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Editor’s note: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is considering suicide, resources are available to help. Please see the information at the end of the story.
The messy hair, scraggly fingers, white T-shirt. Charlie Vazquez still remembers every detail.
Twenty-two years ago, Vazquez was a Houston police officer planning the arrest of a man on parole who’d served time for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a child. Vazquez and fellow officers surrounded the man’s house and then he walked out, armed with a pistol.
The man aimed the gun at Vazquez and his partner. Then he turned the weapon on himself and died by suicide.
Vazquez could not sleep for months. The way the man died kept him up, and so did the thought that he and other officers could have been killed.
“I started to second-guess myself a lot while on the job,” he said.
Vazquez is now Tampa International Airport’s police chief and said he still suffers from post-traumatic stress. In his line of work, he is hardly alone.
Constant exposure to trauma and death, experts say, leaves first responders suffering from depression, anxiety, substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder at rates that far exceed the public they serve.
The stigma of asking for help exacerbates the crisis. Firefighters, law enforcement officers and paramedics are 10 times more likely to attempt or contemplate suicide compared to civilians, according to a study published six years ago in the Journal of Emergency Medical Services.
This year, 120 law enforcement officers in the U.S. have reportedly died by suicide, nine in Florida. That’s the lowest number since 2017 and below the five-year average of 149 suicides a year. Florida officers typically make up 7 percent of annual suicides, according to First
HELP, an organization that collects first-responder suicide data.
But that doesn’t mean the situation is improving, said Steven Hough, chief operating officer at First HELP.
He believes the drop in reported suicides is a result of underreporting during the pandemic. He said suicide reports made to the organization started to fall when the coronavirus first spread in 2020. COVID-19 has also become the leading cause of death for the nation’s officers over the past two years.
The health threat likely...