![]() After he and his partner split off into two directions, Gibbs said the suspect pointed the shotgun at his partner, which he said was cause for immediate fire action. With the help of the construction worker, Gibbs was able to walk down through a construction site to square off with the shooter along with another officer. Gibbs was issuing a ticket on the side of the road, and her boyfriend had just shot her in the back with a shotgun and was then shooting at passing cars on a nearby off-ramp. Gibbs was involved in a shooting in 2011, when on duty as a traffic cop, a woman who was bleeding down her back was taken to him by a construction worker. Gibbs said the atmosphere at police departments includes a lot of “macho folks” and “testosterone” where weakness isn’t allowed, which sometimes causes officers to avoid mental health treatment.Īfter McMahill pledged to make mental health treatment a priority for officers earlier this year, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that Metro is seeking to create five positions for the proposed wellness bureau that models similar operations in other states. “And then over time, the brain just becomes so fatigued, dealing with all of the trauma that it basically … says, I can't do this anymore, and you start to see, slowly but surely, more and more of that active symptomatology.” “So it's more like death by a thousand cuts,” she said of trauma in cops. Gilbert-Eliot said with PTSD, no two people are alike when it comes to symptoms but sometimes there is overlap and that with “regular people,” identifying the source of the problem is more simple than with officers who are overexposed to trauma. She said other symptoms include difficulty with sleep and hypervigilance. Gilbert-Eliot said PTSD has a cluster of symptoms that can include flashbacks and alterations in thinking, such as very negative thinking styles which can cause people to become “avoidant” of people or places depending on the initial trauma. ![]() She said officers as well as firefighters and people who work in trauma-related fields can develop a complex form of PTSD, which she said is highly treatable. “So it's this huge bundle of things that have to be unbundled.” “They have complex trauma because they have trauma after trauma after trauma after trauma,” said Gilbert-Eliot, a psychotherapist in an interview before the event. The panel was moderated by former crime reporter Shakala Alvaranga, who said the goal of the conversation was to shine a light on the magnitude of responsibilities that first responders have and to examine the ramifications on the community at large, which she said raised concerns at previous criminal justice panels at the museum. He said the nature of the job can cause police officers to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alcoholism, suicide, sleep deprivation and higher divorce rates. ![]() “But turning it on and off is the difficult part.”Ĭlark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill, who heads the largest police agency in Nevada, promised to make mental health a priority at Metro during his January swearing-in ceremony. “Hypervigilance is an incredibly important survival skill that keeps you alive on the street,” Fagel said. Panelists said the job causes officers to become hypervigilant, on edge about potential threats and distrustful of their surroundings and “everyone’s veracity” - behavior they said can spill into family and social life. Travis Smaka, and mainly focused on addressing stigmas inside police departments that discourage officers from seeking mental health help for fear of appearing weak or incapable of doing the job, and how developments such as the LVMPD Wellness Bureau marks a new era for cops. The discussion, titled “Officers in Crisis: PTSD, Stigmas and Solutions,” included Fagel, LVMPD police employee assistance program (PEAP) manager Bill Gibbs, LVMPD PEAP counselor Trudy Gilbert-Eliot and Nevada State Police Sgt. He said police officers' ability to trust can become completely eroded. Harry Fagel during a panel discussion at the Mob Museum on Thursday, May 11. “I've been on calls where a father cut his daughter's head off, and I still went back to work half an hour later,” said retired Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) Capt. Now, officers are speaking out, stating that it’s crucial for cops to seek mental health treatment on a regular basis, especially before retirement. Despite frequently encountering trauma, whether it’s a traffic accident leaving someone mangled in the street or a victim shot at the hands of a former lover, police officers usually have no downtime to process everyday tragedies in Southern Nevada.
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