Glad to see you again.

Thanks for coming back and a warm welcome to the Heroes Behind

the Badge podcast, where we tell real stories about real cops.

We expose the fake news about police and we bring you the real truth.

This podcast is brought to you by citizens behind the badge, the leading

voice of the American people in support of the men and women of law enforcement.

CBB, citizensbehindthebadge.org, citizensbehindthebadge.org for more information.

I'm Dennis Collins.

I'm your host.

I'm one of the founding board members of Citizens Behind the Badge.

I'm joined today by my colleagues Bill Erfurth and Craig Floyd.

Bill Erfurth.

He's also a founding board member of Citizens Behind the Badge.

He's a retired Miami Dade police lieutenant with 26 years of decorated service.

And Craig Floyd is our founder, our president, and the CEO of Citizens Behind the Badge.

You probably know Craig more about his role as the founding

CEO emeritus of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.

so today, Craig.

And Bill, we'll be talking to our very special guest.

We try to bring again, the real Heroes Behind the Badge to this program.

And we have one today, heroes come in all different shapes and sizes.

And today our hero, his name is David Berez and David to this very day is still earning his badge every day.

David's a husband, a father, a public servant.

he retired more than 20 years ago.

With the East Windsor, New Jersey police department, he has total of 34 years in emergency, services.

He did volunteer EMS work.

He served as the coordinator for the office of emergency management in this community.

He's lived a life of service.

He is a true public servant.

After retirement.

He decided to take another path.

One of the things he has done, which a lot of people aspire to, but very few people ever complete

is a book, a resilient life, a cop's journey in pursuit of purpose.

This all springs from his lifelong desire to help.

Other people, he has formed a company that he works.

he is the president of the company.

he is a master resiliency trainer, a certified master resiliency trainer.

He is also has earned his master's degree from the university of Pennsylvania and applied for.

Positive psychology, throughout his career, he's received many awards and accolades.

He's a highly decorated public servant, but I think the most interesting thing about David is

his vulnerability, his transparency, his willingness to tell difficult personal stories about his journey.

And his career in law enforcement.

And I think one of the most staggering statistics, Oh, and I don't want to forget to mention this.

he, since, since 2022 has been a member of the citizens behind the badge law enforcement advisory council.

We respect his opinion on so many things, particularly on the mental,

the, hidden mental health issues that are occurring today in law enforcement.

David, I welcome you.

Glad to have you.

Thanks for taking time.

This issue that we're going to discuss today.

It's mysterious, it's unspoken, it's hidden.

Okay.

And I, being a law enforcement parent and someone who has gone through some of the difficulties that you

have gone through and more, I have a particular personal interest in what you're talking about because it is.

Almost an epidemic.

I read some stats, I think, in your book that shocked me.

Police officers are more likely to die by suicide than a line of duty death.

the line of duty deaths are hyped.

They're, memorialized as they should be in the media, but death by suicide.

It's a secret, it's a stigma.

And when I learned this floored me.

Law enforcement officers are 54 percent more likely than the general population to die by suicide.

That floored me.

That's crazy.

So let's start off today, with a question.

As a subject matter expert in this, what the hell is going on?

this is, this shouldn't be what's going on, David.

So there's a lot going on right at the same time, we're not doing anything about it.

So the more problem persists without intervention, the greater the problem becomes.

So yes, that, you are 3.

8 times more likely to die by your own hand than you are by a suspect on the street.

Yes, you are much at much greater risk, by more than 50%.

To die by your own hand than the general public.

Another interesting factoid, cause I get into the stat weeds on, some of this stuff.

The average citizen, average person beyond the age of 50 will live another 30 to 35 years.

The average police officer beyond the age of 50 will live 7.

5 years.

Think about that for a second, that includes suicide, which

is about half those, half that, Delta, half that change.

and the rest of it is, just disease that our bodies are breaking down after the course of our careers.

So it's terrifying to think that we put in all of this time and, from a little cynical point of view, you don't have

the, you don't have the opportunity to collect your full pension, but the,

it's, scary.

And we do, I think we've done a much better job in the last five to eight years or so of raising awareness that

there's an issue, but we're not doing anything to solve for the problem.

And, so there's a lot of people that are out there telling their

story, raising the red flag and their, heart is in the right place.

Unfortunately, so many of them are not trained properly and how to convey some of this information.

And quite frankly, I think they're re traumatizing people through their own stories, during these

conventions or speeches or whatever, and they're not giving them the

tools that they really need to do to help people better themselves.

Of course.

there's kind of two sides to this.

There's the people that need the clinical therapy where you need a psychologist, psychiatrist to

take you from like negative 10 to zero, just to the survival space.

And then positive psychology, which is more of my realm is the thriving space, zero to positive 10.

So positive psychology doesn't look at amelioration of a problem.

It looks at people that have solved for their problem.

And now what do you do?

How do you stop yourself from either going back down that rabbit hole, down that spiral?

or how do you continue to upgrade that spiral into a place where you're thriving?

So that's the stuff I'm looking at.

known you for more than a dozen years.

you are one of the most talented, passionate High energy, a guy

that seemingly has, everything you want in life, right?

A good family man.

and, then I read your book, a resilient life, and you were kind

enough to send me the manuscript before it was ever published and.

I, I knew a different David Beres when I finished reading that book, sadly, you were almost one of those

police suicide statistics and you bared your soul and told that story.

And I want to read an excerpt from the introduction that you wrote.

It says.

While my body aches from years of carrying the physical and emotional weight of the job and

other experiences, it is the lack of touch where I endure the most pain.

I can no longer feel my mother's embrace.

I struggle to hug my own kids, and I'm challenged by the inability to show affection to my wife,

because through it all, I have lost the ability to feel love.

I just shook me when I read it.

I'm like, this is not the David Berez I know.

And then I read the story.

I hope our, viewers understand what happened in your police life that got you to that point.

Yeah.

So even hearing that back is incredibly emotional for me.

A lot changes in your brain.

You don't exit the job, the same person you entered as.

And, there's a scientific term called neuroplasticity.

And what that entails is your brain changes over time based

on the experiences that it has and its ability to learn.

where you are at in the moment and through habit formation, it

adapts and overcomes to give you a new normal over and over again.

And your new normal, when you be, when you get onto the job is just who you are, who you were raised to be.

Most of us started, in our early twenties, some people as young as 18, which is insane to me because you're

still a child and, You are your most formative years as a young adult become through the traumas that you see and

deal with and manage and are exposed to over the course of your career.

And for me, my biggest event of the initial part of my career was 9 11 and, I was a 9 11 rescuer.

it's a whole nother.

Story we can go into, but, it really shaped how I thought and how I process things and how I saw the world.

And I truly, from an early stage of my career, recognize what real evil looks like, and, you begin to.

Disassociate from everyday, normal, quote unquote, normal life, and you begin to believe that the real

evil that you're always confronted with is normal, and that just changes who you are, it changes your

perception of things, and for me, it took the love out of my heart.

I loved the job, but you know what?

That's an intangible.

That job's never going to love you back.

The people you work with are your buddies.

Great.

They'll be there in the worst of moments if you need them, but they're not the ones they're going home to.

They're never going to love you back.

Your bosses, they're your bosses.

They have a responsibility to you as an employee, and maybe you have some

really good leaders that care for you, but they will never love you back.

And through all of that, I forgot.

I lost the ability to love and when I came home, I was just not an affectionate person anymore.

I, didn't know how to hug my kids and mean it.

I didn't know how to have a,

loving relationship with my wife.

It was very functional.

And, yeah, it was really.

That was the hardest part for me when I realized I was going through that.

And you don't recognize it right away.

Like those things change slowly over time until I don't know that I really realized it until I retired.

What I had left behind from when I started.

So I want to jump in real quick and just say, cop to cop, I can completely relate to what

you're just saying, and one little antidote about this is I remember as

a young cop and you'd be around the old guys, the, the old school people.

And you'd look at them and be like, wow, why is that guy?

So hateful and cynical, everything sucks.

Everything is terrible.

And you, and I, would say to myself, I will never be that will never be me.

And then lo and behold, it becomes me.

and it's shocking how cold hearted you become.

Yeah.

And on the other side of your career, when you're ready to leave, you've now

spent 35 years in this neuroplastic change of your brain towards the worst.

and it doesn't change the day you retire.

It's going to take years to unwind that it just, as long as it took you to get screwed up, it could take you that long.

To get unscrewed up and, there's a great book out there, with all due respect to language called unfuck yourself.

And, it, it doesn't, it's not specifically about police work, but it's a great way to understand how your

brain works when things go sideways on you for an extended period of time, and then how to recover from those in

hopefully a shorter period of time, but it can be a one to one ratio.

David, you, said to me once, and I'll never forget it when we were talking about Derek Chauvin,

who was the cop that, was convicted of the death of George Floyd.

And you said it had nothing to do with, racism.

it had all to do with the fact that this was an unfeeling, cop who had lost the sense of empathy for a

fellow human being because of the job and, the career that he had.

Talk to me a little bit about that.

Yeah, I think it's important just to caveat that by saying we need to separate out the

media narrative from what's practical and, objective in that story.

And it's always a shame and sucks when somebody dies.

But you have to separate out the emotion from the pragmatic approach of how you look at it.

And yeah, Derek Chauvin, technique aside on what he used.

And there's some debate in that too.

There's some debate whether the technique was actually used, depending on what camera angles you look at.

But, yeah, when you look in that dude's eyes, he was vacant.

There was like a complete we're open sign here and nobody's home.

the depth in his eyes was creepy to me and looking back at some of his disciplinary history, there was some

major red flag warnings there, and he was a full on lack of compassion, lack of empathy, burned out guy.

he had seen too much, he had done too much, and he no longer had a

soul, and that doesn't make him evil, that doesn't make him a bad man.

It just makes him somebody that's no longer fit for that job and somebody

that needs real clinical support because, my man was in bad, way.

And I think that's what ultimately caused the death of the suspect was Chauvin's mental health crisis.

I just don't think he had it together enough to be able to do the job effectively anymore.

He should have been out a long time ago.

you, you mentioned, I think in the book, and I think I've talked to you about this

before, the average law enforcement officer experiences 20 traumatic events per month doing their job.

The average citizen, civilian, maybe experiences five really traumatic events in their whole life.

Is that part of what you're talking about with Chauvin, perhaps?

yeah.

So the, the, numbers there, just so we have them straight are the

average citizen is four to six, traumatic events in their lifetime.

The average, police officer will have approximately 20 per year and four to 600 within their career.

so yes, that, that accumulation of, traumatic events that you're exposed to absolutely goes to your mind state and.

It goes beyond your mind state.

It's how your body reacts to things.

Even if his mind was, and I know this sounds like excuses, but it's not.

It's an explanation.

Even if his mind is telling him, this is not right.

Let's say, when the suspect passes out or the suspect loses consciousness, the, Average person would say,

okay, let's recalibrate and let's move on to a different tactic or technique here, support this guy's

health, and life, and we're still going to accomplish our goal.

He may have been thinking that I can't say if he was or wasn't, nobody can be in his head, right?

But his body was locked up.

His brain and his body were disconnected and there's a great book by Bessel van der Kolk called The Body Keeps the

Score and it goes into talking about how every cell in your body stores your

overall stress exposure and there's this huge, can be a huge disconnect.

Between your thoughts and how your body reacts to things.

Now that can cause medical issues.

It can cause, there's a whole bunch of different things.

It's, a pretty thick book and goes into a lot of the science, but yeah, it's quite possible that man's exposure

across the years of his job, not only potentially caused him to make bad choices, but maybe in his head, he

was making the right choices and his body just wouldn't respond to them.

Which is wild, right?

the average person is going, yeah, excuse bullshit, but it's, reality because when you look at a trauma

response of an average person at a car crash, how many people have stopped

at a car crash, had these big bulgy eyes staring at it and haven't moved.

To help somebody that's screaming for help, which is, we can go into that

as a separate type of conversation as well, but that's a stress response.

He was having a full blown panic attack, not the suspect, but the officer.

And yeah, it's, he was on that job way too long.

And there was some red flags well before that incident occurred.

So shame on the department for not having solved for it ahead of time.

I want to read something to you from the book.

David talks about the types of traumatic events.

And I think when we talk about a traumatic event, it's like, what are we talking about?

David goes into some pretty good descriptive stories here.

He says he saw two children killed in a car crash.

17 year old boy who died by suicide.

He was hit by a train he told a 10 year old child that his only parent had died, and now he was an orphan.

And, he saw a suicide victim hanging from a tree, a day laborer who fell into a commercial wood chipper.

my goodness.

my question to you, Bill, and you and David maybe can have an exchange

on this, you must have experienced those same types of traumatic events.

And yet, in talking to you, I don't think you ever got to the depths that David did in terms of

depression, in terms of thoughts of suicide, alcohol, et cetera.

And I'm just wondering, what was your mindset?

You dealt with those same traumatic events and yet somehow you came out differently.

You two need to talk about what's the difference, what helped you and what, what was harmful to David.

Yeah, and absolutely.

and I just want to preface that by saying, your average person, as we were talking about traumatic incidents,

your average person, and this is a story that I've said a hundred times to lots of people, want you to explain

what it's like to be a cop and all these things, as a cop, I would see 20 dead people A month, which was

probably average working in a big city and so the, story I would say is,

probably most people in their lives, see 20 dead people their entire life.

And most of them are at funerals and they're cleaned up and their

lips are slow, so closed and the makeup and the whole nine yards.

And as a cop, you're seeing people that are just mangled and destroyed and just craziness, right?

So it absolutely adds up.

And that's why a lot of, people are, why are cops so jaded and cynical?

it becomes a defensive mechanism.

It's a coping mechanism so that you can just get through the day and survive.

And I did get to a point in my career and everyone wants to go and see the train wreck.

Everyone wants to see the gore and the craziness, right?

That's why people go to the movies.

That's why you got the, rubberneckers on the highways.

As a young cop, and I wasn't in uniform on the road for a very long time, quite

frankly, maybe eight years of my whole career, but I would go to every call.

So even if it wasn't my call and there was a decapitated body, I had to go by because I had to see

that if it was someone that was dead in a car, if it was a, if

it was a brutal murder scene or a mutilation or any kind of crazy thing.

I went to those and then as a good cop, I used to want to go to all the police funerals.

And my God, when I was younger, the number of police funerals we went to, in my first five years

on the job, four of my friends were murdered in the line of duty.

So you don't forget those things.

And all of that adds up and adds up.

And I finally got to the point, maybe after 10 years on the job.

And I said, why am I exposing myself to all this?

Why?

I don't need to go to all those calls.

Those are my calls.

I wasn't dispatched to that.

And I, and then I said, you know what?

I'm not going to a funeral again.

And I never have gone to a funeral since then, and I never went to those calls unless I absolutely had to, if that

was my job, not that I didn't care, but it was just self preservation.

So to drill down further into answering your question, I think that

the reason I never had nightmares, I never thought about suicide.

I looked at suicide and I thought, man, if you.

If you committed suicide, you can't even bitch about it anymore.

kind of thing.

I feel that I just grew up that way.

I grew up in a very stable home, a lot of support, good friends.

And I look at different guys, girls that I worked with, cops that I worked with.

And I think that the background and the way you grew up has a lot to do with it.

Yeah, I would agree with that and don't you say something about that in your book?

Yeah.

Yeah.

so I would also add that, There's a lot to be said about having an innately optimistic attitude and which bill,

I, know you, and I know you have, that's just generally your personality.

And I did not grow up in a very stable, I don't want to say it was

unstable, but it was a unconventional household where there were some issues.

I. Unfortunately had a, negative experience with a family friend, and sexual abuse, for a short

period of time, which obviously nothing normal about that.

so there are other issues, but I'm not the only one, right?

I'm not here to cry wolf.

I'm not here to be a victim.

It's not me.

again, these are maybe some explanations and they're not excuses for anything.

but I had growing up, I didn't.

necessarily have the positive support about, man, you can do whatever you,

set your heart out to, man, you've got this, you're a smart dude.

I didn't have that.

what I had was, this is not what Jewish boys do.

I had, this probably isn't for you.

I had,

You're maybe you should look at community college.

meanwhile, I graduated from an Ivy league university with my master's degree.

so I had a lot of those,

risk management issues in my household, that nobody wanted to set me up for

failure because I wasn't seen as someone that was, setting myself up for success.

So it was done out of love and compassion.

But it wasn't done out of intelligence.

So growing up there, I, that caused me to have a lot of negative self talk.

And I think as I went through some of these experiences on the job, I

didn't have that optimistic outlook as, you may have had Bill, and I think.

I just looked at all of these things and speaking from like a music perspective, I looked at all of these things as a D

minor, versus possibly a C note, and, it, they, that D minor adds up after a while and it breaks you down because

it's just such a negative feeling, whereas if you can look at something

and see Not why is this happening to me, but why is this happening for me?

And then recalibrate from that.

That's a positive, optimistic, resilient outlook.

And I didn't have that until after my career.

So I think that's, I think that's a big difference.

If you can do

David.

And we want to drill down on this with you because this is the real heart of the matter.

We're talking about death by suicide.

We're talking about cops that kill themselves at an unprecedented rate.

Let's tell your story.

Tell us what happened with you.

It's my understanding that came up twice.

And talk about the circumstances, talk about why and what, and how did you persevere and survive?

So the first, go around, which was actually the more serious, planned out version of it, was in 2019.

I had an ridiculous IA complaint.

no, it wasn't a complaint.

It was, I had a broken body camera, that literally there were, it's

junk equipment, it broke, and I was leaving for vacation that day.

My immediate supervisor was like, yeah, don't worry about it.

Just we'll figure it out when you get back after your vacation.

I was like, sure.

I should probably write this up now.

He's nah, seriously, don't worry about it.

I get back from the 10 day vacation and I was like, Hey man, we got, to write up that body camera.

He goes, for what?

I will remember the last shift it broke.

He goes, you're just telling me this now.

I'm like, gotcha.

I see the game.

We're about to start playing.

Cool.

Got it on board.

And clearly he was coached.

Because he's not smart enough to come up with this plan on his own.

And, so I wrote the report.

And, I got it back and said, we need more detail about all of these different things.

Meanwhile, the details were like crap and shit that I'm not going to remember two weeks later at that point.

And, so I was like, could have been this, but it could have

been this, could have been this, but it could have been this.

And they're like, no, you got to pick one.

if I picked the wrong one, now I'm lying.

So they were trying to set me up for failure.

And I wasn't going to play that game.

And, so then in their minds, I became insubordinate as a result of the internal affairs investigation.

And long story short, I ended up getting 16 days suspension for a

broken body camera that, by the way, it wasn't even the camera.

It was the casing of the camera and nothing happened to the camera.

The camera worked.

The funny part is that the stories going around the station about why I broke it were hysterical.

did he have sex with the mayor?

Did he do this?

Did he do that?

the countless, accounts of what David could have done to purposely, whatever.

in the end I learned, I'll, backtrack for a second.

So I get the punishment and I was, before I got the punishment, actually over the 16 days, I figured that

I was probably going to get fired for just the litany of things and the way they were setting it up.

And I couldn't handle that.

I had figured that the pain to my family and myself and the embarrassment of getting fired would

be less than if I just eliminated myself from the circumstances.

And how irrational, right?

So just putting a pause there for a second, it's very difficult to get a

good bead on suicide when we can't talk to the experts because they're gone.

And, there's.

Very little opportunity to get into the mindset of committing the act because most people don't survive it.

now me, I don't want to say I survived it because I never actually committed the act.

It's not like I shot myself and survived.

I never pulled the trigger, but we can get into that in a second.

So my mindset was that the embarrassment and the outcomes would be less traumatic to my family if I was eliminated from

the equation versus being fired, but what an irrational way of looking at it.

But that's what goes on in your head when you're stuck with this pain that

you don't know how to manage, you really get these irrational thoughts.

So I had, that morning I had.

come off night shift and said goodbye to my platoon as we all went off on our ways and they had

no idea, obviously, but I knew that I was saying goodbye for good.

And, I was driving home, sitting at the traffic light, making,

about to make a left towards, my house off the main road.

And, I was in the next town over from where I worked and my plan

was to pull into the parking lot of their PD and blow my brains out.

I already had my gun in my lap.

The funny, part is if there's a funny part, I was actually, there's no traffic on the road at, six 30 in the morning

on a, whatever day that, I don't know, I think it was a Tuesday actually.

And I'm sitting at the red light waiting for the light to change before I turn on to the other street where the PD is at.

Who cares?

What are they going to give me a ticket for?

blowing my brains out?

Who cares?

like just completely irrational shit.

And, while I'm sitting at that traffic light, my phone rings.

And it was my older son.

And, who was,

probably 12 or 13 at the time.

And, He's Hey man, Hey daddy.

I just wanted to say hi.

I didn't know if you'd be home before I left for school.

So I just wanted to say good morning and say, I love you.

I'll see you later.

So we had a three or four minute conversation in that window.

I had made the left turn driven past the police station where I planned to execute this and just kept on driving.

And by the time I hung up the phone, I was at another intersection down at the other end of that road and my

moment had passed and I don't know why I didn't just pull into another

parking lot, but there was this window that mysteriously he caught me in.

And I drove through that window with him on the phone and I got home like nothing ever happened.

It was a typical morning, sent the kids off to school and my wife went off

to work and I lied in bed, opened the window, sun shining in, air coming in.

I never felt so alive in that piece of my life.

Never share that with your wife, by the way.

the first time she heard that story is when she read the book.

And what about your son?

He has not read the book and I have not shared the story yet with him.

How old is he now?

17.

That would be interesting to see how he relates and understands and feels about that whole situation.

Yeah, I agree.

it's one of those things where you always say it's just not the right time, maybe later.

Yeah.

And later, They're later is not on the calendar ever.

so it's,

as your kid probably looks at you as his father, his mentor, his

rock, somebody looks up to, and then to share that story of vulnerability of.

That side of you that maybe he never thought of is interesting, but the

dynamic of him then knowing that it was him saved you is very powerful.

It is.

And,

as vulnerable as I am, and I appreciate, even in the intro to, all of our conversation today that was mentioned,

I haven't had the strength yet to have that conversation with him.

David, I've heard from others that, that have dug deeper into this issue of police and firefighter

suicide, very similar numbers that, it's the fact that police are exposed to death on a regular basis.

Bill mentioned maybe 20 dead people he saw in a typical month while he was a police officer in Miami.

and then you have easy access to a weapon, a gun, that you're very comfortable with.

you fire it all the time, target practice, et cetera.

how much, do you think that plays into the higher rate of suicide among police officers?

Easy access.

To a method of committing suicide and as a comfortableness, if you will, with death.

That's a great question.

And, the research bears out that it's statistically insignificant.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So

David, I've, I have an interesting question for you.

What's your safe space?

Where do you feel the safest?

That's a great question.

now in this moment, Or this, point in my life in my wife's arms.

Gotcha.

So I'm going to further this along.

I've got two safe spaces.

It's interesting because after all the death, destruction and despair that you experience as a cop over

the years, the shadows that lurk behind, how evil lurks everywhere.

I don't go.

Pretty much anywhere without a gun.

I don't even feel safe in my own home.

Like

I would agree with that.

I actually feel most vulnerable in my own home.

Yeah, because who knows who might come to kill you that you put in prison or whatever it might be right.

Agreed.

My one safe space.

My number one safe space is the couch on my family's home where I grew up as a kid.

Before I knew the evils of the world.

And when I go back there, I can sit there and all of a sudden I feel

this leave my body and just feel a complete and total sense of peace.

I have that other sensation when I'm in the mountains, but otherwise

I'm always still on alert for the evil that lies around the corner.

Yeah, that's 100 percent relatable to me.

so I think the question for me is actually better in reverse.

It's where do I not feel safe?

because I can feel pretty safe outside of the area where I worked outside of my home.

Like we have a second home up in Western Massachusetts in the mountains up there.

I don't think about cop shit at all.

I'm hiking, I'm kayaking, I'm skiing.

Like cop shit is just like completely the last thing on my mind.

because it's, I'm out with nature and just, I feel Untouchable,

but yeah, my home is actually here in, where I live in New Jersey is, I feel most vulnerable, when I drive

through the town that I work in, I worked in, which is about, 15, 20 minutes away from my home, for one

reason or another, I don't get back there much, but I have, an eye doctor that's there, I have, whatever,

I get this sense of unease.

I get that, the hypervigilance like goes through the roof again, and

I'm immediately back in the cop mode and, it doesn't feel good.

And isn't that interesting?

Isn't that interesting though?

Because when you go back to where you work and you drive down a street.

And you look at every corner and you say, I remember the dead body there.

Yeah.

I remember the person that set themselves on fire there.

I remember where that person was, killed and decapitated.

You can go through blocks and blocks of neighborhoods where you worked and you remember some

traumatic thing that happened, some child, baby that died there.

And, it's just.

But I will also add, Bill, I also can say.

I delivered a baby at that household.

You can't.

I, did CPR and save somebody's life at that household.

I remember how grateful this woman was when I showed up at her door.

And I tried to go back to those moments more and I, but it has to

be done with intention because our minds naturally spin to the negative.

and there has been, and throughout your career, mostly things are negative.

Correct.

Nobody calls 9 1 1 to celebrate a birthday.

They call 9 1 1 because they just flushed their infant down the toilet.

Correct.

It's so full of death, destruction, and despair.

Yeah.

Those few little nuggets of saving somebody's life or

really making an influence on somebody changing their life is.

It's, a big, difference.

Yeah, And so I do it with intention because I, otherwise I will drive myself nuts every time

I go through town and, I see both, but I try to remember the ones that are positive, especially at this

point, having been through the pen program, having been through the master resiliency trainer program.

I recognize what's healthy for me.

And I make a very conscious, deliberate effort to focus on the positives.

So David, let's jump into your other incident, in the interest of time, and then we'll jump back to Craig.

I know he's got some other things.

Yeah.

So the second, moment in time is a little less dramatic on my end, but,

so post

COVID.

So I retired January 1st of 2020.

And then, if you do the math on that, I missed COVID and I missed all the civil unrest.

Which, by the way, was very challenging for me.

When everybody's busting their ass and shoulder to shoulder in

these riots, and I'm sitting on my couch listening to the scanner.

Was not a good place for me to be.

I needed to be in that fight.

And I still had it in me.

I almost went back.

But my wife was like, you can go back, but we won't be here when you come home.

so it was a challenge and, I found some solace in being able to leave six packs on people's porches for

when they got home after, maybe a 36 hour shift during the riots and stuff.

So for some geography context for the listeners.

I live, one side, one town outside of Trenton where there was a

lot of, civil unrest related to the Chauvin Floyd case.

And, it was, I felt useless.

I felt a lack of purpose.

I felt disconnected in a way I'd never felt disconnected before.

And I found myself on this downward spiral.

Barbara Fredrickson, the, research psychologist, has this downward and

upward spiral that is associated with her broaden and build theory.

And, I felt myself in that downward spiral.

I didn't know how to catch myself and I didn't know how to send myself back up the other way.

And I just felt myself slipping and slipping back into this.

Deep, dark place that I recognized where I knew I'd been there before.

And, just before I think I was in at most risk for.

Being another statistic, sadly, my buddy, Danny, who's a detective sergeant at Trenton PD on July 29th had taken

his own life and, a very dramatic story, but it was what it was and at that point we had, I think, six or seven.

In New Jersey, in a very short period of time, Danny was a straw that broke my back, and I knew that, but not

for him, it probably would have been me in the coming days and weeks.

And, I needed to do something about it, and that was what my turning point was.

Danny was not only a good friend, he, our kids are friends, Danny was a Police Unity Tour guy,

It,

broke my heart, and it left a void in me that I, struggle, I still struggle to talk about till today.

I know, craig's got a number of questions too.

it's crazy.

I, knew people when I was working that committed suicide, I never understood it.

There was one female that, was on my squad and she committed suicide.

I didn't know her she laid out her entire uniform from her hat all the way down to her shoes.

On her bed, like perfectly.

And I, we never talked about that stuff.

It was very taboo, police suicide was taboo.

We, you weren't supposed to deal with it and it still is.

And it's going to be interesting, to get into why and some of the statistics and how do we go about preventing that.

Craig, I'm going to throw it over to you.

I think it's a good segue.

we've talked about all the struggles that David has faced,

that you faced, Bill, that every officer has to deal with.

and I want to leave this interview on, a more positive note, because as David said, he was down in a

very dark place and then somehow he pulled himself out of it.

And today he is a leading expert on officer resiliency.

the pillars.

That you talk about, David, and we've talked about this many times,

the pillars of resiliency, mental, physical, social, and spiritual.

And what I'd like you to do to maybe, as we conclude this interview, Talk to the officers that are viewing this podcast

and tell them what they can do to help themselves better cope with the Amazing stresses of a police officer's job.

that's hard to do in a short segment Especially

when I teach hours upon hours of classes on that Simple question.

but so let me go back to the PERMA theory P E R M A. I think is a great place to start.

