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Critical
program
Catch
A Falling Star assists police officers, sheriff’s deputies and others
in law enforcement who have
been
involved in a “critical incident” — a sudden, unexpected event
that’s outside the normal realm of everyday activity and the normal
range
of stress. Such incidents may
include
a colleague’s suicide or death, shootings, crimes or disasters with
mass casualties, prolonged rescue attempts and more.
The
offers peer assistance from specially trained fellow officers, exclusive
AA meetings, special out-
patient
services with area hospitals and a network of counseling professionals
experienced in the culture of law enforcement.
Catch
A Falling Star runs not only in
Western New York
but also in
Canada
and
Australia
.
Though
Goss has been in the thick of it since the beginning, she seems as
surprised as anyone that she’s lasted nearly 20 years with the
program. “If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have thought you
were crazy. But I stuck with it because there was nothing like this
available.”
The
program has its roots in Goss’ experience as director of
Erie
County
’s
general EAP. In her purview were the Erie County Sheriff’s
Office
and Alden Correctional
Facility.
Goss noticed that the program wasn’t getting any referrals from the
two law-enforcement
agencies.
Not only that, she found
it
difficult communicating with them about the assistance program.
“They’d say, ‘You’re not one of us,
you
don’t understand,’” she recalls.
Crucially,
after the first six months of her tenure, she took a call from an
officer whose brother had admitted him to a detox program at a local
facility. “He called me to get him out,” she says. “He’d
recognized another detox patient as someone he had recently arrested
during
a
drug raid and feared for his safety.”
Goss and her colleagues saw the
danger in the officer’s situation and
realized they needed to find another facility for
him. After finding an
appropriate out-of-state program
for the officer--who successfully
returned to work--Goss received a
referral after an officer was killed in
line of duty. Though she responded to his
traumatized colleagues, she
realized she really didn’t have the
experience necessary to give the
right kind of help. She asked other
police agencies and found out how
and where she could get educated on
responding to officers in crisis. Once
Goss had the training she needed,
then-Erie County Sheriff Thomas
Higgins gave her the chance to work
with his agency. She created a special EAP for
officers and a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing Team, training
sheriff’s officers to respond to any critical incident with other
officers or emergency responders like EMTs or firefighters.
The going wasn’t easy. “They
tested me,” says Goss. “They’d
have someone give me a bogus problem to see how
long it would take for me to divulge their personal problem to the
department. That’s OK, because they were learning to trust me. It’s
the nature of the beast.”
Captain Larry Eggert of the Lockport Police Department would
probably agree with Goss about trust. In February
2003, he and
his partner investigated a case in
which a gunman had shot a man
with an AK-47 automatic rifle and
sprayed the front of a bar with bullets. Eggert and
his partner responded
to the call that the suspect had
been located. At the scene, the suspect shot both
officers, Eggert in the
shoulder, his partner in the chest
and leg.
During Eggert and his partner’s
first hours in the hospital, Goss
offered crisis intervention counseling to their
families and coordinated efforts with the Buffalo
Police
Department, who was providing
meals for the families. “The law
enforcement community is kind of
closed. We don’t trust many people,” Eggert
says. “To find someone
you can unburden yourself to is extremely
difficult. But Cindy eased
those first 24 hours.”
The ability to communicate within the culture of law enforcement--the
tacit dictate to swallow emotion, mordant sense of humor, aggressive
attitude—was critical. “They have to
allow you to be part of their family. When you
learn the dynamics of working with them and their personality traits,
word starts to get out, and you earn a reputation.”
She also found that law enforcers get stuck between
internal discipline and public condemnation, oftentimes leaving them
with nowhere to turn in crisis. Explains Lockport PD’s Eggert:
“We’re the big, strong people; nothing is supposed to bother us.”
Goss agrees. “When I first started doing this, I
saw the devastation
and pain in their lives. I wanted to
do what I could to help.”
Growing scope
Goss’s reputation did grow, and
neighboring police
agencies—the
Erie
County
Police
Academy
and
the Buffalo
Police Department—
began requesting similar programs.
The black humor that found Goss
as its target signaled her arrival in
the world of law enforcers. “They
joke: ‘When you see Cindy, some
one screwed up, or something bad
happened.’”
Goss continues, more seriously,
“I can’t tell you the days and nights
we spend in the corridors of
Erie
County
Medical
Center
making sure
an officer makes it through.”
