Georgia police officer now carries a Bronze Star

Dalton, Ga., police officer receives Bronze Star for service in Afghanistan
Times Free Press
by Tyler Jett
November 18, 2013

A Dalton, Ga., police officer was honored by the U.S. military for his work in Afghanistan.

Brian Early received the Bronze Star at the end of his tour of duty, during which he served as a squad leader and a platoon sergeant. The Bronze Star, the fourth-highest individual honor that the U.S. military gives, is awarded for acts of valor or acts of merit.

The Dalton Police Department recognized Early at its annual Veterans Day lunch.
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New Hampshire Nam Knights welcome home Jose Pequeno

If you know the Nam Knights, they do this kind of thing all the time and I do mean "kind" so it is great to see the New Hampshire Nam Knights get some recognition for how much they really do care about the men and women risking their lives everyday. Jose Pequeno was a police chief and was wounded in Iraq. The Nam Knights are members of law enforcement, firefighters and veterans.

Former police chief Jose Pequeno, injured in Iraq, comes home
By RAY DUCKLER Monitor staff
Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Iron Mike and Rhino never saw it coming.

They never figured Jose Pequeno, the former Sugar Hill police chief, would react as he did Friday at the Concord airport. Hadn’t that brain injury Pequeno suffered in Iraq pushed him into a world of darkness? Hadn’t that grenade tossed into his humvee nearly seven years ago wiped clean his memories, his emotions, his very identity?

That’s what people like Iron Mike and Rhino, along with the others with the rugged nicknames and the biker jackets and the barrel chests, thought when they greeted Pequeno on his trip home for Christmas.

Instead, Pequeno cried.

So the tough guys did, too.

“I saw him shortly after he came home from Iraq, and he was still in and out of surgery back then, in real rough shape,” said Iron Mike, whose real name is Mike Dempsey. “It’s very personal, but I feel as if he recognizes who we are now. When we talked to him, you could see his eyes light up and his face light up. To me, that tells me that he recognizes the voice, that he gets excited and makes it known through his own way.”

Dempsey is a 51-year-old former Marine with a gravely voice and a passion for motorcycles. He rode with Pequeno’s father in the Nam Knights of America, a philanthropic organization of retired law enforcement officers and military veterans.

They raise money, and they roll out the red carpet for people like Pequeno.

Four Nam Knights joined hands to lower Pequeno down the stairs, off a plane flown by a volunteer pilot from Land O’ Lakes, Fla., where Pequeno is now being cared for by his mother and sister. His wife and three kids still live here, in the small North Country town of Lisbon.
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Deputies get help with postwar trauma

Michael Sears
Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Sgt. Colin Briggs, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, is back and supervising deputies at the lakefront. But sometimes the hot sun can bring flashbacks.

Deputies get help with postwar trauma
Sheriff's Department program will guide returning veterans
By Eric Randall of the Journal Sentinel

Aug. 24, 2010
When he's driving his cruiser on a warm day, with the sun beating down on the pavement, Milwaukee Sheriff's Sgt. Colin Briggs says it is easy to flash back to the roads in Iraq.

Briggs served there, and Afghanistan before that, as a combat adviser to local security forces.

Odd as it may seem, the difference between Milwaukee and Baghdad can be difficult to perceive for some returning veterans who serve in law enforcement - the result of a war in which urban patrolling makes a soldier's job more similar to a police officer's than in any previous war. Those similarities can be dangerous when soldiers who have been taught to drive fast and stop for nothing translate that experience to the roads of Milwaukee County.

But speeding is not the most disastrous of the potential side-effects facing veterans who return to law enforcement jobs. Last October, a sheriff's sergeant, Scott Krause, repeatedly punched a handcuffed suspect in the back of his cruiser. After a judge sentenced Krause to 18 months in prison in March, Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. realized he had a problem.
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http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/101439164.html

Here are two of my videos that may help you understand what Sgt. Briggs is trying to explain.

Rookies Hear Frank Suicide Talk From Cop’s Survivor

To Protect and Serve is what they intend to do, but maybe the word "Survive" should be added to that slogan. When you think of what they put themselves through on a daily basis, it should be obvious that sooner or later, it will all pile up on their minds.

When they die in the line of duty, it is a tragic price paid but we pass it off as they knew it would be possible considering the dangerous jobs they have, but when they die as a result of doing their jobs by their own hands, we tend to ignore all they have gone through.

My husband's brother-in-law was a cop in Massachusetts. He had a "drinking problem" and was often violent as a nasty drunk. His family was always on edge one way or the other. Either they were afraid he wouldn't come home from work because of his job or they were afraid he'd come home drunk because of his job. Either way, they felt lost.

