Exposure to Trauma in the Intelligence and Law Enforcement Communities

Evan Banks

You're listening to Policy Currents, a weekly podcast from the RAND Corporation. I'm Evan Banks. It's September 29th. This week, we're bringing you a special conversation with RAND researchers Heather Williams and Dic Donahue. Before we get into the episode, a brief content warning for our listeners. This discussion you're about to hear focuses on the mental health effects of exposure to trauma. And it includes explicit references to violent and traumatic events.

Evan Banks

I'm here in the studio today with Heather Williams, associate director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Program, and Dic Donahue, director of the RAND Center for Quality Policing. Heather recently coauthored a paper examining trauma in the intelligence community, and she is a former intelligence officer herself. Dic's research focuses on law enforcement issues, including police, community relations and officer training, recruitment and retention. Before joining, RAND, Dic was a decorated law enforcement officer. He's a retired sergeant of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Police. Welcome, both of you.

Heather Williams

Thank you.

Dic Donohue

Thanks.

Evan Banks

You've both written about the effects of trauma and secondary trauma, and we'll get into the difference between those later in both the intelligence community and in the law enforcement community. And we're here today not just to talk about that, but also to talk about your own personal experiences with both of those. I think, let's just start with those personal experiences. You both have really very interesting backgrounds from before you came to RAND. Can you tell me a little bit about what those were?

Heather Williams

So I was in the intelligence community for 13 years before I joined RAND. That was seven years ago. And I worked on primarily Iran and terrorism, counterterrorism. I did three tours overseas working directly with special forces in trying to identify high value targets and to apprehend or kill them. And so those were a lot of my experiences that I sort of brought to this work. But since I've been at RAND, I continue to work on issues of terrorism or mass violence. So sort of my potential exposure as an analyst and a researcher to issues of potential trauma didn't necessarily end when I when I joined RAND.

Dic Donohue

And prior to coming to RAND, I was a law enforcement officer as a police officer with the mBTA Transit Police Department in Massachusetts. I served there for a number of years before a life changing experience that happened over the course of about four days where there was, they say good things come in threes and bad things do as well. First one being the Boston Marathon bombing itself. So I was a patrol officer working a few miles from the marathon finish line and, you know, going into work thinking it's going to be just a a regular day. That was kind of the first life changing experience. Three days later, my my friend and a police academy colleague was, was murdered in the line of duty. And two hours later, I was in a gunfight with the Tsarnaev brothers and I was critically injured. I was nearly dead for the better part of an hour. And, you know, for the, you know, maybe save some divine intervention, I'm still here today and, you know, have since medically retired from the police department and and came to RAND a few years later.

Heather Williams

I mean, one thing I've been curious for you, Dic, is, your trauma was experienced in such a public way. I mean, you know, here is this very personal experience and everybody knows about it. And how does that affect how you try to manage it?

Dic Donohue

That just means I don't have privacy anymore. You know, when you're when your entire life and pictures of my then one kid are all over, you know, national news while I'm still in a coma and you wake up and like, whoa, hey, things have changed a little bit and I can't move my leg. And then, you know, you have people visiting you, you know, from, my senator and the governor and the head of the transportation agency and every officer in the department. And and I'm sitting in a hospital bed in the johnny. You know, it really is a lesson in humility. Like really probably, down, you know, to the lowest level. Right. I had people stripping me off in the street and giving me CPR and giving me mouth to mouth and, you know, being even running into people, my one of my kids' hockey coaches who I didn't even know this whole thing happened, he goes, "My God, I didn't see, you're Dic Donahue, like, I am an X-ray tech at the hospital you got brought into. I remember you got brought in like, we worked on you." And he just turned like pale as a ghost. And it is. It is. It is strange. But I don't think that might be just such an oddity in itself that it was extremely public. I just, you know, don't wish any of my entire experience to anyone else. And, you know, you just have to deal with it any way you can other than just. Yeah, try to try to try to figure it out and do whatever you have to do and lean on the people you have to to, to get through the next, you know, minute, hour, day, month and year.

Evan Banks

Yeah. Both of these communities, the intelligence community and the law enforcement community deal with some very unpleasant things. And it's a necessary part of the job. And the people in those communities do that so they can keep other people safe and so that other people don't have to deal with and see some of the things that the people in these communities have to deal with and see on a day to day basis as part of their jobs. But seeing and dealing with these things is not without consequence itself, correct? This is what you call secondary trauma. Can you tell me more about about what that is?