The program’s
name comes from the questions Goss gets about how she and her team save
a job, a marriage, a life . . . “We say you’ve got to catch them before they fall.
And the star
is the badge of every
aw-enforcement officer.” Catch A Falling Star
has grown steadily in scope. Currently, each participating WNY
law-enforcement agency has one officer trained to identify officers who
are having problems. The issues vary, and not every problem is the same
for every
officer. “They might also have private issues
that affect how they
react,” Goss notes.
In addition, the police
academy now offers education about job stress. All new recruits receive
critical-incident stress training. They’re also required to bring one
family member to a special program
that introduces them to the hazards of the law enforcement family and
the
resources available in the event of
a critical incident. Says Goss, “We
teach recruits how to shoot someone but not how to
deal with the
effects of doing that. We let them
know, from the time they’re recruits,
that it’s OK to be a human being.”
Dispatchers and other appropriate
civilians get similar training.
As well, all supervisors are trained when
they’re promoted so they can more easily identify officers with
problems before their agency’s internal discipline mechanism kicks
in.
Goss also has identified counseling professionals
who have a good rapport with officers, who, she says, “can be
intimidating if you don’t know what they’re like. We have to have
people who can stand up to hem
and say, ‘You’re not in charge here.’”
The single most important
aspect of the program,
Goss believes,
is a “safe environment that they can
trust to work out their stress. They
have to know it’s available before a
tragedy happens. We have one shot
to get a person to a counselor, so we
have to get them to someone who’s
the best we can get because we could lose them.”
Goss also specifically credits the
peer officers who care for their colleagues.
“Without them and their
assistance, none of us would be
where we are.”
Captain Eggert adds “she’s kind
of an unheralded hero. She filled a
niche that no one else did, and for
her it’s a labor of love more than
money. She’s gone out of her way
to make herself available.”
Memories of crisis Goss easily calls up milestones in her career. She
says one of her proudest moments was her coordination of a massive drill
that focused on the mental-health effects of a disaster. She staged a
bus hijacking by terrorists who were trying to get to the airport to get
out of the country. The drill included 15 hostages held at
“gunpoint,” 125 law-enforcement responding personnel from federal,
state and county agencies from the
U.S.
and
Canada
, mental health professionals, clergy who work with
emergency responders, peer officers and others.
A post-drill debriefing focused not on how participants had responded,
but on how they felt emotionally.
She also vividly recalls her experiences after the
World
Trade
Center
attacks. Arriving in
New York City
just hours after the event, she responded with a
group of peer officers, providing ‘round-the-clock
debriefings to police
and firemen
working the “pile.” “We tried to
make sure they were mentally handling the side
effects of being traumatized—not being able to eat or
sleep, alcohol consumption, etc.,”
says Goss. “They were distraught,
in shock. There was really nothing
we could do to help except be there
for them.”
Proof in the pudding
Goss cites the results she sees from
her team’s efforts in developing and implementing
the EAP. Since 1988, the team has dealt with well over a thousand
officers and family members. “Today we see more self-
referrals by officers or their family members than
referrals mandated
by a department head,” she notes.
“Some 95 percent of Western New
York
’s enforcement-agency management supports the
peer-helping
mechanism. That means (the program is) working.”
The program’s
success is also
evident in the attention it has
received from outside the law-
enforcement world. When ABC’s
“Prime Time Live” produced a segment on police
suicide, it featured
the efforts of Goss and several peer
officers working to reduce the officer suicide rate
in WNY.
Furthermore, Goss served as a
consultant on an HBO documentary
on the Memphis Police
Department
called “War on the Street.” She also
took part in an A&E documentary on the
uniqueness of officers and
why general EAP or generic psychotherapists don’t
work for them.
A book called Copshock about surviving
post-traumatic stress disorder listed Catch
A Falling Star as a
resource. And an AP International
article on police
suicides cited the
program as one of best in the
U.S.
Goss doesn’t rest on any laurels, however.
“I’d like to make sure that every police
agency in the country has a program
like this.
We pay more on fixing cars and
copy machines than we do on officers’ mental
health. Someone has to
care about these people who sacrifice their mental and physical health
and families for us. We owe this to
them for what they do for us. We
can make a difference in their lives.”
Grace Lazzara is a freelance writer and public relations
consultant
residing in
Buffalo
,
N.Y.
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