'We're Trying to Change the Culture': Dallas Police Department Addresses Officer Mental Health

The human psyche is not meant to handle the things police officers see on a daily basis. As a result, it often becomes difficult for officers to carry on with life as easily as perhaps most others do. That's how Mike Mata, president of the Dallas Police Association, sees it.

“We see mangled bodies. We see murder victims. We see beat children,” Mata said. “And the majority of us have a wife at home, have children at home, but yet we continue to go from call to call.” If officers don’t have an outlet, they will typically internalize these events, which isn’t healthy. “That’s the difficult part of it because you don’t want to take it home to your family,” he added.

Last week, a Dallas Police Department officer named Matthew Bacon killed himself one day after he was involved in a shooting. Bacon and three other police officers shot and killed 36-year-old Corey Thomas, who was armed and wanted for murder, according to the department.

Referring to Bacon, an 18-year veteran of the department, Mata said, “You’re trying to make sense out of the senseless.”

“Detective Bacon was well liked. He was a hard charger. He was all DPD. You forget that there’s another side to everybody’s life,” he said.

Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia told news outlets that he and other officers spoke with Bacon after the shooting but did not detect any signs that he was suicidal. Garcia called for more mental health awareness among officers after Bacon’s death.

The mental health of officers has begun to receive more attention, but it can still be hard to overcome the stigma behind seeking help. Mata thinks that’s why it’s important that the department has mental health services that are completely anonymous. Younger officers are more open to the idea of seeking help for their mental health; it’s older officers, generally those over 40, who find it more challenging, he said.

“We’re trying to change culture, is what we’re trying to do." – Assistant Chief Reuben G. Ramirez

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Last year, the department created a Wellness Unit that checks in on officers after certain incidents, including shootings. These interactions can be done over the phone or in person, and they’re referred to as checkpoints by the department. After these checkpoints, officers can seek counseling through the department. Counseling is also provided to officers’ spouses and children, if necessary. “We do a really good job of trying to help those officers that are in some type of mental crisis,” Mata said. “The problem is that it’s hard to get to those individuals sometimes.”

Some come into the department already needing mental health assistance. Just over half of the department’s academy classes are coming from the military, and many have post traumatic stress disorder “but they don’t know it yet until they witness something here in the department and it triggers that,” Mata said.

A similar scenario in Dallas Fire-Rescue's ranks was recently described to the Observer, when Dallas Fire Fighters Association President Jim McDade said that many DFR employees “have seen things, really bad things, and then we’re bringing them in and putting them in this environment. We owe it to them to make sure that they’re taken care of, but it’s a challenge.”

According to Mata, mental health isn’t an important facet of officer training. “It’s very difficult to address that because every person handles those situations differently and every person internalizes it differently,” he said. “The problem is it’s almost a reactive situation rather than a proactive situation.”

But the Wellness Unit is a way that the department can get ahead of these issues before they get out of hand.

According to the department, the Wellness Unit can direct officers to the help they need, including city psychologists, therapists and the Employee Assistance Program, which provides access to counseling, coaching and self-care services.

The Wellness Unit also manages the department’s alcohol rehabilitation program. The police chief started the alcohol rehabilitation leave procedure, which provides employees 30 days of paid administrative leave to attend an in-patient alcohol support and rehabilitation program. The Wellness Unit acts as a liaison between the department and officers to help with onboarding to an appropriate alcohol treatment center.

Assistant Chief Reuben G. Ramirez headed the effort to develop the Wellness Unit that Chief Garcia directed the department to build. Today, he oversees the program.

The Wellness Unit has exceeded Ramirez's initial expectations, but one of the biggest challenges the unit faces is normalizing the idea of seeking help for mental health.

“We’re trying to change culture, is what we’re trying to do,” he said. "That’s never easy."

Nonetheless, the unit is off to a good start. It was created some 14 months ago and completed about 800 checkpoints through the end of last year. About 11% of officers either asked for or agreed to hear more about some of the services the department provides. This year, the unit is averaging 200 checkpoints a month and is seeing between 11% and 14% of officers asking for more information about these services, Ramirez said. He said the department is set to do 2,400 checkpoints this year.

“We are putting stressors on these officers and on their families by just the profession and what we do every day,” Mata said. “Waiting for officers to commit suicide or waiting for officers to become alcoholics is not what we need to be doing. We need to be injecting ourselves into that process much sooner so that we can afford those officers some form of counseling or at least just some form of outreach so that they can help mitigate some of these stressors.”

Terrance Hopkins, president of the Black Police Association of Greater Dallas, has been with the department for 32 years. In his early days with the department, he said talking about mental health was taboo. “You didn't do that,” he said. “We were just taught and conditioned to be tough, no matter what you came across.”

Hopkins said things are different today, but the department still doesn’t see enough officers seeking help with their mental health.

“For so long, officers have just been put in the category of ‘You’ve got to be tough. You’ve got to be bullet proof, Teflon’ — everything other than being open and honest about what you’re feeling and what you’re going through,” he said. “This stuff manifests in many different ways for different people.”

Hopkins recently spoke to a graduating class of the police academy and tried to explain to them the importance of staying on top of their mental health. “The things you’re going to see out here, they’re not normal. It’s eventually going to take a toll on you," he told the graduates.

"I’m trying to tell these young kids, you don’t have to be that tough anymore," he told the Observer. "We don’t want you to be that tough anymore. We want you to talk to a professional and say ‘Hey, I’ve seen this. It has me feeling this way.’ It’s like anything else, it’s going to take time before we truly understand, we’re not Superman.”

But for that to happen, everyone needs to be on board with the idea of maintaining good mental health.

“Until that happens," Hopkins said. "We won’t be where we really need to be.”