HOW MANY POLICE RETIREE SUICIDES ARE THERE?
A. UNKNOWN Currently no valid studies to give us a valid number, at this point. Unfortunately, in 1980, C. W. Gaska did his doctoral thesis and in it studied the Detroit police department, comparing its retirees to the white, male general population of Detroit. He concluded from this that retired police officers commit suicide at a rate of 335/100,000. Additionally, he concluded that disabled police retirees commit suicide at a rate of 22,616/100,000. What do Gaska’s figures really mean? Probably not much. An off-hand guess is that there are easily 50,000 service retired and 50,000 disability retired officers in the United States today. If Gaska were correct, we would see 11,500 retired officers killing themselves each year. The chance of this kind of carnage is mathematically unlikely. Additionally, unlike active duty officers, retirees are extremely difficult to track. They move, disperse into the community, lose touch with their departments, and as they reach advanced ages they ofte
