A veteran police sergeant and the spokesperson for the National Police Association has slammed the left for proposing that the suicides of four cops who reacted to the Capitol riot were a direct outcome of it, saying that 'we will never know' why they took their own lives so shouldn't assume the reason to suit political bias.
Sgt. Betsy Brantner Smith was a suburban police officer in the Chicago area for 29 years. She is now the spokesperson for the National Police Association, a lobbying group, and charity that acts on behalf of police officers at every rank around the nation.
She announced that she and other cops have grown disgusted with how Democrats in Washington and 'the media' have politicized the deaths of Howard Liebengood, Jeffrey Smith, Gunther Hashida, and Kyle Defreytag - four officers who reacted to the riot and have since committed suicide.
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Two of the officers' widows - Serena Liebengood and Erin Smith - say the riot caused their suicides. Now, they are fighting to have the deaths ruled as "line of duty" deaths. Nancy Pelosi and Democrat Jennifer Wexton are among the politicians making efforts for the classification, which the families say would adequately honor the officers.
Though Brantner Smith - who has advocated publicly regarding the mental health of cops and campaigns for greater support for them now through the Association - maintains there's no direct evidence that the riot caused the officers' deaths, and that suicide, as a whole, is a common tragedy across all of America's law enforcement.
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'We don’t know why these officers committed suicide. Police officers see horrible things every day from the minute they get out of the police academy. We don’t know why any police officer kills themselves unless they leave a detailed accounting of why they killed themselves and most do not.
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'To my knowledge, none of [these four] officers left any kind of detailed accounting of why. That’s why it’s important that we don’t assume, and we don’t politicize.
'We will never know. That’s what law enforcement around the country is finding so distasteful about this… that one riot in one area, and suddenly police suicide is a big deal.
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'No one is talking about all the other cops who are killing themselves. The politicization of this topic is abhorrent.'
The suicide rate among American police is higher than it is in the wider population; 13 out of every 100,000 people die by suicide in the general population, that figure rises to 17 out of 100,000 among police officers.
In 2019, 200 officers killed themselves. In 2020, there were 173 police officer suicides and in 2021, there have already been 90.
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