Officers on the Edge

By NANCY GIBBS

Ann Marie Hall sat next to her husband on the green sofa, trying to talk the gun out of his hands. "You know you can't kill yourself," she said. "Think about the boys, and your mother, and your brother and me. How will we feel?"

Michael admitted he wasn't thinking straight. "It's not about anything but you and me," he said. Even as cops' marriages go, theirs was badly bruised. They had fallen in love fast; he proposed five months after they met, on bended knee atop the Empire State Building, and they were married eight years ago. But since then, the fights had become more frequent, as Ann Marie learned what it meant to marry into the force.

She remembers a night they spent cruising up the Hudson River at a wedding reception on a yacht. "Mike and I went up on deck, and we were the only two up there," she recalls. "We were slow dancing, and I was thinking about how romantic it was. And then Mike says, 'Do you have any idea how many dead bodies there are in this river?' "

Michael had grown quiet, withdrawn, in the days leading up to that Sunday afternoon in July. She glanced at the heavy flashlight on the stone fireplace and thought of grabbing it, hitting him on the head and getting the gun away. But she was afraid something would go wrong, so she stayed where she was. He put the gun to his head.

"Don't be ridiculous," she said, "put that thing down."

"Oh, I'm ridiculous?" When he pulled the trigger, the bullet passed through his skull and lodged in the wall behind the couch.

Their three small children were playing in the next room. When they heard the shot, they came running, saw the red stain spreading over the sofa and didn't say a word.

Michael Hall, an officer in the 46th precinct in the Bronx, became the seventh of 10 New York City cops to kill themselves so far this year, already tying the record set in 1987. No one has an adequate explanation of what finally drove him over the edge, and so the speculation runs a predictable course: it was the danger, the pressure, the grinding sorrows embedded in the daily routine. Last week the New York police department released the results of a three-year study that found that cops were more than twice as likely to kill themselves as were members of the general population. Though every case is different, the experts do see some patterns: male officers are far more likely to kill themselves than female ones, alcohol often plays some role, and corruption scandals within the department are usually followed by a spate of suicides.

The cops themselves rarely blame the obvious culprit -- the tension of living forever in the cross hairs. Veteran officers and the experts who study them agree that the pressure on police officers actually comes from some surprising sources. The most crushing battles, they argue, often occur not on the streets but in the rundown precinct houses, and the courtrooms, and the $ privacy of their own homes. Too often, police complain, the commanders and commissioners who cops imagined would guide and protect them seem to ignore or betray them instead. "Frequently, officers feel that somewhere on the line between lieutenant and captain, these people change," says Scott Allen, clinical psychologist for the 3,200-member Metro-Dade police department in Florida. "The command loses touch with the soldiers."

Many cops on the street charge that they are being asked to do more with less; just getting the equipment they need requires a major bureaucratic struggle. "A car that breaks down while you're pursuing a suspect? That's stress. A gun that may not work? That's stress," says John Johnston, a 20- year veteran of the Los Angeles police department. The criminals, he takes in stride: "Dealing with bad guys is why I became a cop. What gets you down is the bureaucracy." In his office in the L.A.P.D.'s Northeast division, which includes the grimiest stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, the computers are antique, the shotguns routinely fail during practice and the cars in the lot are monuments to budgetary restraints: the odometers read 132,000 miles, 136,000, 148,000 . . .

Just as punishing to police morale is the problem of punishment: it is common for officers to risk their lives arresting suspects whom they meet again on the streets within days. "That's the main stress" Seattle Detective Nathan Janes says, "like the fact that the violent criminal doesn't even go to jail." He recalls a thug who attacked a fellow officer a few years ago, wrestled his gun away, jammed it under the officer's bulletproof vest and tried to fire. "He wanted to kill him, but the cop got his hand in between the hammer and the firing pin," Janes says. "I took this guy to jail, and he was joking that he'd do it again if he got the chance. Anyway, 18 months later, I was involved in a car chase. I finally stopped the car, and there he was. He didn't even serve 18 months for trying to kill a cop. That can cause some stress all right."

When so much of the day's job involves exposure to the darkest corners of human nature, cynicism and denial serve as a handy emotional vaccine. But that coldness can take a personal toll; and at worst, the day's violence bleeds into the home. In a study by Arizona State University sociologist Leanor Boulin-Johnson of 728 officers in two East Coast departments, some 40% responded that "they had gotten out of control and behaved violently against their spouse and children." Last week in Alexandria, Louisiana, deputy sheriff Paul Broussard shot his estranged wife Andrea five times because she was filing for divorce. He fled across the street to a bank, still waving his gun, as police moved in and sealed the area. Surrounded by sharpshooters, Broussard talked to a priest for more than two hours. A friend and a police chaplain tried to persuade him to surrender as well. "Nothing worked," said Lieut. Tommy Cicardo. Broussard finally put the .45 to his jaw and pulled the trigger, as the local TV cameras rolled.

At best, being a police officer places terrific stress on a family," says Harvey Schlossberg, the former director of psychological services for the New York City police department and a 20-year veteran himself. Cops "tend to feel very uncomfortable outside the company of other police officers," he observes. "They tend to be very clannish." The hypervigilance that keeps them alive on the street is hard to shed once they're home."It's as if you become a cop 24 hours a day," says the ex-husband of a New Mexico cop. "That's the way you treat everyone -- commanding, suspicious, paranoid. She'd gone into the cop role so much that she regarded any challenge to her authority as an attack."

Though urban cops may feel that they are the ones patrolling a war zone, rural officers often long for the anonymity of the big cities. At a crime scene, the odds are high that they will know both the victim and the suspect. It is impossible to go off-duty; like the small-town doctor, the local cop is constantly pressed for help and advice. "Community members expect the officer and their family to be free from family conflicts," explains psychologist Ellen Scrivner, an expert on police stress. "Moreover, children are expected to behave differently when their parent is a police officer."

Twenty years ago, it was the rare police department that had any formal mechanisms for helping officers or their families cope with the demands of the job. Now more and more have instituted programs ranging from peer counseling to diet and exercise plans, designed to teach stress management. The L.A.P.D. has seven full-time psychologists working out of an old bank building in Chinatown, where cops can visit without fear of being seen by their colleagues or superiors. Since 1990, there has been a 103% increase in the number of counseling sessions conducted there, to a projected 3,734 sessions in 1993, and a 44% increase in the number of clients seen.

But the experts acknowledge it is hard for police officers to admit when they need help. If an officer visits a counselor and is put on psychological leave, notes William Nolan, president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, "they take him off the street because the city doesn't want the liability of an officer with stress on the streets. So if an officer is willing, or man enough, to admit it, they'll take away your gun and star, and you won't get them back until you can prove you're O.K." Nolan would prefer a more anonymous system, where officers could seek help without feeling a stigma or risking a career.

The Halls' white clapboard and brick house is half empty; there's a FOR SALE sign in the yard, and the path to the door is strewn with Tonka Trucks. Ann Marie is inside packing, to move closer to her family in Connecticut. She hasn't been sleeping well, and has lost weight. Michael's dress uniform hangs in plastic in the closet. A carpenter has been in to fix the hole where the police dug the bullet from the wall. Michael's partner came by with the contents of his locker. Three-year-old Danny, who loves playing cop, went rummaging through the box, then came running upstairs to his mom, wearing his father's dark blue hat. "After we were married," Ann Marie says, "he told me he had a dark side and that I'd better pray that I never see it." Now she must wonder how long it will take to get the vision out of her mind.

With reporting by Hannah Bloch and Massimo Calabresi/New York and Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles