LITTLE ROCK — Ten minutes after Officer James Jenkins arrived at a hospital after being shot during a drug raid a year ago, he was surrounded by fellow SWAT team members - and two men he didn’t expect.
They had badges, but they definitely didn’t have guns.
“I didn’t know who they were, I hadn’t met them but they said they were here for me,” Jenkins said. “Even though I didn’t know them, they were asking me how they could help. ... To have that kind of support, then, that was big for me.”
The Rev. Ken Martin, a pastor at St. Mark Baptist Church and coordinator for the Little Rock Police Department’s chaplains, was in the hospital that day.
“For us, to be there for him, for them, to show them if there’s anything we can do for them, they have it,” Martin said. “We try to give them our compassion ... and our support.”
But just as the city and the department has changed, even over the past decade, so has the job of a chaplain, Martin said.
With a falling crime rate and fewer homicides, the department’s chaplains are taking fewer calls to notify families. And improved communication technology, mainly cell phones, often carry bad news faster than any chaplain riding in a squad car could.
No longer interested in merely presiding over awards banquets and memorial services, chaplains are getting directly involved with individual officers by providing them counsel, or at least an open ear.
Starting Sunday, chaplains from around the South will be arriving in Little Rock for the International Conference of Police Chaplains Regional Training Seminar to learn how to talk about subjects such as stress management, substance abuse and suicide, issues that plague police departments nationwide.
Martin, like the Little Rock department’s other six chaplains, joined because his is a life of service - and he wants to serve those who serve the public.
“These men and women are out there in harm’s way every day protecting us,” Martin said. “I couldn’t do that job, could you?... We want to help and get involved.”
Little Rock police spokesman Lt. Terry Hastings, who joined the department in 1976, said the city’s police have always had a chaplain.
But it wasn’t until 2000 that the department tried to expand the chaplaincy’s ranks, as well as the roles chaplains play.
Hastings said the current crop of chaplains, consisting of six pastors and one rabbi, strives to reflect the community.
“Used to be we only had one guy and that’s a pretty big load,” Hastings said. “The more [chaplains] we have, we can meet the needs we have.”
Many of those needs, Martin said, revolve around a grim reality of police work. Whenever there is a fatal shooting, fire or car accident, it often falls to the chaplains to do what few are capable of, let alone willing to do: death notifications.
“It almost always comes at night,” Martin said. “I’m standing over my bed and the phone will ring ... and you have to go.”
And when they go, it doesn’t get easier, Martin said. Every death, every family, every call is different.
“They’re always difficult,” Martin said. “Families ... they know something has happened when we show up. We want to be clear and let them know what happened, but we need to be able to help.”
With more than 10 years of work as a police chaplain, the Rev. Dean Wright has seen the emotional and mental toll police work can take on a young man or woman.
“[A young officer] sees the dark side of life every day; it’s challenging to see the seedy side of the city,” Wright said. “I don’t want to do what they do ... see brains blown out ... I don’t want to.”
Hastings said chaplains try to offer day-to-day relief to officers who deal with more stress and trauma than most civilians. And that’s just at their day job.
“We are a community unto ourselves,” Hastings said. “We tend to stick to ourselves, our friends are other police most of the time. ... We don’t interact like the public does.”
John Violanti, professor in the department of social and preventive medicine at the State University of New York in Buffalo, is a retired New York State Police officer and one of the few researchers who looks deeply into the long-term emotional and physical effects of police work.
Violanti said rates of depression, alcoholism and suicide are all higher for police officers than the general public.
What’s more, Violanti said, officers seldom talk about such issues, especially thoughts of suicide, in fear of the stigma that might follow.
A training coordinator at the Little Rock Police Training Academy, Sgt. Heath Helton, said Violanti’s findings hit close to home.
And what’s worse, Helton said, is officers seldom have an outlet for their problems.
“Dealing with the things we deal with, deaths and car accidents to the shift work, the demand of this job, we try and suppress those, to not take it home ... sometimes with alcohol,” Helton said. “It’s unfortunate because officers have that macho bravado where we don’t want to admit we’re human and have problems.”
It takes time for chaplains to become counselors and confidants to officers, Martin said.
“The chaplaincy is about things that touch us deeply, and death is only one of them,” said Rabbi Kalman Winnick. “Stress is one, crisis is another, family issues is another ... lots of things happen that make us feel things deeply and we don’t want for officers to have to wait to see the chaplain who is only there when there’s been a shooting.”
Martin, Wright, Winnick and others said they have to earn the right to serve officers as their chaplain.
“You have to develop the trust to serve them,” Wright said. “It takes a whole lot more time ... you’ve got to work on a daily basis with these guys for them to open up.”
So that’s what they do, through ride-a-longs, meetings and prayers with officers getting ready to go out on patrol. The seven chaplains are trying to increase their visibility in a department with nearly 500 sworn officers.
It isn’t easy, but God’s work seldom is, Martin said.
“We want the officers to realize we’re there for them,” Martin said. “But if they agree to talk and open up ... that’s what we’re there to do.”
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 03/05/2011