On January 6, 2021, Howard Liebengood was at the U.S. Capitol, protecting the building and its inhabitants during a four-hour melee that claimed the lives of both civilians and police. Three days later, the 15-year veteran of the U.S. Capitol Police died by suicide. He was one of four officers to perish this way in the weeks following the highly traumatic event.
“At the time I experienced immense grief but I realized his suicide was preventable,” said Liebengood’s widow, Serena Liebengood, a radiologist with Johns Hopkins Medicine.
She created the Howard C. Liebengood Foundation with a straightforward, if unusual proposition: Bringing together multiple perspectives to develop systemic solutions to a pervasive and underreported problem.
The landscape and crisis facing first responders
First responders are far more likely than the general population to die by suicide, Liebengood says, yet few police or fire departments have resources devoted to officer health and wellness. “This is a problem for many if not all agencies,” she said.
On September 30 and October 1, the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School hosted the foundation’s first symposium at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C.. Sponsored by Carey as well as FirstNet, built by AT&T, Axon, and PepperBall, the symposium attracted about 175 participants from across the nation, including police and fire chiefs, union representatives, mental health professionals and Carey professors.
Titled the Evolving Law Enforcement Landscape and the First Responder Mental Health Crisis, it kept the focus on systemic solutions, and not the struggles of individual first responders. It was notably apolitical.
Panel discussions explored the stresses of law enforcement, including shifting public opinion and escalating protests and violence against police; as well as intervention strategies for preserving health and wellness.
David Mitchell, who has led the University of Maryland Police Department since 2010 and serves as an adjunct instructor with the Carey Business School, said he telephones every officer involved in a shooting, just to check in. He asks them if they’re replaying the incident in slow motion yet, and tells them they’ll likely find the anniversary day particularly rough each year.
A culture of support, built over time
There is more awareness of the stresses of first responder work than in the past, he said. On February 20, 1973, in his first year on the Prince George’s County police department, Mitchell was with Carroll "Beau" Garrison when he was killed while investigating a reported burglary.
Mitchell returned to work the next day. He didn’t seek or receive counseling because he thought doing so would cost him his job.
Now, he and others noted, counseling and time off are widely available, and sometimes required, thanks in large part to union negotiations. “Thank God we have recognition and training now,” Mitchell said. “We do talk about this uncomfortable topic.”
Chris Myers, Peetz Family Professor of Leadership and faculty director of the Center for Innovative Leadership at Carey, agreed with others that a culture of support is built over time. “I think we place way too much emphasis on the big shiny changes,” he said. “We risk missing that most culture changes are a result of small policy changes.”
He praised efforts like those of Trisha Wolford, chief of the Anne Arundel County Fire Department and immediate past-president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, who modified uniforms and hair policies in response to concerns.
“People were uncomfortable wearing ties. People were so uncomfortable in their pants that they were distracted,” she said. “Women had to wear their hair in tight buns, which meant they couldn’t get their helmet and hood on quickly. I approached it from, ‘How do I make each individual feel like themselves and also feel like they’re the best version of themselves?’”
Some of the panelists have led their departments through tragedies almost beyond imagination. Michael Kehoe, now retired, was chief of the Newtown, Connecticut, police department in 2012, when 20 children and six adults were murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Ed Davis was Boston’s police commissioner when bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line in 2013, killing three, maiming many more, and touching off a 5-day manhunt.
In those cases, the immediate trauma was exacerbated by a sleep-deprived, stressful whirlwind of political attention and media coverage, leaving little time for much-needed rest, counseling, or simply space to process the experience.
Davis touted mental health support as a good investment. “We spend millions training police officers on things like first aid and statutory changes,” he said. “We need to give the same attention to saving lives. This is life and death. It’s life and death for our people so we should be paying attention to it.”
Resilience in high-intensity professions
Many panelists noted that first responders deal with continual stress and tragedy in encounters far from the headlines, including car accidents, overdoses, and domestic violence situations.
“We think of resilience as coming after an event, but it occurs earlier,” said professor emeritus Kathleen Sutcliffe, a renowned expert on resilience in organizations and individuals. “We need to create processes and routines that enable resilience. I don’t think there’s one right answer, but we need to be more conscious of what resilience in our organization looks like and what we are doing to create it.”
Myers, while noting his own lack of law enforcement expertise, saw parallels with other high-intensity professions, particularly healthcare.
“As leaders, we are responsible for the resilience of our people, not just providing the resources,” he said.
Simply providing tools such as counseling is not adequate if people don’t use the resources.
Myers teamed with Michelle Barton, professor of practice at the Carey Business School, to cap the symposium with a lively workshop aimed at helping people bring real change to their organizations.
Barton noted that change doesn’t happen in a vacuum, urging workshop participants to consider the large and interconnected context of their proposal.
“At some point with any change, you have to decide who is affected by it, but also who is not,” she said.
Myers discussed the power of correctly framing issues and proposed solutions, and involving the right people in the process.
Throughout the event, there were discussions about who to include in next year’s symposium, with one person approaching Liebengood to recommend an LGBTQ perspective, and others saying they wanted to hear more from peer counselors, therapists, and officers on the front lines.
There’s a lot to be done, and progress is never inevitable.
“The value of these conversations will ultimately be determined by what happens next,” Liebengood said. “Take these conversations back to your agencies and organizations. Stay connected to the people you met here. The conversation cannot stop here. The issues we have discussed matter too much. And the people affected by them matter too much. For me, this work began with Howie. But it cannot end with Howie.”
