ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. — It’s known as The Knock.
The moment a police officer has to knock on a stranger's door and deliver the worst news a family has ever received.
It becomes a moment that will forever change their lives and sometimes those of the officers, too, according to St. Louis County Lt. Scott Roach.
“It's very traumatic, it's very sad,” Roach said. “It can affect that officer personally and it often does.
“When you hear about things that really mess up cops, one of the things is anything pediatric. So if it's a pediatric death, it’s an untimely death, a kid that was injured in a car crash or killed in a car crash or a homicide or whatever, that really messes up policemen. As you can imagine, that's a human response. And it's even worse if the officer has kids.”
Now, Roach is heading up a department-wide effort to make tending to mental health part of the police culture as the commander of the first-ever Officer Wellness Unit.
The St. Louis Police Foundation and a federal grant from the Community Oriented Policing Services Office are paying for the unit’s training, education, speakers and programming.
It was a speaker that inspired Roach to get involved with mental health care for his fellow officers.
In 2013, he was a board member for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. He invited Connecticut State Police Sgt. Troy Anderson to speak during its conference in 2013 – one year after Anderson was put in charge of overseeing the mental health response for first responders at the scene of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting.
“I sat in the front row just mesmerized and just soaking in every word because I realized not only our agency, but a lot of agencies didn’t have anything like this,” he said.
He spent the next few years helping officers with their mental health where he could, offering a listening ear. He used Anderson as a sounding board.
Since Ferguson, Officer Wellness Units have been popping up at police departments across the country. Creating them was among the recommendations of the Ferguson Commission.
In 2016, Roach gave a class at the police academy about the department’s Employee Assistance Program, which offers ways officers can also find help.
“There were people in that class that didn’t even know we had an EAP, let alone how to use it,” he said.
After that class, he said EAP use went up by 62% among officers.
In 2019, the suicide rate among officers soared, pushing the issue to the forefront once more, Roach said.
Lt. Roach said he is turning to other departments including San Diego, Indianapolis, Connecticut and Seattle as models to build St. Louis County’s unit.
But once a department gets a Wellness Unit, it can still be an uphill battle to get officers to buy-in.
Roach is a third-generation police officer.
“In talking to my father and my grandfather, you talk about stigma being a problem now? Oh my gosh, I mean, this wasn't even discussed back then, it's, ‘You handled it in your own way' and that was it.
“Officers are afraid of what it makes them look like, or think it makes them look weak.”
But Roach said the younger generation of officers is different.
“They care more about themselves, physically and mentally than any generation before them,” he said.
Roach has long-term plans for the unit, which also include a physical wellness component and a military reintegration program to help soldiers adjust to life as officers.
“We might bring in nutritionists, because where are you going to get a meal at 2 a.m. other than at QuikTrip?” he said.
For now, Roach is overseeing the department’s chaplains, and his primary goals include launching a peer support program in which about 20 officers will be trained in techniques such as active listening and other coping skills.
He’s also planning to launch an app officers and their families can use to find resources, reading materials, stress management techniques and even an SOS button to push if they need someone to talk to right away.
“If you don't have a foundation to go home to because things are bad at home or your families are suffering, there's really no way to get away from it all,” Roach said. “When their officers or their detectives are stressed out, it's affecting the families.
“Considering all the things that we see and we're going through, especially lately, it's the families that notice that stuff. So this isn’t just for them, it’s for their families.”
And to prevent another knock at a family’s door.
