Radical Loss for Law Enforcement: A Problem of Immunity or Humanity?

• In Event: Roundtable: Policing

Abstract

Law enforcement officers face a silent epidemic one not of violence in the streets, but of trauma within their own ranks. This paper confronts the mental health crisis ravaging police departments, where PTSD, depression, and anxiety metastasize under cultures of silence and institutional betrayal. Drawing on recent case studies, we expose how systemic pressures in addition to coercive practices, moral injury, and retaliation against whistleblowers corrode officers’ psychological well-being. Suicide rates among police now rival those of military veterans, yet agencies cling to outdated notions of invincibility, stigmatizing help-seeking as weakness. In fact, police suicides account for three times the number of officers killed by felonious means (Whittington & Basham, 2024).
The authors argue that expanding legal immunity, as proposed in Alabama’s “back the blue” legislation, ignores the root cause: dehumanizing workplaces that prioritize power over compassion. True reform demands trauma-informed training, confidential mental health support, and dismantling toxic hierarchies that glorify brutality. Police officers are not casualties of external threats, but the internal systems serving them require prompt attention. Until departments reckon with this crisis, the cycle of suffering will persist. This is a call to action: protect the protectors by valuing their minds as much as their mandates.

Authors

• Amml Hussein, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

• Robert White, Alabama State University