Police Mental Barricade: A Survivor's Guide to Poor Law Enforcement Leadership

By Nicholas Ruggiero, Ernest Stevens and Travis Yates

"Police Mental Barricade" is a raw, unfiltered look into the epidemic of suicides within law enforcement. Last year Blue Help alone reported 228 known suicides within the law enforcement profession. On the other hand, last year 147 officers were killed in the line of duty. We are losing more officers at their own hands than we are on the job. Why?

The problem stems from poor leadership within the law enforcement profession. This is an epidemic, and "Police Mental Barricade" is the beginning of a search for a cure.

Nick was a police officer for almost 20 years in two different agencies, Alexandria City Virginia and the New York City Police Department.

In Alexandria City, Nick held the position of Sergeant and supervised midnights, evenings, days, and ended his career in the Community Policing Unit. During Nick's time in the Community Policing unit he witnessed poor leadership decisions made from his command staff and fell victim to a hostile work environment for speaking up about the treatment of his troops.

In 2019, after the department refused to handle his hostile work environment claim he retired and went to work for the District of Columbia Police Department as the supervisor of background investigations and immediately knew he had made a mistake and asked to return to the Alexandria City Police Department.

As a punishment for leaving the agency Nick was stripped of his rank, pay, and put through countless retaliation to prove a point to other people thinking about leaving the agency.

After over a month of relentless harassment and retaliation Nick attempted to take his life. He didn't complete suicide but took his poor experiences and started the Roll Call Room podcast in October 2019 helping thousands of other officers struggling with PTSD and mental health issues.

When the Roll Call Room podcast hit 25,000 listeners, the Chief of Police attempted to make Nick shut the podcast down. When Nick refused and scored top of the list for the upcoming Lieutenant process (as a police officer) the department investigated him for an incident a year prior and prior to his re-hire. Knowing that Nick was on probation, the department concluded their investigation six days before the end of Nick's probation so he would not have grievance rights. Rather than be forced out of the department, Nick retired and left the agency.

Since leaving the agency, Nick has been harassed and bullied by Alexandria City Police command staff on social media through the Roll Call Room podcast.

Nick wrote, "Police Mental Health Barricade: A survivor's guide to poor law enforcement leadership" to help others going through the same thing. Leaders are very scarce in our profession right now and more than ever positional equity leaders have no place leading us through these tough times. This book will take you through taking medication for PTSD, poor leadership, promotions, positional equity leaders, and how we fix our amazing profession.

This book is meant to help "Stop the Stigma"

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098322533

Book preview

Chapter 1

Suicide

May 25, 2019. A day that will always be ingrained in my mind. I remember that day like it was yesterday, and no other day has been the same since. That was the day that I chose to take my own life. Many factors led to this decision, many failures led to this decision, and even as I planned it, second thoughts were starting to overpower this decision.

Now, as you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking to yourself Wow, Nick must’ve been going through some really tough personal things for him to get to that point. While you’re partially correct, ultimately it was my career in law enforcement and enduring poor leadership over a long period of time that drove me to that point. That doesn’t mean that I don’t take full responsibility for making that final decision, but it is important for you to know all of the factors that led to that decision. I want you to know that if you ever get to that point of desperation and hopelessness, you are not alone like I thought I was.

So how do we get to this point? Many of you don’t know me so let me paint you a picture of the type of person that I am. When you’re in a social setting and you look around and there’s that one person that’s making everyone laugh, that would be me. No, I didn’t have a fucked-up childhood, actually quite the opposite. On the job, I considered myself to be one of the most levelheaded officers. When I got promoted to Sergeant I considered myself a good leader, and we will get to what a good leader is later on in the book, but I always considered myself someone that led from the front, someone that stuck up for their people, and someone that always cared about their subordinates’ mental health.

I can remember a time as a Sergeant sitting in my office with an officer who was struggling with his mental health. This officer had just gone through a terrible divorce and was in financial ruin. I remember listening to him and seeing how close to the edge he was, with every word I could hear the pain he was in. At that time, I did not fully understand what he was going through, but I liked to think that I did. In my head I was saying to myself this guy has the whole world ahead of him and he’s willing to just give it up all up. Fast forward to May 25, 2019, I then fully understood that I had no idea what he was going through. You see, you have to understand when you get to that mindset of believing that suicide is the only option, it’s a thought process that only people in this club know about. All that remains is the dark cloud of pain, suffering, bad decisions, poor leaders, the times you wish you said what you were really thinking and not just what made other people feel good. The last thing you’re thinking of is what destruction this will cause for the people left behind. It’s a certain tunnel vision unlike any other. Nothing else matters to you in that moment other than wanting the pain to end.

In order for you to understand my thought process and how I got to May 25, 2019, I need to tell you the back story. I started in a Police Department in Virginia with roughly 300 officers. I went to a regional Police Academy and spent 20 weeks preparing to become a Police Officer, the profession that I always dreamed of. Even in the Academy, I always cheered up my classmates and helped them see the lighter side of police work. When I graduated from the Academy, I went into field training. I struggled, like most recruits do, trying to adjust from civilian life. The change is pretty tough if you are a kindhearted person and you believe that everybody is good, and everybody is always honest with you. You learn fairly quickly in law enforcement that being lied to was just part of the job. You learn that it’s not personal, and people genuinely aren’t doing it to be assholes (most of the time). It’s a normal human reaction to be deceptive towards authority.

Early in my career, I decided that I wanted to be in community policing. Community policing appealed to me because I liked working with the public and I loved adding currency to the police social bank. It’s not a highly admired job within the profession. Most officers would make fun of the community policing unit mostly because they didn’t understand how it benefited them. Eventually, after three attempts to get into the community policing unit, I was accepted. Almost immediately I took to the unit like a fish to water. I always used out-of-the-box thinking to develop new programs within my agency, and it helped elevate us to a national level. When this happened, it was my first experience within the profession of facing jealousy and poor leadership. I learned very quickly that the brotherhood we hold so near and dear in our profession only extends so far. I watched colleagues get jealous over national recognition for our outstanding community policing programs, and the more popular these programs became, the so-called leaders attempted to use them as positional equity. We’ll talk more about positional equity later on in this book, but more and more in our profession, it is becoming the new norm.

As I continued to excel in the community policing program, my career path took a turn. A Sergeant and a good friend of mine told me that I should consider putting in for Sergeant. He said I was a natural-born leader in our department, and they needed someone like me in the ranks. I took the Sergeants process and scored top of the list. I was one of the first promoted off of that list and immediately sent to midnights. On midnights I supervised the newest officers, officers fresh off-field training, and some officers with performance issues. This taught me how to communicate better with my people. I always tried to find the best way to teach them first without crushing them with internal investigations, which at the time was the only way to handle underperforming