MARCH 2024 - Law Enforcement Deaths by Suicide - Daniel S. Lawrence and Jessica Dockstader

as the leading organization in the collection of reliable and valid data regarding deaths by suicide of public safety personnel. [...] The correlation between agency size and the proportion of deaths by suicide appears to Figure 2 presents the distribution of 1,287 be linear, with fewer occurrences observed in smaller officer deaths by suicide by agency type and size, agencies. [...] Location Across the divisions of the country, a higher incidence of suicides is observed in the South Atlantic (within The distribution of public safety personnel suicides the South region) and the Middle Atlantic (within appears relatively uniform across the various regions the Northeast region), which account for 19 and 18 of the country, as shown in Figure 3. [...] Considering that the Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama and accounts South has more than double the population of the for 3 percent of the deaths overall. [...] Therefore, we examined the prevalence of Among officers who did report life challenges, the unique challenges in the lives of officers who died by majority faced between 1 and 3 of the 24 challenges suicide, as detailed in Figure 8.