Heather Williams

Yes. I think in our communities, I know I'm speaking for the intelligence community, Dic can speak for the law enforcement community. Even some of the terminology about trauma isn't really directly understood and appreciated. So a lot of people and not just professionals in the space, but people understand direct trauma where you you were directly involved in a traumatic event. Dic's obviously experienced to more than his fair share of direct trauma. But indirect trauma or secondary trauma is perhaps under appreciated. And so this is something that a lot of members of the intelligence community get exposed to. And let's say you're working really on any kind of issues that are going to involve violence, which a lot of us do. You might be working on counterterrorism, you might be working on counter-narcotics, you might be working on a an oppressive regime that systematically uses violence against against its population. You might be looking at currently, you know, the war in Ukraine. And so you're are reading material and increasingly listening to or watching material about those, about the conflicts or about violent events. And so you aren't there directly. You aren't experiencing direct trauma. But there's a cumulative effect of being an indirect kind of witness of these events. And just because you are resilient to it today does not mean that you're resilient to it tomorrow. So there's a there's a cumulative effect of seeing that kind of content over and over and over again that can wear down the emotional resilience of a person.

Evan Banks

To give our listeners an idea of the kind of content that we're talking about. I don't want to be too graphic, but you wrote an op-ed in Politico. And the title of that op ed is "Don't Tell your Non-Work Friends about the Decapitations." For our listeners, this is the this is the kind of content you see through intelligence gathering. And it's just it's brutal. It's very brutal.

Dic Donohue

When Heather talked about, you know, don't talk about decapitations with your non-work friends, I happened to be at lunch in June, right right down the street here in in Virginia with some with some D.C. cops. And I'm out of the loop now. Seven years retired, basically ten years since I've really actively worked on a police department and, you know, go have lunch with a couple of guys. And we actually drinking Coca-Cola for a change. I was kind of kind of like shocked. And it's it's me. So retired, retired cop, my buddy who's a homicide cop and the other guy is a cold case detective. And the other guy at the table works for the sexual assault unit. So, I mean, we or they talk shop for the better part I mean, we're there for two hours talking shop. And I think some of it might have been, okay getting my buddy who will remain nameless, he might listen in, getting him back in the loop as he's ready to get back in. But I think some of it, too, you know, I guess it was good we weren't at, you know, quote unquote, choir practice and we were, you know, having soda and hamburgers. But it was kind of getting some of the you know, the emotions out are the emotional trauma and stress out and being able to discuss it. And even some of it that was, you know, you hear, yes, I didn't believe this person because they're you know, they've been a, you know, a drug user and abuser for a long time. And they actually got kidnaped and sexually assaulted. And then I had to take the statements and then we were back on camera. Then we found this person getting kidnaped. And then we hear these stories over and over again. And it's not like, you know, hey, and then and then, you know, I wrote the report, you know, went home and called my my psychiatrist because that probably didn't didn't happen. Or I went home and I got on, I did my breathing exercises and did X, Y and Z. It was, you know, then I was ordered into a shift. I had to put a uniform on and I had to cover another shift or I had to go back to work the next day, the next day, the next day, the next day. And here the same sort of thing over and over and over again. But it was maybe an environment where we could talk about, you know, some of the worse things. And I think part of it for me, too, is even on a day to day basis, you know, some of my best friends are still, you know, on the force. And, you know, my my my brother's a cop. So I still get I still got a little taste of it and I still kind of hear some of it. But but, yeah, naturally, if you bring some of those, those are some of the stories, you don't tell at the dinner table with like mom and dad or the kids and that sort of thing.

Heather Williams

I think that's how a lot of people in these communities and the law enforcement community and the intelligence community process, this stress is with their work colleagues, you know, with their friends. That's who you talk to about it, because they're a group that understands your experience. And then sometimes they're a group you're legally allowed to talk to. You're in the intelligence community and in law enforcement, too. You're just you're not allowed to discuss a lot of these things with somebody else. And so I think a lot of people process and decompress from stress by using their personal networks, use your family, you use your friends, use your spouse. Those recourses are not always available to people in our community. And so there, you know, you do have your work colleagues, and that's useful. To a great extent. That said, you know, as we as I've said, this community doesn't actually understand necessarily trauma. And they're also experiencing trauma, too. So, you know, the person you're trying to lean on is also potentially suffering. And so there's just there's not a lot of resources available. And there still is. As much as it's okay to talk about certain things over Cokes or beers or whatever it might be. But there still are boundaries and limitations and stigma inside of these communities. I'd be curious to hear from Dic about what some of them are for law enforcement. I know for the intelligence community. You would never, I think there's a real stigma against revealing that you're vulnerable, that you're suffering, that it's affecting your judgment in any way.

Evan Banks

Is there like a belief that that could affect your security clearance?

Heather Williams

Absolutely. So, you know, the the security clearance process is always asked about mental health. Historically, with very vague and open ended questions, they've gotten more specific about what those questions are. But there's still a lot of, I think, anxiety about revealing that you might have concerns about your own mental wellness, which is is is actually ironically just creating more risk for the community because there could be opportunities for someone to acknowledge that they have a problem and seek treatment and there's no national security risk. But instead there's such anxiety about it that that they will just try to maybe sort of do self-care or sometimes self-harm in search of self-care like drinking or other detrimental negative behaviors. And that just creates greater risk in the long run.

Evan Banks

And it's not like there's a network of like classified psychologists and therapists available to help because even if they were, a lot of the way the intelligence community works is on a need to know basis. And so if you don't need access to particular information, then you don't have access to it. And so even if someone else was cleared, you may not be able to to talk about some of the things that you've seen.

Heather Williams

Yeah. I mean, there technically are, you know, counselors and therapists inside the intelligence community. They exist. That resource exists. There are concerns about what even I could share with them. So you're absolutely right. Just because you have a clearance doesn't mean I'm allowed to tell you everything at any time, in any way or any circumstance. You know, but there are employee assistance services in all of the agencies. But there are different cultural differences in the agencies, and there's just a lot of uncertainty for the individual and the individual who might be managing a, you know, sort of their own stress, their own potential traumatic exposure. And the individuals around them like I don't want to necessarily say anything about my colleague, even if I'm concerned about them. That could compromise their ability to keep their job. So just that I think does not it's it's not a community that's going to be that outspoken about these things. And there's not a culture of mental wellness within the community.

Evan Banks

Dic, how was how was that your experience, too, with law enforcement?

Dic Donohue

So similar, instead of clearance, it's gun and badge. It's it's if you talk to somebody, if you seek help, if you're perceived as needing that to the you know, to the extent that someone's going to get the help for you, that your gun and badge are going to be taken away from you. I remember literally being in the hospital with tubes sticking to me. People are saying, don't say, don't talk to anybody about what happened. They're going to take your gun. They're going to take your badge. They're going to take your job. It didn't happen. But that that is the longstanding, you know, generational. You know, generation after generation, you know, law enforcement cultural belief. It's that if if you seek treatment, they're going to take away your gun. They're going to take away your badge. And that means you can't work. That means you can't work a regular job. You can't work overtime and you're out. So there's there's a a fear in that. And obviously, I said, it didn't happen to me. You know, my department came and gave me my badge, which is nice, even though, you know, for, for, you know, two months I was in hospitals. I wasn't going to go arresting anybody. They didn't give me a gun right away. But I think, you know, for good measure, again, you know, sleeping in hospital rooms for for for for two months didn't didn't really need one. So even in my case, being through the situation, being, you know, very physically injured as well, that it just simply didn't happen. And then when I was, you know, recovered, you know, quote unquote enough, I did end up retiring, you know, went back to the range, qualified with my duty weapon. We changed weapons. They gave me a new one. And and there was there were no issues. So even kind of dispelling some of those rumors, but certainly having heard them from other officers beforehand and even officers during those first few days when I'm just barely getting better and just, you know, barely surviving a gunfight, I'm hearing, hey, be careful what you say. Be careful what you do because they're going to take your job.

Evan Banks

There's such a culture of being stoic and being it just being part of the job and it is part of the job. But.

Heather Williams

You know, I find it interesting Dic that you say this because I do wonder if for cops it's the gun and the badge is even more a part of their identity. Like you know it people in the intelligence community are very anxious about their security clearance. Nobody wants to lose your security clearance. We all recognize that that's a critical thing for you to work. But I don't know. I mean, you still you're still who you are. It would be it would be problematic for your employment. But I feel like to be a cop.

