The New Jersey attorney general on Tuesday announced a plan to curb the rising tide of police suicides by building a statewide program that teaches officers ways to better handle the stress of their jobs.

Dubbed the New Jersey Resiliency Program for Law Enforcement, it will require that all New Jersey police officers finish a two-day training course on coping mechanisms by the end of 2022, Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in a statement. And it will designate at least one member of every local, county and state agency a “chief resiliency officer” who is responsible for the program locally, and can connect officers with help if they need it.

At a Tuesday news conference in Newark, Grewal said the program will fight the stigma officers often face when they open up about their problems, which, left unchecked, can lead to physical ailments, depression and burnout.

“We all know somebody who’s taken their own life,” Grewal said, gesturing to the police and prosecutors standing behind him. “No other profession in this country deals with the stressors that our law enforcement officers deal with. And you and I will never know that … unless we walked in their shoes, we will never know it.”

The attorney general said the stress of police work puts officers at higher risk for physical and mental issues, including high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, substance misuse, family and relationship stress and self-harm. That burden sometimes leads to dire consequence — across the country, at least 167 officers died by suicide last year, the attorney general said. In New Jersey, 37 officers have died by suicide since 2016.

Grewal said the program is the first of its kind in the nation. And it’s the second time in two years the attorney general has created a program meant to help maintain or monitor police officers’ mental health. The first, begun last March, required departments to set up early-warning systems to flag officers with more than three performance issues or complaints against them in a 12-month span. Those guidelines also demanded that departments start randomly drug-testing officers.

That move was meant to spot problems in a given officer's behavior before it blew up into an incident on the street, Grewal said at the time. But his new directive is intended to lend officers a helping hand when they ask for one.

“It’s just being present, being available and offering help,” Grewal said, adding that the program will work in conjunction with existing programs.

Statewide police organizations quickly praised Grewal's initiative.

At the news conference, James Stewart, vice president of the New Jersey Fraternal Order of Police, commended Grewal for recognizing the problem and moving to fix it.

“There clearly is a connection with the job the men and women of law enforcement do out there every day and the subsequent suicides that plague so many of us,” Stewart said. “There’s a gap there that needs to be bridged.”

Grewal said the program is based on a federal model put in place by the FBI. To oversee it at the state level, Grewal chose Robert Czepiel, the chief of the Prosecutors Supervision and Training Bureau in the Division of Criminal Justice.

The attorney general moved to expand the program statewide after watching a pilot program at the Maple Shade Police Department, in Burlington County. New Jersey's lack of a statewide program, combined with a number of officer suicides in other parts of the country, convinced him to move forward.

“It became really a no-brainer — we’re quick to raise red flags, but very slow to provide officers the help they need,” Grewal said.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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