PERMA theory was developed by Dr. Marty Seligman at the university of Pennsylvania.

he is still the director of the MAP program, my graduate school

program, and my personal mentor, which I am incredibly grateful for.

so perma, the P in perma, speaks to positive emotions.

the E speaks to engagement, the R speaks to relationships, the M speaks to meaning or mattering,

depending on how you look at it, and the A speaks to accomplishment.

And those are the five things that are needed, according to Dr.

Seligman, to live a meaningful, purposeful life towards ultimate.

being which Aristotle termed eudaimonia.

And so when we're looking at well being, there's actually two pieces.

There's hedonic being and there's eudaimonic well being.

And hedonic being is the immediate gratification of something.

That quick dopamine hit, whether it's scrolling through your phone and getting all the likes you can

on Instagram, which, by the way, is a colossal waste of time and does nothing for you other than feed that.

control center in your brain, which is equivalent to getting high on an illicit substance.

Or eudaimonic well being, which is more of the long term, long

goal view of doing things that just better your life over time.

And whether that be habit forming, whether that be expression of gratitude, committing random acts of

kindness, Just maintaining a gratitude journal, something so simple, the three blessings exercise, all of these

are evidence based research informed techniques that you can, do for yourself

that as long as you keep up with them, we'll elevate your wellbeing.

We'll take you from that zero to positive 10, that thriving mode.

And they're simple, they're free.

They don't cost you anything other than your intention to do better.

And.

On the surface of it, without having the in depth conversation, people are like, Oh, it's cheesy, bro.

what are you talking about?

That's rainbows and unicorn shit.

but the truth is it's, the science is there.

it's in the numbers and the statistics are indisputable that if you take five or 10 minutes of your day,

either when you go to sleep at night or when you wake up in the morning and write in a gratitude journal,

three things you're grateful for over the period of 30 days, you're.

Elevated wellbeing is completely documented for another six months or up to another six months.

It just makes you feel good because there's a principle, that

looks at the things you focus on are the things that you see.

And so if you are exposed to all this crap all the time, that's what you're going to see.

And that's what you're going to feel.

And that's what you're going to.

Be reacting to now, if you can take a few minutes of your day and write down these things that you're

grateful for over time, those are the things you're going to see.

And I'm not talking about, Oh, I'm grateful for my family.

I'm grateful for my church.

Like those, we call that vanilla be specific in what you're grateful for

because your body, your mind will start to see with purpose, with intention.

Those greater things in your life, and you're more likely subconsciously to hold the door for somebody when

you're walking into a store, you're more likely to put your cart back in the cart line instead of just leaving

it in the parking lot, just random acts of kindness will automatically develop over time because you're

grateful for the little things in life in the big things to, so that's what

I would suggest to officers, upfront, simple, small tasks, free of charge.

They don't cost you anything but your consciousness to do the little things that make you happy

and not, I'm not talking about scrolling through your phone.

I'm not talking about an extra red bull.

Those are hedonic responses.

Those are immediate gratifications.

They over time is what your brain will look for.

Those dopamine hits that.

It's not going to get you to a greater well being, it'll actually destroy your well being over time if

you don't mix it with the eudaimonic responses of greater long term look, one thing I want to say, but

one thing that I want to say, before Craig jumps back in is, it has evolved a little

bit from being super taboo from when I started on the job, right?

I'm a dinosaur now, But, back then, it was very taboo.

Today, and even when I was on our department, we had a bureau.

It was called Psych Services Bureau.

And we had full time psychologist doctors on staff.

And I know tons of people went and talked to them and went to see them.

And I do believe that's becoming a thing.

More prevalent throughout law enforcement, especially bigger agencies

that can have that kind of budget and staff and bring those people on.

And I think overall in society, people are more open to going and speaking to somebody where before, and especially in

the law enforcement circles, everybody, it's all, it's, all about that machismo.

I'm a tough guy kind of thing.

I can put up with it.

I can see anything.

Tolerate anything, everybody has their, tipping points.

So to be able to now go and feel more comfortable seeing and talking to somebody that's, truly evolved.

And, I think Craig had, had alluded to that before, and we had talked about that on our own before as well.

There's some great, great programs out there.

New Jersey was the first state in the country to enact, a statewide

resiliency program, which is currently in a, new evolution.

we'll see where that shakes out.

Louisville, Kentucky has an entire wellness center, that, that was.

It came out of a consent degree, which is also another conversation, but, that was a good part of the

consent decree was that this wellness center were developed out of it.

and, LA County Sheriff's Department has some amazing trainings going on in this space.

there's some great agencies doing some great work.

Addison, Illinois does a lot of the resiliency training and it is catching on.

but getting rid of the stigma has certainly been a challenge.

And it's about just having honest conversation.

and it's not about telling, it's not about storytelling.

It's not about war stories.

It's not about, having people come in and just say, yeah, I, can relate because I did this, I think that's crap.

You have to have people come in that.

Not that can not only relate, but that can give you tools to walk away with.