Dic Donohue

Yeah. And even in retirement, it's important. I mean, I remember being anxious, like I'm out processing. Where's my retiree badge? Right? Where's my retiree? But I have one. I still have one. I still have, you know, all my retiree gear and ID just to have that, that, that tie back right to to being in that. Even with all that I miss or like or dislike or have packed away that I still do have that that that one thing. Interestingly enough when I when I was thinking about you know talking about this subject, I think about one of the things that was given to me on day one of the police academy given to everyone in our academy, was a book calledEmotional Survival for Law Enforcement. It was written like 30, maybe 30 plus years ago, and it went over everything from stress management to things like, I'm sure you've experienced hyper vigilance, right? For everything. Like, hey, when you go to a restaurant, make sure you sit with your, you know, facing facing the door, right? Don't wear a seatbelt because if you need to jump out, you don't want to get caught that one time. Right. The didn't say to not wear a seatbelt in the book, but just some of these actions that that you think about some of these hey when I'm on the job for a year all of my friends are going to be on the job. I'm not I'm not even going to have a tie back to my life beforehand. Right. I'm going to eat, sleep and drink this culture up. And some it was trying to be like, you know, you got to distance yourself from it. You have to have some of these other mechanisms, either organizationally or personally. You need to have the hobbies even when you're working 80 hours plus a week plus commuting, plus sleeping in your car, that sort of thing. And it was just like, I feel like that book kind of still rings true every once in a while. I still have it up on my bookshelf. Take a peek at it every once in a while. But I think about it even even when I'm you know, working on some of these these these wellness issues here at RAND or when I was at a site visit for something completely unrelated. And I'm working with federal law enforcement officers and we're getting up at 3:30 in the morning to go and do work. And I just asked them, I said, how many days a week do you get up at 3:30 in the morning to to do your job and then get home at, you know, five in the afternoon? It was like, well, I do this, you know, five days a week. I was like, well, how do you how do you cope with that? Because this is terrible. I'd rather work overnights than wake up at 3:30 in the morning. You know, like, how does your how's your family deal with this, too, right? If you have kids or a wife or a significant other, how do they deal with that, too? And what's that? I don't know if that secondary trauma or just the secondary impacts of of a certain type of of of employment. And I know you've been you've been deployed as well. Right. It's not, you know, not an easy thing to have to have to deal with all that and then think about the, you know, secondary effects on other folks.

Heather Williams

It's interesting you say that because one of the things I thought was really interesting about this work that we did on trauma in the intelligence community, is that as important as the potential trauma exposure is the environment that one is in when these things happen. So, you know, as important as to whether or not someone can deal with traumatic stress is whether they're working long hours or whether they're working nights or whether they're working for a supportive manager versus, you know, a terrible manager. All of those dynamics really affect someone's resilience to stress. And in the intelligence community, like law enforcement is can be really high stakes and in a really, really intense environment. So I think that rings so true. At the same time, one thing I think is an interesting difference between our communities is this maybe concept of boundaries. I think, yeah, cops don't ever really get to turn off. You're sort of always a cop and you you live that identity day in and day out. Whereas if you're an intelligence officer, boundaries are actually very present and very important for your life. You know, my work stayed at work. It did not go home with me. So yeah, I worked long hours, but when I walked out the door, I had to have hobbies or other facets...

Evan Banks

But there were negative consequences to both sides of that coin where, like, you felt it was hard, I mean, and you couldn't talk about some of the things with other people and Dic, you, it's hard to turn off and have a life outside of of the the work. It's interesting how both sides of that coin can contribute to this environment.

Heather Williams

That's right. Yeah. But I think they do make it a little bit different, like how it presents itself. And I think that is really important for our field. We understand a lot about secondary trauma and there are some universal truths about it that, you know, practitioners who understand it can bring it to different fields, but there are these unique aspects to these fields that we need to understand a little bit better. So this work that we did at RAND, I think is some of the only work that's ever been done on secondary trauma in the intelligence community, and it has resonated so powerfully. We hear so much from I hear so much from people about how much it affected them, how much they related to it. And it's hopefully started an important conversation, but one that needs specific study. Like someone needs to specifically think about what this means for this field. I think there's been a little bit more about that done in law enforcement and first responders generally, there's a better understanding of the fact that there are risks here. It doesn't be that there isn't still more to be done.

Dic Donohue

There's a lot to be done on the research end and I was thinking there was a report that came out from the Department of Justice and, you know, the Appendix B or whatever was was here are 30 different bullet points of of possible, you know, wellness, health and wellness solutions for from everything. You know from from EAPs to, you know, using using mobile apps to I mean, anything you could think of to, to critical incidents, trust debriefings, which there's there's research already on on some of that, you know, saying they're ineffective but agencies keep keep using them. I guess I could go off on a tangent there but I'll save my breath for another day. But I thought it was really interesting that they said here are here's a laundry list of potentially helpful things. But they all need research and evaluation. Every single one of them do. So whether or not that will happen in one fell swoop, I'm not really optimistic about that. But I am at least optimistic that that look, we're considering all these things across the spectrum of law enforcement, it wasn't just DOJ for just feds. It was for the, you know, the department of one, you know, to NYPD or the Border Patrol. This this counts for everybody.

Evan Banks

And I guess that just points to the newness of the field and the newness of the research, that this is something that people are realizing applies to to a lot of different communities.

Heather Williams

Yeah. Or the resistance of that community, to, I mean, these aren't necessarily that new. So some comments, like, some concepts like moral injury are still a little bit newer, understanding that that moral injury and the sort of these risks that might exist to harm an individual emotionally, mentally, by sort of violating their core ethics or putting them in these situations where they're kind of feeling that the activity is immoral. So that that's a relatively new concept. But I think there's these are both communities that have been frankly, more masculine communities. They are communities that have historically had a specific sort of demographic type. And it's just not communities that are necessarily oriented towards their feelings. These are tough, tough communities. And so I think it's taken some time for there to be an appreciation and a little bit more understanding brought to the work culture.

