Early in October, a 30-year-old Texas police officer in San Antonio committed suicide. He was the department’s fifth active-duty or recently retired officer suicide in the previous seven months, according to experts. Fox News Digital quotes them as saying that this serves as a stark reminder of the difficulties police officers are having performing their duties in the face of the nationwide defund the police movement.
Officer Jordan Hammond of the San Antonio Police Department, who had been on the police for five years, committed suicide last week at the age of 30, according to KENS-TV. The agency’s fifth suicide in the past seven months, according to a spokeswoman, was confirmed to the publication by the department. Of the five fatalities, four included officers who were on duty, while the fifth involved a retired officer who passed away two weeks earlier.
The demonization of police by the media and politicians has significantly contributed to destroying law enforcement morale across the country, according to Tania Glenn, a trauma therapist who has worked in the Austin, Texas, area for 30 years and the head of Tania Glenn and Associates, which focuses on offering mental health services to first responders and veterans. She made this statement to Fox News Digital.
“They have a really big city with a lot of violence, and they have been dealing with the media portrayals of law enforcement folks as demons,” Glenn said. “And they have sort of been cut off from society and engaging in making people happy with “coffee with a cop” and things like that. All these things have really come to a screeching halt between the pandemic and what happened after George Floyd. So, they’re isolated. Their mental health is suffering, the trauma is compounding, and it’s just this perfect storm for what’s happening there.“
After the Ferguson riots in 2014, Glenn wrote a book for police officer children called “Protected But Scared,” which she claims saw a rise in sales after George Floyd’s passing. Glenn told Fox News Digital that the Floyd riots in 2020 had a significant impact on the mental health of both officers and their families.
Glenn, who wrote a book for the children of police officers called “Protected But Scared” in the aftermath of the 2014 Ferguson riots that she says saw an increase in sales following the death of George Floyd, explained to Fox News Digital that the Floyd riots in 2020 had a significant effect on the mental health of not only officers but their families as well.
Glenn acknowledged that the demonization of police compounds even more when elected officials join in on the demonization of police that has been pervasive across media outlets, citing as an example the declining police morale in nearby Austin, where the city council voted to defund the police in 2020.
