In Episode 407 of Mic’d In New Haven — Mental Health Matters — Edmund Hartnett discusses a major issue in law enforcement mental health that often goes overlooked: there is no centralized system tracking police officer suicides after retirement.
An officer can serve 25 or 30 years, retire, move to another state, start a second career — and years later, if they take their own life, it may never be officially counted in any law enforcement database. The information is often passed along informally, anecdotal, and incomplete.
Unlike the military, which tracks veteran suicides through the Department of Veterans Affairs, law enforcement has no single clearinghouse collecting this data nationwide.
Without accurate numbers, it becomes harder to understand the scope of the problem — and harder to build the systems needed to help the people who spent their careers helping others.
Outro Song: REM – Everybody Hurts (1992)
VIEW INTERVIEW HERE:
Mike Colón Media 
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