Evan Banks

Yeah. You wrote in the paper that there is a small community where these traumatic experience have been like taken into account a little bit more, a little bit more holistically. And that's the the drone operators community. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Heather Williams

Yeah. Well, the only places that research has been done is drone operators, and that's been done often the Air Force and drone operators. And so there is an appreciation, I think, of that, that sort of function, that job function and how that can be difficult. You know, drone operators for those that are unaware, drone operators are often here in the United States, you know, they aren't even deployed forward alongside troops. And they're they're seeing these feeds from platform unmanned platforms like Predators of what's going on in the battlefield. And sometimes they're even making decisions like they're determining, yes, that is the enemy target. You can fire the missile on that drone. And so they're they're kind of one foot in the war, but they're physically out of the war. And so those were very difficult jobs for a lot of the service members who are doing them. You know, they would be essentially there virtually in Iraq and Afghanistan during the conflict and then go home to their families. You know, at least, as Dic was mentioning, my deployments, deployments are are very surreal. And you can't really talk about it, but you're in it, it's a very different environment. I remember coming home from my deployments a bit confused that anything had happened in the 3 or 4 months that I was gone. Oh, someone got married or engaged or something, because for me, time stood still when I got on that plane to go to Iraq and and the real world restarted when I got home. And so that did, I think, allow me to have some sort of emotional buffer. You know, may have meant I wasn't processing what I was experiencing there. But you didn't, but you could be, "This isn't the real world."

Evan Banks

Or it wasn't so close to it, yeah.

Heather Williams

Right. That's right. But, you know, a lot of drone operators haven't had that luxury. So. So there is some research that's been done in that in that space, but not really for the intelligence community broadly.

Evan Banks

What would you both wish you had? So sort of like what, what would you have wanted to have to feel supported?

Heather Williams

Yeah, I think that's a great question because I do think there are well-meaning intentions that have tried to give the community that and this is an an example where execution is important. So my third tour overseas, when I came back from my deployment, I was required to sit down with a psychiatrist and that hadn't happened previously. That was clearly kind of a new requirement as they realized that maybe this is something we should be doing. But it was useless. It was a waste of time. Right. I'm going to sit down. I was, feel like I hadn't even out processed yet. And I sat down with a person I've never met before, you know, for ten minutes. And they ask me, you know, how's everything? You know? Yeah, I'm fine. I don't know you. I'm not going to reveal my deepest, darkest secrets to you, essentially stranger. There's no actual trust or rapport that's been built with this person. And so it was just really pro forma. So, but I still believe well intentioned, just badly executed. So I think what I would have wanted was to know to know what was okay. Like to understand this is a person that you can talk to. Here's the parameters of the conversation, just like you might know, like you have a rough sense of what your priest or what your lawyer's going to do with information. Almost like a privacy bill of rights.

Evan Banks

Yeah. It's not a it's not a gotcha kind of scenario. It is a serious debrief, but sort of like, you want to be walked through, like what, what the person's going to do with that information, what's going to happen? I sort of saw the same thing. I worked on a documentary several years ago on traumatic brain injury in the military, and it wasn't associated with RAND, but it was about service members who sustained like TBIs and come back and that's kind of like another lasting direct trauma that they have. And it's hard for them to talk about because the TBIs leads to things like PTSD and things like that. They don't know who they can talk to about it. They don't know what happens if they do talk to someone.

Dic Donohue

It hits home a little bit. Right. Memory and physical and other defects that are there are longstanding.

Evan Banks

Yeah. This was a good it was a good project. The Marines and the Navy at the time were trying a couple of new things using like holistic centers of excellence that focused on things like yoga practices and acupuncture and just like things that military hadn't previously tried to do before. And they were having some success with it, which was interesting.

Dic Donohue

So interesting you said like, you know what, what what could help you? And I was like, well, you know, you just mentioned some of these these kind of newer age kind of things.

Evan Banks

Yeah, it seems like hippie dippy kind of stuff.

Dic Donohue

Exactly. For lack of a better term. Yeah. That, you know, if you talk to Dic Donohue in like in in 2012, you know what we have in terms of things right? I mean, I went home like the day before Christmas, the day before Christmas Eve. So the 23rd and I got ordered into a shift and I was like, great, I want to go home and see my my kid who is young and and my wife and get ready for Christmas and oh, somebody get their throat slit in a train station. And I had to, you know, shove my hand in somebody's throat and this other guy's getting arrested. And then I had to just hey, got to write a report and go home. And then, you know, hey, it's Christmas. Fantastic. Let's, like, wrap the gifts and stuff, and thinking back to what was there, I just, there was stuff. I just don't know what was there. Right?

