Some KC-area law enforcement volunteer officer suicide data to FBI, others don’t - fox4kc.com

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — “I didn’t call the police because he was the police.”

In 2015, four months before Lindsey Doolittle’s late husband Sgt. Brett Doolittle with the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department died by suicide, she said he attempted suicide in front of her.

Lindsey, whose husband worked for the department for at least 16 years, said she didn’t report her husband’s suicide attempt, fearing he would get in trouble, lose his job, leave her, or people wouldn’t believe her.

“He had joked about using a firearm from the department, and he had joked about it several times, that he would use that on himself,” she said. “Also, he had other weapons as well, as a cop, around the house.”

After her husband died, Doolittle said she found a suicide note that he had written, blaming his law enforcement career for his suffering.

“I can tell you, in his suicide letter, he wrote that the job had changed him into someone he didn’t even recognize and, ‘It was you, Lindsey, that kept me going,’” she said.

Although her husband blamed the stress of his career for his mental health struggles, Lindsey said detectives who investigated his death pointed to marital problems and reoccurring medical issues as conclusions in their report.

“In the official police report and the autopsy report, they blamed our marriage for his death, and then Brett blamed the police department in his suicide letter,” she said. “My message has always been that I don’t blame anyone.”

“I feel that his life exceeded his coping skills.”

Lindsey said she doesn’t point blame at any one person or agency for her husband’s death. However, she said the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department failed to support her after Brett’s untimely death, ignoring her at his funeral and seemingly disinviting her from annual events.

“It doesn’t feel good when you write a letter to the chief, and he doesn’t respond to you,” she said. “It doesn’t feel good when officers see you, and they ignore you.”

“I can’t imagine what my life would look like now had I received some kind of support or kindness from the police department.”

Collecting data

Karen Solomon, co-founder of Blue H.E.L.P., which helps support families who have lost an officer to suicide, said the organization has been collecting data on law enforcement suicide for nearly six years.

“They (the FBI) started collecting it because we raised the red flag,” Solomon said.

Solomon is also a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigations‘ new Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection (LESCD) taskforce. The voluntary database is designed to provide national statistics on suicide tragedies.

The database is designed to help agencies better understand and prevent suicides among current and former law enforcement officers, corrections employees, 911 operators, judges and prosecutors.

The information will be provided to the public, including details related to circumstances and events occurring before each suicide or attempted suicide, general location, demographic information, occupational category, and the method used in each suicide or attempted suicide.

However, the data will not include information that directly identifies any law enforcement officer.

Some Kansas City area law enforcement agencies say they’re eager to submit data to this participatory database.

But other local law enforcement agencies are hesitant, don’t plan to volunteer data at this time, don’t track this data, or fortunately, have not experienced such a tragedy within their department.

One police department said it didn’t know about a suicide that had happened just a few years ago.

Solomon said the FBI would not have directly contacted law enforcement agencies regarding the data collection. Instead, she said the FBI is working diligently to spread the word through other means, like social media.

“So the problem is, how does the FBI contact every single police department in the country and say, ‘Here, we’re doing this law enforcement data collection. Will you register and submit your data?’” Solomon said.

“It sounds simple but it’s really not that simple to contact every agency in the country, so they have a federal law.”

In 2019, Congress passed the Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection Act, the driving force of the FBI’s new data collection efforts.

The legislation outlines details regarding the data collection and emphasizes the confidentiality of the database, in which it “may not include any personally identifiable information of a law enforcement officers who commits or attempts suicide.”

Solomon said the law is intended to capture the attention of law enforcement since reaching out to every single one is a difficult task.

“When LEOKA (the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted Program) came out, the FBI didn’t reach everybody,” she said. “It took time.”

“It’s gonna take time and the thing with the FBI collection, you have to log in at work. It has to be reported from the department. It can’t be reported by a family, so there’s a distinct difference between what we do and what they do.”

Law enforcement suicide statistics

Data compiled by Blue H.E.L.P. shows at least 34 officers in Missouri died by suicide between 2017 and the present, but Solomon said the data is likely underestimated, with more officers having died by suicide across the state than has been reported to the organization.

“Money and politics speak, and suicide doesn’t have a lot of money, it doesn’t have a lot of politics to support it,” she said.

Nationwide, data shows the United States has lost nearly 1,000 law enforcement employees to this tragic outcome since 2016, with 247 individuals that died of suicide in 2019 — more than any other year.

