Suicide of a Chief Executive Officer: Implications for Intervention (IN: Suicide and law Enforcement, ed. by D Sheehan and J Warren)

The 18 papers in the first section on police suicide describe how various law enforcement agencies in the United States and Canada have sought to prevent and respond to police suicides. The papers also include a training guide for suicide awareness and suicide potential, procedures for assessing the needs of survivors, and how to develop a policy for combating police suicide. In the second section on police suicide, nine papers explore the psychological aspects of police suicide, with attention to the major precipitating factors in police suicide, the assessment of suicide risk among police officers, barriers to mental health interventions, and the performance of psychiatric/psychological “autopsies” in the aftermath of a police suicide. The third section of papers on police suicide contains six papers on behavioral clues that indicate the potential for suicide by police officers. The eight papers of the fourth section address efforts to quantify the number/rate of police suicides and ensure uniform reporting on such suicides. An international perspective is provided with papers on police suicide rates in Germany and Norway. The six papers of section five explore some nontraditional methods of diagnosing the risk for officer suicide, such as the analysis of computer games played by subjects, an officer’s spiritual condition, an assessment of police humor in the investigation of citizen suicides, and the influence of an officer’s perfectionist tendencies in suicide risk. The final section contains 14 papers that focus on suicides precipitated by citizens who use police deadly force as a vehicle for their deaths. Attention is given to the prevalence and characteristics of this phenomenon, police training for dealing with such a scenario, and dealing with the aftermath of such incidents. Each section of papers is accompanied by a bibliography. Appended survey of law enforcement suicide and a summary of conference themes