Heather Williams

You mean, like resources? There were resources?

Dic Donohue

I mean, anything I don't know whatever is offered. My I guess other than kind of working the, you know, 16 hour days, four days a week was, you know, thankfully we had a department gym where I would hit the gym or go for a run before work. I'd run, you know, 13 miles before work and then go work, you know, 12 or 16 hours and then really be tired at the end of the day.

Evan Banks

During which time you're on your feet. And you know, right.

Dic Donohue

So, you know, just with that, with the physical pounding and stuff, too, and wearing the gun belt and all that, you know, I could complain, but we're not here to do that. But it was I think that was my outlet was was doing that, which is also difficult when you get basically put in hospital for months and then I can't run to this day. So it's like, hey, that that's that's taken away. And I think only by being in a really traumatic event and being so like nearly dead, like very critically injured was when you learn about things, you learn about, like what your leadership is going to do if you're in a situation like this. Right? Who's going to take care of your family? Who's going to watch your kid? Who's going to get somebody from the airport that's coming in here? Who's going to make sure you get the best medical care? Who's going to I don't even know what reiki is to this day, but I did it. I don't know what it is. Or like acupuncture. I did those things I had like needles in my ears. What is this? Will this help me with my pain? I'll try whatever. Right. It was learning about all these different things, like department chaplain or like local chaplain or whomever. You know, I think by way of being involved in a major incident that was covered in, you know, international news kind of sped these things along because you don't know until you, until you need to know if you need these things. And it really is for everything from like, hey, what do I do? How do I file for disability insurance? Who's going to make sure I get get paid when I'm out, because I didn't plan for all these things? Right. So it was it was really learning on the fly from not just like the mental, but the physical, but all these other things, you know, downstream to paying the bills to child care or to, you know, being, I guess, you know, physically normal and able to do policing to not being able do that and, you know, living with the disability, living with, you know, short and long term and long lasting effects of a disability and real, you know, life changes with that. You know, some of those things, I don't think you're going to, one would normally or rationally want to be planning or thinking about or talking about. But I think that's also part of, you know, coming up with these protective factors. So if if and when or if/when you are exposed to trauma, whether it be, you know, physical trauma or the mental trauma or secondary trauma that you have. Some of of the things, whether it be, you know, at home, at the agency level, you know, the personal level to, you know, sleep, diet, exercise, all these sorts of things that that you're ready or that you you can take on these challenges or that you can reach out to the right person at the right time to do it.

Heather Williams

I never thought about that. This idea that for law enforcement, the sort of physical aspect could be a really good coping mechanism. Right. Fitness and then the physical demands of the job. But yet you're in a job with a really high risk of physical injury. And so when that happens, you've lost one of your main coping mechanisms. I also think that my community is maybe a little better structured to deal with this than than Dic's community, than law enforcement, because the intelligence community is is pretty structured and consolidated. You know, there's there's a lot of questions that we haven't even really gotten to is what about these contractors who have security clearances but, you know, wouldn't get all of the sort of.

Evan Banks

Part of an agency? Yeah.

Heather Williams

The benefits you'd get is from federal employment. That's a huge issue. But but let's just start with the federal employees. You know, there's only, you know, 18 agencies for them. And so they they've got this structure in place where you could be getting services through your employer, whereas law enforcement, such a sprawling enterprise. And then even if you know what a best practice is, then you try to figure out how to disseminate it amongst what, 19,000 law enforcement organizations. So.

Dic Donohue

Exactly. And I think that that that's part of the problem. Right. You have a great, you know, peer to peer program. Right. Where you funding this works. That's sustainable at a large agency. But, you know, there's agencies of one. There's agencies of five, you know, everything from, you know, the most rural place to, you know. Right. Right in Washington, D.C.. That and that what might work or be sustainable in one place might not be somewhere else, which is which can be, you know, certainly problematic. What I have seen, too, is that if you ask, people will come. So even folks from from some of these larger places or larger peer support networks, they are willing to to reach out if they're asked. But they have to know about it, too. So if they don't know about it. They can't help.

Heather Williams

We found that some of the response we got to the piece that we read about the intelligence community, that organizations that support veterans came to us because they've never sort of thought about this community. Right. But there are there's a lot of nonprofits, private organizations that are here to try to help law enforcement officers, to help veterans, but spies, you know, not not so much. And especially in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. There are an incredible number of our intelligence officers who are forward deployed, who were there working alongside soldiers and so and sailors and service members. And, you know, the military has structures for this. The military has people like chaplains.

