CopShock - Introduction

CopShock, Surviving Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Introduction

The detective led me to the door of a rat-hole called the interrogation room. He sat in a chair against a window, I with my back to the door. Between us was a gnawed, wooden table barely large enough to set up the tape recorder and microphone. The only other objects crammed into the tiny room were a punched-out, green metal filing cabinet and a black telephone.

The detective's white dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows and unbuttoned at the throat, was decorated with a scrawny print tie and a black 9mm pistol dangling from a right shoulder holster. He was round-faced, as big as a fullback, the smallness of the room making him seem all the bigger. After he began his story, tears came to his eyes, and he wept silently in the tiny cubicle. He told me of flashbacks and nightmares, of reliving scenes as if from horror movies.

"...The mother tied the hands of the two children with phone cord and stabbed them as they ran around the apartment..."

But this was not a movie. The detective had lived the dreams. The crime scenes he had investigated were real and the victims, he said, haunted him in his sleep and pursued him while awake.

"...The infection turned to gangrene. So when I walked into the crime scene and saw the body, the ankle was rotted away and full of maggots..."

In a gush of words he described his drinking, drugging and uncontrollable crying fits, reactions sometimes associated with a dangerous psychological condition with which he was diagnosed called Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

"Do many cops suffer from PTSD?" I asked him.

"In this country, probably a third of the police force."

While astonished by his estimate, later I was to learn from research the detective was right. As many as a third of the cops in this country are impaired by PTSD and cannot function well, if at all.

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder was first diagnosed in Vietnam veterans years after the war. They developed it from combat situations. Today PTSD may well be the most significant reason cops become emotionally crippled.

After interviewing the detective, I spoke to two other police officers that day who were diagnosed with PTSD. Both were Vietnam War veterans. One of them spoke indifferently about stressful effects the war had had on him, as if underplaying the effects would make them tolerable. The other, his eyes tearful, his voice breaking, couldn't talk about the war at all. He said he hadn't even told his therapist about what happened in the war -- now decades later.

This same man told me what happened to Vietnam veterans who were cops during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Riot conditions were similar to a battlefield with automatic gunfire, snipers, fires, smoke, screams and explosions. Some officers felt they were reliving their war experiences and, overwhelmed, had to leave the scene to seek help from counselors.

By the end of the day of interviewing at the LAPD, I had solid information for writing a newspaper story about cops with PTSD. I went to say good-bye to the detective when he motioned me into his office and shut the door.

The detective, William H. Martin, the LAPD's Drug And Alcohol Rehabilitation Program Coordinator, said traumatized cops were calling him in the middle of the night. Yet cadets at the academy and even seasoned officers didn't believe anything could happen to them. They need a book, Bill said, to explain how PTSD ruins lives.

"I've gone to too many funerals of cops who ate their guns because they couldn't take it," he said. "A book is part of the solution."

"Wouldn't a doctor be more suited...?" I began.

"Cops need a book from a layperson's point of view," Bill interrupted, "a book from somebody who reports facts in an impartial, objective way without psychological jargon."

After I got home, I called several treatment centers and police peer supporters (cops trained to look after cops) in other cities. I learned that even though most police departments do not experience as high a rate of suicides as Los Angeles and New York, the consequences of trauma can devastate officers' lives. And the lives of their families.

The counselors I talked to thought a book about how cops handle the effects of trauma and PTSD from a journalist's unbiased standpoint -- something they'd never seen before -- would be valuable in their work helping law enforcement officers cope.

My resistance vanished. I spent the next six years researching and writing CopShock -- stories of how cops prevent or manage psychological trauma.

Those six years took me to places I had never been before. Dark streets in big cities, drug dens, scenes of shootings and beatings. In the back of police cars, I hung on as they careened, sirens wailing, through streets and alleys. I wore a bulletproof vest that made me drench my shirt with sweat. I witnessed cops stonefaced and people weeping in grief as their friend, shot, was carried out on a stretcher.

I walked the corridors of police power, meeting administrators and politicians. And I talked to over a hundred police officers, their spouses and friends, union representatives, counselors and combat war veterans.

I listened to police officers' tales of the toll it takes on them to wear a stone face. They told me how anger and despair held inside turns against them, eating away at faith and hope.

The stories in this book tell the cops' stories in their words. Of what it's like to shoot another human being and to be shot, knifed, and beaten. The book tells of police officers' struggles with treacherous administrators and hostile doctors. Of the day-to-day build up of "routine" events that can break an officer down. Of sleepless nights, horrifying flashbacks, drinking binges, drug taking, and suicide.

The stories explore the dark recesses of the mind, in which violent thoughts and loss of control crash into each other. And the stories show how police officers pull themselves out, how they survive psychological trauma, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

Rather than immediately taking the reader through the definitions of trauma and PTSD, I begin this book with the first story. Giving psychological trauma a human face illustrates, better than any explanation, where PTSD -- copshock -- begins and how it progresses and changes lives.