Corrections_Today_March_April_2020_Volume 82, Number 2

nEWS & vIEWS

in the period we were studying. We used the publicly available obituar- ies of the officers and tried to contact each of the people named as survi- vors. We contacted parents, siblings, spouses, adult children, and extended family. We tried to find close friends who had posted condolences on publicly available websites. North- eastern University’s institutional review board, which ensures the protection of human subjects during research experiments, required that we attempt to contact each individual at most twice, via a letter posted to the person’s last known address, and that we not proceed further until we received a return communication, in writing, expressing affirmative inter- est in interviewing with the research team. Given these restrictions, we were worried that few would write back, and that the reach of our case studies might be limited to our reviews of personnel files and

other documentation provided by the department. In fact, the response to our outreach to the families has been overwhelming. As of October 2019, we had heard from the families and friends of 17 of the 20 officers. We are deeply grateful for their will- ingness to speak with us because although our case studies involved more than the family and friend interviews, we felt we could fully do justice to the lives of those of- ficers only if we also learned about them from their immediate family and friends. We understood when, for some families, participation was simply too difficult and the experi- ence still too painful to recount. We are grateful to them as well, for their correspondence. All of our interviews were con- ducted in person, often in the homes of the officer’s family members, and we opened every interview by asking for a favorite memory of the officer.

This allowed the families to share their positive experiences of their loved one first. Although they were not asked to do so, most of the fami- lies brought photos, several sent or showed us videos, and some shared things their loved one had written. All of the families gave us rich de- scriptions of the officers’ lives. The love that these families and friends had for the officers was abundantly evident, and the depth of their loss was palpable. We were humbled by their willingness to share the good memories and to talk to strangers about what had often been the most devastating event of their lives. We left the interviews feeling as though we had come to know these offi- cers personally, even if only briefly. Though I never had the opportunity to meet any of the officers, I can bring their likeness to mind at the sight of their names. Sadly, as we interviewed officers currently working for the department for the second phase of

the research, we learned of more officers who had died by suicide during the pe- riod 2010-2015, and so we are still working on these case studies. Although we cannot yet say anything definitive, we can say with a relatively high degree of confidence that there were at least three distinct types of cases, and we can share some preliminary emerging themes common to all three types. To be clear, the suicide was shocking and devas- tating to every family we spent time with. However,

istock/Chinnapong

16 — March/April 2020 Corrections Today