What's the takeaway from this conversation we're having?

How can I do better as a result of our conversation?

And, I think it has to be a conversation, putting somebody up on a podium with, a PowerPoint deck, useless.

Absolutely useless.

You have to have somebody come into the room, be part of the, crowd, walk through the aisles, have conversations

with people that creates that the breakdown for vulnerability to happen.

So standing up on a podium with PowerPoint slides, it is a waste of everybody's time and money.

But if you can create those conversations in the classroom.

David, in the interest of time, I'm sure we could spend hours with you.

this has been fascinating to hear your personal story.

In the interest of time, I'll ask you a question.

Would you be willing to come back and go deeper into this at some point?

100%. Great.

Because I liked what you were just saying about the different programs that are springing up.

And, I. I am very interested because I, as you, am a student of this, and I am of the belief that as the

leadership goes, so goes the rest of the team and if law enforcement

leadership doesn't get on this train, it's leaving the station.

Okay.

And it's not going to get any better and it's a big pet peeve

with me and I have some personal stories to tell as well, but I want.

To hear more of your stories, if you would be kind enough to come back.

And that's what we did in New Jersey.

We hit up the state chiefs of police association.

We did two, chief peer classes so far, maybe three at this point.

and they're like, wow, this stuff's awesome.

And then that has, flowed downhill.

I know Craig's got a question and he's been jumping out of his shirt for the last three minutes.

Okay.

He doesn't want to respect our timeline.

No, I'm not.

I'm just fascinated.

Maybe it's my posture that you're thinking of, but let me close by saying this.

That when I was CEO of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, we had a program called Destination Zero.

And, it involved, the safety and the wellness of officers, right?

And a big focus of that program was on mental health, all right?

And what we did was we spotlighted those programs that were in place around the country at different

departments to provide better mental health support for their officers.

and I'm so proud of the fact that we were the, the, leaders, if you

will, in, in that particular effort to try to focus on this issue.

And now, David, thanks to you being a part of the CBB leadership team, we are continuing to focus

on this very important issue of mental health for officers.

Officer well being and how can we prevent police suicide?

so when we talk about gratitude, I am very grateful that you're a part of the CBB team I'm, very grateful that

we got to know each other more than a dozen years ago through the police unity

tour And I can't thank you enough for sharing your story, in a resilient life.

What a book.

I encourage everybody to go out and read it, especially our law enforcement professionals and the public.

They need to understand what our officers are dealing with on a day to day basis.

and I'm just very grateful that you shared that story and that you're

now helping others thanks to your own personal experience and struggles.

Thank you, sir. You are truly a hero behind the badge.

Thank you, Craig.

Again, if you want more about this incredible topic, here's

David's book, A Resilient Life, A Cop's Journey and Pursuit of Purpose.

if you liked what you heard today, you need to get online right now and buy this book because it goes deeper.

And tells more of David's story.

David, your, story, what can I say?

your superpower is your vulnerability.

Your superpower is your transparency.

And that's something that's sometimes missing in law enforcement.

We don't always get that, but your story is not only inspiring.

Not just to law enforcement, but to people, to human beings.

And more important,

it's instructive, because you have the knowledge, you have the experience, and you've blended the experiences you've

had with the knowledge you've gained as a trained certified facilitator and a master degree, facilitator in

two very important topics that law enforcement needs to pay attention to.

So again, thank you for sharing at such a deep level.

certainly, probably not the most pleasant experience all the time to go back there.

How many people have we helped today because of having this conversation?

That's what I think of.

yeah.

And you are one of the best I've ever heard.

I'm, jealous because I wish I had studied with Marty Seligman.

He is one of my total all time heroes.

He's a good man.

And, as soon as we, publish this, I'm a hundred percent sure I will be sending it to him and, he will see

what we've been talking about and how we're using positive psychology in the law enforcement fields.

I would add though that, I'm the only police officer to have ever gone through that program, at 10.

And there's been an FBI agent and, a psychologist with a, one of the alphabet agencies.

And, but I'm the only, and sorry, and the chief of police in Mumbai, India.

but I'm the only street cop from the U S it's ever been through that program.

Good for you.

And ma and I think you would probably say this to many more, please do this.

We need an army.

We don't need just one brave, vulnerable person like you doing this.

We need more.

And hopefully we got that message across today.

And tell Marty, I said, hi,

I said, I'm going to call him right after we're done.

Absolutely.

Folks, we're going to have to end this wonderful episode of Heroes Behind the Badge.

We thank you for tuning in.

Once again, our guest was David Berez.

again, I can only recommend one more time.

The result, a resilient life, a cop's journey in pursuit of purpose.

This will tell you all you need to know about David and his personal story.

So until next time, if you would like more information about

citizens behind the badge, that's who brings you these podcasts.

If you'd like to know more.

You can find us at Citizens Behind the badge.org.

That's Citizens Behind the badge.org.

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already stepped up to support the men and women of law enforcement.

Until next episode, thanks for tuning in.

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