ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. – For most people, a critical incident may happen once or twice in a lifetime.
However, for someone working in law enforcement, it can happen hundreds of times.
Sergeant Michael Pate, who helps oversee the sheriff’s office peer support program, said most people don’t experience anything close to the number of critical incidents officers encounter on the job.
“In a 20-year career in law enforcement, we are seeing upwards of 500 to 600 critical incidents in those 20 years,” Pate said. “A normal person may only see one or two in their lifetime.”
The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office spent years building a peer support program designed to help employees deal with the emotional toll of those experiences.
The effort took on new urgency after Detective Jeff Carroll died by suicide.
“It was just a shock to the agency; no one really expected it, no one knew it was coming or what to expect,” Pate said. “He was the implementing factor that we needed to take care of our people,” Pate said. “We didn’t know the signs; we didn’t see it coming.”
Pate told News4Jax’s Reporter Briana Brownlee and Photojournalist Jesse Hanson that Detective Carroll’s death pushed the agency to take a closer look at how it recognized and responded to mental health struggles among its employees.
The program now provides trained coworkers who can listen, recognize warning signs, and help employees find additional resources when they need them. The support is available throughout the agency, from patrol officers to the sheriff.
“So a deputy or anybody can come to me like, ‘Hey, I’m struggling with this,’ and it’s 100 percent confidential,” Pate said. “There is no one who can bribe me to talk; no one can force me to talk. It’s between him and I.”
Victoria Thompson understands the need from both sides.
Thompson is a civilian leader on the peer support team, but her primary job is as a 911 dispatcher at the county’s crisis communications center.
She takes hundreds of calls, including crashes, stabbings, and other traumatic incidents.
“There are absolutely crashes, stabbings and incidents that I have taken that affect me personally, so I have to go to a peer support member myself and say, ‘Hey, I’d like to talk about this,’” Thompson said.
She said the culture surrounding mental health in law enforcement is changing.
“Just the culture in law enforcement itself is changing; it’s growing, thankfully,” Thompson said. “We are moving from a ‘this is just how the job is and get through it’ to a ‘we are going to support you through and take care of your mental health.’”
Plans to expand beyond St. Johns County
The sheriff’s office is now trying to take that support a step further.
Commander Tres Edenfield said the agency recently applied for a mental health grant worth up to $300,000 to build a regional peer support team serving agencies across Northeast Florida.
The idea is to have additional trained peer supporters available when one agency’s own team is overwhelmed by a major incident.
Commander Edenfield said that could become especially important after a crisis such as a school shooting.
“Our peer team would be taxed really fast; you have the deputies, you have the human beings who are responding to the scene itself, we may have affected peer team members who have children at the school or affected in some way,” Commander Edenfield said.
With a regional network, agencies could call on peer supporters from other departments to help.
“We can start making phone calls to other agencies who have signed on to be a part of it and say we’re taxed, our peer team is taxed, we need more peer members,” Edenfield said.
Edenfield said the proposed regional team could include more than 40 agencies across Northeast Florida.
For Thompson, the greater effort comes down to making sure people don’t have to simply accept the emotional toll of the job.
“We are moving from a ‘this is just how the job is and get through it’ to a ‘we are going to support you through and take care of your mental health, so when you retire from your career one day, you will be there for your family and enjoy the rest of your life,” Thompson said.
The sheriff’s office hopes the expanded program will make that kind of support available to more first responders across Northeast Florida.