Evan Banks

There are like very formal services in place to...

Heather Williams

There are formal services and there is cultures that sort of understand who that person is and that they're available to you and how to use them. And those don't exist, you know, there's not the same parallel sort of services for the intelligence community.

Evan Banks

Yeah. And Dic, you were saying that that structure really is not there or if it was if it if it is there, you didn't know that it was there beforehand.

Dic Donohue

I mean, personally, I didn't think about it. I just thought about my next shift. My schedule for the next couple of days, getting my workout in. I mean, that was that was my that was my way to decompress and not, you know, you know, lose it for, for lack of a better term. It was like, I need to make sure I get that exercise in the middle of my shift because I'm working all the time. So. There's actually one thing I want to ask. I know we're running short on time, but, you know, one thing I've looked at is law enforcement and and suicide and suicide, even suicide data collection wasn't even formal until very recently. And a not for profit had to had to really start and get the ball rolling and start collecting data and stories on and you know, they're confidential and shared by the family on on you know officers that that that die by suicide, whether or not related to the job or not or somehow factored in that it took a long time. We you know, the law enforcement community knew it was an issue. I think everybody knew. You have somebody either at a department or a neighboring department or academy classmate where this happened. But it took a long time for for some of the, you know, the focus and the data collection to come to light on that. And it's now kind of becoming national. It certainly is becoming national. And it's supported by, you know, all the major, you know, law enforcement, trade organizations and unions and what have you, the folks that are that are involved in a lot of decision making. And I know that in the law enforcement community. But is that something that's even being discussed or considered for the for the the intelligence community?

Heather Williams

I think, you know, there's a there's sensitivities around people's personal records in the intelligence community. Right? So there's there's a lot of privacy kind of concerns. I think that makes it really difficult to even understand how many potential suicides there's been. There was a relatively prominent suicide a few years ago in the sense of a fairly senior person who was in the news.

Evan Banks

In the CIA, right?.

Heather Williams

Yeah, exactly. And so I think, sadly, those kinds of events are ones that can prompt a conversation about it. You know, this was a circumstance where it seems that many of his colleagues were unaware that that there may have even been suicidal ideation. And so it caught individuals by surprise and shocked many of them. You know, one thing that's interesting is we heard suicide brought up in some of the interviews we did for this report. In the context of that, with situations where there might be recognition of a traumatic, traumatic exposure. Right. So so I heard managers say, well, if someone committed suicide, then I would understand that I needed to bring in employee support for my staff. That I understand is that's a secondary trauma exposure that we should be talking about. But that was sort of the only example. It was only that circumstance. It was, you know, that very personal instance. There wasn't necessarily, for example, an acknowledgment that, well, what happens if you asked that person to watch hours and hours and hours of ISIS decapitation videos to look at, you know, techniques, tactics, signatures of ISIS? What do you you know, maybe you think that should be what if they are having to look at, you know, pictures and footage from the cartels of atrocities they've committed in order to intimidate the civilian population, to try to identify which cartel it is? Or, you know, just because that's the report you read and that's the material that came in with it. I mean, the work is serious work. And so there's an appreciation that it's serious, there's an appreciation that there's heavy content in it. But I just think there isn't exposure and awareness of the mental health risks that that brings. Even I saw that even with very compassionate managers who really cared about their people, wanted to support them. It just wasn't in their list of things they were thinking about, you know, this, that, hey, that's something I should be considering how that's affecting my staff. And then I think something that's really important to keep in mind for secondary trauma. I know I said it earlier, but that there's a cumulative effect of it. And so just because you were able to do the job yesterday does not mean that you can do the job today. It does not mean that you can do the job tomorrow. And I think it can be really hard for employees who are coping with this, you know, as that resilience starts to slowly break down, as they become sort of more emotionally fragile to it, to recognize what's happening and understand what they can do to try to help because they just want to do their jobs. I mean, the intelligence community is such a patriotic, dedicated workforce, and I feel like so many people are just going to blame themselves or not understand what's happened and just try to put their head down and push through. And that is, you know, that's not the only technique. That's not necessarily going to help them and and help them when they really do need something else.

Evan Banks

Yeah. What can these communities do so that the individuals in them can be supported?

