Why Some Police Departments Say 'Officer Wellness' Is Key to Protecting Communities

When San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus responded last Monday to the horrific mass shootings at two Half Moon Bay farms, she wasn’t only concerned about the victims and their families.

She also was worried about her deputies, whose job is to run toward violent crime scenes.

Corpus made history when she was elected last year as the county’s first female sheriff, also becoming one of the first Latina sheriffs in California. She’s always been an outlier in law enforcement — a petite woman, the daughter of immigrants.

Sometimes that outsider status has been a challenge in a sheriff’s department that is still largely male dominated. But Corpus said it’s also given her a different perspective, even at the start of her career, when the advice was basically to suck it up.

“When I was in our field-training program 20 years ago, I responded to a call for service of an unresponsive toddler on Thanksgiving morning,” she told KQED in an interview two weeks before the Jan. 23 shootings that left seven farmworkers dead and an eighth critically injured.

“And as I arrived on scene, I saw the fire department pulling this little boy out of a pond, and they worked for about 45 minutes on resuscitating him, but they were unsuccessful.”

The boy had slipped outside while his mother was changing her newborn baby’s diaper. Corpus remembers that her training officer told her to conduct the interviews and investigation without showing any emotion. When her report was done, they went back on patrol.

"Not once was I asked, 'Are you OK? Do you want to talk to anybody?'" she said.

That service call, though, has stayed with Corpus.

“There's not a Thanksgiving morning that goes by that I don't think about that curly-haired little boy in overalls and think about how he would have been an adult by now,” she said. “And then I think about the mother. Now that I'm a mother, how has she navigated through life?”

For first responders, Corpus says, it’s like being handed a backpack on the first day of work.

“And every time you go to a critical incident, you put a rock in your backpack,” she said. “And if you don't take those rocks out of your backpack, the backpack’s gonna get too heavy and you're going to topple over.”

During that interview with KQED, before the shooting rampage, Corpus spoke about creating a robust mental wellness program at the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department, and working to ensure that there is a culture in which officers know it’s OK to ask for help.

Corpus put those plans into action last week. She said her first move on Monday was to get to the crime scenes herself to support her officers. Then she released the deputies who first responded so they could go home and be with their families.

Those officers also met with one of her department’s mental health professionals, she said.

“[I came to do] a debriefing with them and to openly talk about it,” Corpus said last week. “And I'll be checking in with them on a daily basis to make sure that they're OK and whatever support that they need, they'll have it from me and the organization.”

Corpus isn’t alone in prioritizing what’s become known as “officer wellness.” The increased focus on this issue comes amid a mounting body of data showing that law enforcement officers are more likely to die of suicide than in the line of duty.

In recent years, many departments across the country have created positions or offices within their own command structure that are dedicated to supporting the mental health of their officers.

In California, the agency that trains police officers began offering local departments entire courses on wellness and resilience just last year, after funding was approved by state leaders.

That money comes years after the federal government highlighted the issue. Supporting officer safety and wellness was among the six main recommendations for improving policing that were highlighted in the final report of President Barack Obama’s 2015 Task Force on 21st Century Policing (PDF) — an initiative convened largely in response to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown.

In the report, the task force spelled out why the mental health of law enforcement officers is “critical” to public safety at large.

“An officer whose capabilities, judgment, and behavior are adversely affected by poor physical or psychological health not only may be of little use to the community he or she serves but also may be a danger to the community and to other officers,” the report stated, pointing to corroborating testimony from a prominent police psychologist.

“Dr. Laurence Miller observed in his testimony that supervisors would not allow an officer to go on patrol with a deficiently maintained vehicle, an un-serviced duty weapon, or a malfunctioning radio — but pay little attention to the maintenance of what is all officers’ most valuable resource: their brains,” the report states.

Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese acknowledged the connection between officer wellness and community safety during a news conference earlier this month, a day after his agency responded to the killing of 11 people at a local ballroom dance club.

“The officers that were here last night are just coming on duty right now — they are upstairs at briefing,” he said during a press conference. “When I get done talking to you here, I will go back upstairs and make sure my officers are mindful of what took place and that they’re in a good place tonight, because their wellness means a lot to me. And the only way they are going to protect this community is if they are mentally prepared to do so.”

Back in Half Moon Bay, Lenny Mendonca, who owns Half Moon Bay Brewing Company, said he was heartened to hear of Corpus’s focus on mental health.

“It starts at the top — they have to be able to say, ‘This is OK. We want you to talk about it,’” said Mendonca, who served as Gov. Gavin Newsom’s chief economic and business adviser until leaving the job in 2020 to focus on his own mental health challenges.

“I'm glad she's talking about it.”