Data reveals more law enforcement officers died by suicide in the past five years than any other first responder position. In 2019, 196 police officers died of suicide, compared to 39 correctional employees, 10 firefighters, and one EMS responder.

Solomon said it was difficult getting some police departments to submit data to Blue H.E.L.P., fearing they would get in trouble for breaching officers’ privacy and publicly identifying the police department, risking intense public scrutiny.

“The trust of the departments came pretty quickly, but there were a few, ‘What are you going to do with this? Am I going to get in trouble?’ or ‘Promise you won’t put my name on it?’” she said. “I would say by the end of the first year — even before that — we were pretty well-known and people had no issue reporting to us.”

Lindsey Doolittle said law enforcement needs to take suicide more seriously.

“Is handing the department pamphlets of mental and emotional health and having posters around, is that enough?” she said. “I know for my late husband, it wasn’t.”

Solomon said law enforcement needs to set aside the “pissing match” and refrain from letting egos get in the way of learning more about suicide in the workplace.

“This is about getting help,” she said. “It’s not about anything else, and any department that has had a suicide, that doesn’t want to participate in it, is really not setting a good example for others, for their officers, and they’re not showing they truly care about the mental health of the people in their department.”

The first Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection report will be published in mid-2022.

Police departments willing to participate in the FBI’s database may submit data through a state Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program or directly to the FBI’s UCR Program.

Departments not already participating in the UCR program can find applications in the FBI’s Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal (LEEP).

“We don’t want people to feel intimidated and think that it’s (the application) this long process,” Solomon said in a Facebook live on Thursday. “It really isn’t. It’s easier than you think.”

Which local agencies are participating?

FOX4 reached out to dozens of law enforcement agencies in the Kansas City area and asked whether they planned to participate in the data collection.

A handful of police agencies in the Kansas City region stated they will be submitting information to the database, including:

• Gardner Police Department, Kansas
• Wellsville Police Department, Kansas
• Fairway Police Department, Kansas
• Mission Police Department, Kansas

Several agencies said they’re aware of the database and would evaluate whether to potentially participate, including:

• Kansas City, Missouri Police Department
• Northmoor Police Department, Missouri
• Raymore Police Department, Missouri
• Kansas City, Kansas Police Department
• Bonner Springs Police Department, Kansas
• Overland Park Police Department, Kansas
• Leawood Police Department, Kansas
• Leavenworth Police Department, Kansas
• Basehor Police Department, Kansas

Nancy Chartrand, spokesperson at KCKPD, said the department has not dealt with this type of tragedy in over five years, but she assumes the agency is eager to involve itself with anything that could potentially help prevent such tragedies.

“It’s a sad reality that departments have faced,” she said via phone. “We’re no different than any other, and while we have not had that situation in over five years, it’s even more reason why we’re devoted to the health of officers.”

Some agencies said they aren’t opposed to participating or won’t do so because they do not have data to submit at this time:

• Liberty Police Department, Missouri
• Gladstone Police Department, Missouri
• Platte County Sheriff’s Office, Missouri
• Belton Police Department, Missouri
• Peculiar Police Department, Missouri
• Edwardsville Police Department, Kansas
• Tonganoxie Police Department, Kansas
• Johnson County Sheriff’s Office, Kansas
• De Soto Police Department, Kansas

Mark Mathies, chief of Edwardsville Police Department, said the agency has not experienced a reporting event.

“Should such a tragic event occur, we would use the system to report the requested details in furtherance of the efforts to better understand why suicide is becoming increasingly prevalent amongst our ranks,” he said in an email.

“We look forward to any reports published as a result of the data collection project in hopes that it will provide additional guidance on best practices specific to public safety employee health and wellness.”

Several law enforcement agencies said they were not aware of the database or were unfamiliar with the process for reporting this data, including:

• Independence Police Department, Missouri
• Lee’s Summit Police Department, Missouri
• Parkville Police Department, Missouri
• Prairie Village Police Department, Kansas
• Leavenworth County Sheriff’s Office, Kansas

Several law enforcement agencies did not respond to multiple email requests for comment, including:

• Raytown Police Department, Missouri
• North Kansas City Police Department, Missouri
• Claycomo Police Department, Missouri
• Pleasant Hill Police Department, Missouri
• Harrisonville Police Department, Missouri
• Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Office, Kansas
• Roeland Park Police Department, Kansas
• Lansing Police Department, Kansas

You Matter: Find mental health resources and stories on FOX4.
If you are thinking of hurting or killing yourself, you can call 1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-784-2433) or 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255). Please get help immediately.

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