more of this story, written by Taylor Rapalyea, go to http://www.salemnews.com/news/...55-4fe7b2b3d760.html]
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