Our Position on Suicide Statistics

Badge of Life™ will continue to maintain our personal ethical and professional standards. We adhere to the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists Code of Conduct. The needs of the officer will remain our only priority.

Our mission is to provide comprehensive education and training to law enforcement about mental health and suicide prevention for officers and their families with our “Building A Better Cop” program. Suicide does not stand alone and cannot be managed by simply looking for the common signs and symptoms. This is why Badge of Life™ relies on comprehensive programming. Our training methods go beyond the usual PowerPoint lecture and include hands on scenario-based exercises which are relevant to the officer and agent. The actual methods of managing stress, trauma, family conflicts and other topics relevant to law enforcement are based on current research. Take home information is distributed as well as the offer to follow up with our trainers as needed.

There are many hypotheses about why officers and federal agents take their own lives. We have found that the data is not entirely clear and more research is always needed to work towards prevention. There are many variables in each situation that must be collected and scientifically analyzed in order to give us more insight. We do not feel pressure to give the "why" answer, as we do not yet know it and each situation is unique. As the evidence is produced through rigorous and scientifically accepted methods, we will inform the public about our findings, commonalities and reasonings as they emerge. The most salient information is currently produced by Dr. John Violanti who's work I encourage you to study. His peer reviewed journal articles and books help keep us up to date and informed on the most pressing issues about law enforcement and mental health. We could not be more fortunate to have Dr. Violanti as our advisor.

We train nationally in response to requests from police departments, task forces and federal institutions. We have highly experienced and informed trainers who meet the needs of officer’s and agents. Each training is developed specifically for the requesting agency to meet their unique and specific program needs.