LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) – The Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office is requesting $251,000 from the state to help deputies cope with the mental toll of responding to traumatic events.
The Lubbock County Commissioners Court approved the sheriff’s office application for state funding to improve officers’ mental health through a program called “Healing the Shield.”
“This really provides the public with the best version of an officer, the best version of a person to show up on a call,” said Lieutenant Chris Daniel, one of the agency’s chaplains.
The sheriff’s office currently has limited trained staff to help deputies after difficult calls, including two chaplains, three critical incident stress management staffers and two peer-support members.
Daniel said the agency needs a stronger system to address the mental and moral injuries officers face.
“The visions they see, the cries that they hear, the injuries that they deal with and it extends into the home when we are dealing with domestics and civil disturbances, any type of call that does that, up to when an officer has to be involved in something like an officer-involved shoot, or just making decisions that may affect somebody else’s life,” Daniel said.
The weight of those moral injuries can follow officers home, leading to broken marriages, PTSD and suicide.
“But if you carry something from work, the things that we see, the typical response is we stop talking to our families or we carry the anger into the home, we carry the sadness into the home, or we just withdraw completely,” Daniel said.
If the state approves the funding, it would allow the sheriff’s office to pay for services through the American Warrior Association and its R3 Checkpoints program. The partner would help create a program from the ground up, training officers, providing outside counseling and other resources like workshops and retreats.
County Judge Curtis Parrish said the mental training would reach beyond the sheriff’s office.
“This isn’t just for police officers, but it’s also for even our volunteer fire departments, our paramedics, and ambulance folks. This is for everybody who is in law enforcement in the 15-county area,” Parrish said. “This is a wonderful thing… We will pray in earnest that this grant becomes fully funded.”
Parrish says training officers’ minds for the job is just as important as training their bodies.
“We know that we focus on giving them the proper tools and equipment to do their job – body armor, training to actually physically do the job of being a law enforcement officer. But have we been really adequate in training their mind to also do that?” Parrish said.
Daniel said the sheriff’s office currently relies on help from the Lubbock Police Department for mental health support. The police department has also requested $220,000 from the state for this program, but declined to comment further since the grant has not been approved.
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