When my husband's nephew was just a young teenager, he came home from school one day and found his father in his uniform on the floor in a pool of blood. He shot himself. A few years later, this same teenager was in Vietnam.

While there is a danger associated with police work, we also need to factor in the fact that many in the National Guards and Reserves are also police officers. When we talk about dwell time in between deployments, these men and women spend their dwell time with their lives on the line on a daily basis. They never have time to readjust back into peaceful life.

Here is a story about a cop that wanted to stay on the job no matter what happened to him before. It ended up costing him his family and ultimately his life.

The government estimates that up to 6 percent of cops have diagnosable PTSD. In 2008, there were 141 police suicides across the country, which is higher than the national average.

Rookies Hear Frank Suicide Talk From Cop’s Survivor
by Abram Katz Mar 18, 2010 7:48 am


Janice McCarthy carries a certain melancholy that few radiate but the spouses and survivors of a police officer’s suicide.

McCarthy carried that melancholy this week to the New Haven Police Academy this week. She spoke to cadets and supervisors about stress, post traumatic stress disorder, and suicide, which frequently follows unless the cycle is somehow broken.

Tuesday was McCarthy’s third visit in as many weeks to the police academy on the Sherman Parkway, to tackle a problem that confronts too many cops yet doesn’t often make it into their training curriculum.

“It’s very healing for me to do this,” she said.

McCarthy spoke to 35 supervisors for about 2 hours, and to 40 cadets for an hour and a half. It was part of an effort by Lt. Ray Hassett (pictured above with McCarthy) to prepare budding cops to recognize and deal with signs of post-traumatic stress on the job.

McCarthy, 46 and the mother of three, told the officers and cadets about the traumas that her former husband, Paul McCarthy, endured before shooting himself in the chest at about 7:30 p.m. at the junction of Route 28 and Interstate 95, in Canton, about 30 miles southwest of Boston.

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Rookies Hear Frank Suicide Talk From Cops Survivor

The police suicide problem
Being a cop is a dangerous job -- and not just for the obvious reasons. Suicide kills more officers every year than homicides or accidents at work. But what does society owe the families of those for whom this high-stress job is too much to take? One widow answers: respect.
By Julia Dahl
January 24, 2010

Early on the afternoon of July 28, 2006, Captain Paul McCarthy of the Massachusetts State Police put on his blue trooper uniform, holstered his gun, and got into the driver’s seat of his police cruiser. McCarthy was despondent, exhausted from 13 years of physical and emotional pain. It all began on an overtime shift back in 1993: a snowy March midnight when a man driving a stolen MBTA bus bulldozed his cruiser, crushing his legs and trapping him inside the vehicle. After that came the surgeries and months spent learning to walk again. He fought hard and, defying doctors’ predictions, after a year and a half made it back to active duty in the only job he’d ever wanted.

Paul McCarthy began stuttering and picking fights at work. He was diagnosed in 1994 with post-traumatic stress disorder, and for years, Janice says, she begged her husband to quit. She nursed him through three more on-the-job injuries and shouldered most of the work of raising their children while he kept passing promotion exams and sinking deeper into mental illness. His supervisors made a record of his “bizarre” behavior, and in 2001 Paul was suspended, Janice says, and had his gun confiscated while he underwent yet another psychiatric evaluation. A department doctor wrote then that while Paul was “technically fit” for duty, “it is more likely than not that he will deteriorate when he returns to his former setting.” Still, he was cleared for duty, given his gun, and sent back to work.

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The police suicide problem

Program helps police, firefighters cope with trauma

"Imagine just lying in bed and you can smell the crime scene 10 years later. Or look in the mirror and see a dead person who isn't there. These are symptoms people really have."

Healing the badge: Program helps police, firefighters cope with trauma
By John Simerman
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 05/31/2009 02:18:35 PM PDT
He smiles now, with earnest, gleaming eyes, but Joseph Banuelos easily recalls standing in his yard two years ago, shooting rounds into the grass and thrusting a gun in his mouth.

A state drug agent who had worked in West Contra Costa, buying undercover on the same Richmond streets where he grew up, Banuelos was arrested twice over a weekend for driving drunk, he said. A year earlier, he had blown a 0.26 on a breathalyzer — more than three times the legal limit.

He had screwed up at work and his days as a law enforcement official would soon end. Worse, the images of past calls haunted him:

Turning a corner and seeing a 16-year-old boy who had shot himself in the head "looking at me, and as God is my witness I thought I heard him say, 'Mom, please help.'"‰"

The bullet that hit a 12-year-old, with Banuelos unable to move as rifle shots flew and the father pleaded for help as the boy bled out in his arms.

That triple murder-suicide in Novato.
go here for more
http://www.mercurynews.com/crime/ci_12490591?nclick_check=1