Heather Williams

I mean, I think awareness can go a long way in the intelligence community, understanding what secondary trauma is, understanding how to describe it, if you're experiencing it, being able to articulate that, having a vocabulary that you understand that someone that can help you also understands. I think that is actually very powerful and very important. I think then there needs to be services available to you. So there needs to be sufficient employee support, sort of structures, employee assistance structures. I'm not sure whether they are sufficient. Now in the intelligence community, no one's ever done a study on that. So whether or not there are sufficient services, but there need to be services and people need to feel like that it's it's a not a choice between getting help and keeping their job. So people need to feel confident that they can get support without having to take on this great personal risk. And so I think that can happen through policies being transparent, through also just helping people maybe with some examples, understand what are situations where someone has sought mental health treatment in the intelligence community and it is not meant that they're clear it's been taken away. So, Dic talked about how he still got to keep his badge, you know, even though he went through this experience. And so having those stories that people understand that that's not they're not making that tradeoff upfront when they even start to, like ask the question. And then I think there's a lot that could be done in making sure that these issues are things that we train our managers about. We talk to them about it. They understand what this is, they understand what resources are available to them. They understand how to see signs that someone is struggling to manage traumatic stress, that they can make sure that they get the help that they need. I think that all of these things can be really helpful towards cultivating sort of a culture of mental wellness inside the IC.

Dic Donohue

In following on that and in speaking from the law enforcement lens, I'm still involved outside RAND in in police training, in officer safety and wellness. And I think they really go, you know, you know, hand in hand. I talked about building up some of your protective factors. It's it's kind of encouraging a a healthy culture that really hasn't existed or partially exists. It might exist within the individual, but certainly not across the 19,000 law enforcement agencies, certainly not within certain agencies or under certain managers or under certain conditions as well. So, you know, I think of it, you know, when I go through it, it's it's it's everything that that I did. Wrong and right because I didn't wear my vest every day. Stupid, right? I will say that's idiotic. I didn't sleep a lot. Sometimes I would sleep 4.5 hours, then go back into work. Five hours. Go back and work. I had a baby at home. I sleep in a different room on the couch and then go to work. Not the best decision. And then B then tell my partner, hey, why don't you drive today? Because, you know, I feel like I've had a couple of drinks. That's how tired I am. And then so again, it's knowing what to do. But then also, you know, doing it, it's the sleeping, eating healthy, having a healthy, you know, lifestyle, whether it be, you know, physical fitness. But then there's the the, you know, the the mental fitness aspect of the of these things, too, whether it be, you know, even from I think, Heather, you mentioned the supervisory role, the reaching out, the recognizing the signs that that somebody might need a day off or might need to go home early or might need to talk to somebody and not being afraid to have that conversation because I think that's been one of these you know, there's there's tons of stigma in the law enforcement community that's that's led to poor outcomes, has led to bad uses of force that's led to accidents, that's led to killings, has led to domestic violence, has led to firings. And I mean, I know people that have been involved in that. Just off the top of my head, that's led to, you know, alcohol abuse and substance abuse. I'm thinking I have people's phone numbers on my phone where I'm like, I know this. This happens to people. And it's it's it's really you know, we talk about, you know, the police profession is as a brotherhood, you know, man or woman doesn't matter. It's a brotherhood. Well, you know, I think we need to to to think about, okay, if it's a brotherhood, will we need to take care of this person. And sometimes that means having those those difficult decisions or maybe ask them to turn in their gun or badge for for a little bit of time or taking a few days off to, you know, to to to mentally regroup or physically, you know, regroup from something. I think there are, you know, some some some small incremental changes. And I know I rattled off a lot of different things, but it could be a extremely mundane, boring job. Five minutes later, you're not going to come home for for 24 hours because of what's going on at work. So it's difficult to plan for all that. But, you know, really building up these these these protective factors and and minimizing your risks. I sound like a nerd now, right? I sound I sound like some of that sort of redone. But but but, you know, as as you've done, I I've walked the walk I've talked to talk and and I've I've only learned through my own mistakes. And I guess to to some extent some minor triumphs along the way.

Heather Williams

I think they're they're both we both come from really insular communities and they're sort of trust based communities. There's sort of a fraternity aspects, you know, there's and brotherhood. I think that all of those traits can be negative potentially towards reporting, communicating needs, acknowledging these things, you know, creating sort of this stigma based culture. But there's a positive opportunity with all of those traits too. Right. If you can kind of push those values towards and de-stigmatize some of this towards like, hey, we trust each other and you needing help does not mean I don't trust you. And I, you know, I'm going to take care of you and you are part of this community. So I do think it's making sure that all of those values that we're channeling, the way in which they can be used positively and mitigating the way in which they they could channel negatively.

Evan Banks

Thank you both for sharing your stories and being on the show and for all the research you do and all the work you do. I really appreciate it.

Heather Williams

Thank you.

Dic Donohue

Great. Thank you.

Evan Banks

That's it for today's episode. You can learn more about the topics that Heather and Dic and I discussed in the show notes at rand.org/podcast. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through research and analysis.