When the Threat Is Over—But the Body Isn’t

PTSD in law enforcement isn’t just about what happens in the moment—it’s about what follows you home. The calls don’t stop, the stress doesn’t reset, and for many, there’s never a true chance to decompress. I sit down with William Irving to unpack the realities behind trauma, operational stress, and the mental toll of serving on the front lines.

We get into the gaps in training, the stigma around asking for help, and the critical role of leadership, peer support, and family. From crisis intervention to identity struggles after the uniform comes off, this conversation challenges the idea that toughness means silence—and reframes mental health as a necessary part of staying ready.

Episode Highlights

[00:00] - The unpredictable reality of law enforcement calls and why there’s often no time to decompress

[03:12] - Why PTSD isn’t about breaking warriors—it’s about keeping them mission ready

[10:36] - Finding purpose in crisis intervention and de-escalation

[16:54] - Transitioning into law enforcement and adapting to constant operational stress

[20:00] - Understanding the phases of PTSD and how it develops over time

[27:38] - Recognizing the signs: hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, and emotional burnout

[32:38] - Suicide intervention realities and why connection is critical

If this episode resonated with you, make sure to rate, follow, share, and leave a review—it helps us reach more people who need these conversations.

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Contact us: mbridgeman@behindthethinblueline.org

Listener Advisory

This episode includes discussions of real-world violence, criminal activity, and emotionally intense subject matter. Listener discretion is advised.

Transcript

William Irving: 0:02

enforcement, you never know what you're gonna get. You go to a noise complaint and it's actually a fight subject down, and you think it's just an overdose, and then they got stabbed. And you never know who's gonna be there. You never know who's around, or sees your car coming to the street, people calling just to ambush you, stuff like that. So you're right. There's always the inherent level of risk right associated with these calls, and the problem is there's no decompression afterwards.

David L. White: 0:27

This podcast contains real world accounts and discussions related to law enforcement, military criminal investigations, public safety incidents and violent crime topics may include graphic descriptions, strong language, trauma, death and emotionally intense subject matter and may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener, discretion is advised.

Mark Bridgeman: 0:46

Marc Bridgeman, I'm your host, have over three decades of law enforcement experience in various forms. Worked with Fayetteville PD for 26 years, and then with Army Cid for another nine years. So before we begin, this episode discusses trauma, PTSD and suicide within military and law enforcement ranks, the information shared is for educational and awareness purposes only, and it is not a substitute for professional medical or psychological treatment. If you're experiencing emotional distress or crisis, immediate support is available, and we'll share that at the end of this podcast and provide resources for those that need it. Seeking help is not a weakness, it's maintenance. Maintenance preserves readiness. Welcome to today's podcast. We have leave Irving here. Today's topic, we're going to be talking about PTSD. If you worked in the military, you served your country, you serve your community and law enforcement, public safety. You know the chances of seeing traumatic incidents is very probable. You know, it's why we're first responders. Yeah, and there's a difference between surviving a officer involved shooting or critical incident or combat and surviving what happens after you were in the Marine Corps, we trained, I was in the army, worked with Fayetteville. PD, you work with Raleigh. PD, you train all the time, you know, for different contingencies and a lot of different things. But one of the things that was lagging, in my opinion, in law enforcement, was training for what happens after you see a critical incident, you know, and how to decompress appropriately. And we train for tactical readiness. We qualify with our weapons however often that they want you to shoot. And that's the last resort, you know, I always found that ironic that you do more hands on with individuals in the street, right? And you get very little hands on training, you know, they want to and understand liability behind it, firearms. So we don't always train for what our nervous system can handle and what we take home, and sometimes we don't even know we're taking it home with us, you know. We just may be acting in some sort of way, you know? And then you realize that trauma is a weakness. It's adapting to what you've seen while in the normal scope of your duties. This podcast on PTSD isn't about breaking warriors, you know, it's about keeping their mission ready without losing themselves in the process. So I'd like to introduce our guest today, William Irving. He's uh, uniquely qualified to discuss this uh aspect of post traumatic stress because he served in the United States Marine Corps and then left the Corps and joined Raleigh. PD, thank you for your service, you know, and there's a difference between serving in a capacity that he is now working towards, and it's really a specialty, because not every counselor can handle public safety issues and trauma and as well as military. You know, that's it. That's kind of a unique, you know, path to take, much needed, but it's very unique. He's lived the culture from both sides of the military. He translates, you know, his training and education into a language that first responders and military can understand and relate to because he's been there, he's seen a lot of different things, and it's it's a lot different talking to somebody that has experienced same or similar situations that you have, versus somebody that has No idea for what you've been going through other than reading it in a book. So without further ado, I'll turn it over to you will and thank you for being here once again. I thank you for

William Irving: 4:50

your service. Thank you. I'm really glad to be here. That's a tremendous honor to be able to talk about some of these things like you mentioned. The biggest. Thing is, you know, a lot of veterans, first responders, they don't want to go to therapy because they're worried about secondary trauma. You know, given the therapist trauma just sharing some of the things they've seen and done, and they're also worried about being sat down, being pulled off the line, being pulled away from the job based off of what they share, what they say, because command is looking to protect themselves, right? And the city's liability, right? If you got officers that have been through a traumatic event and they want to get help, they look at it like a weakness. And, you know, so guys just kind of hide away and and don't share what they're going through, because they don't want to get pulled away from the job and lose, you know, their income. So it's been something that I've been trying to speak to different commands about, you know, going into different departments and saying, Hey, look, let your guys come talk. Let them come talk on duty, let them go out of service. You know, let's, let's get them some time to, you know, get some things off their chest. A lot of the programs that most departments have, they're, you know, reactive instead of proactive, just like everything we pretty much do in law enforcement nowadays is mostly reactive, yeah, and what happens is, it's only if the officer reaches out, right? So you have all these peer support programs for all these different departments and agencies, and it's on the officer to reach out to them, to check in and get help, versus the peer support or whoever reaching out to the officer, right? So, for example, you work in a major city, you go to a murder, a stabbing, or, you know, a sexual assault or something of that nature, and then you just go home. Yeah, right. Nobody checks on you. Nobody sees if you're doing all right, how you went through it, right? You got husbands and fathers and mothers and wives going to all these calls. And when they see these victims, they see their family and their loved ones, and then they just go home, yeah? And nobody kind of helps, you know, decompress and wind down off of those, yeah.

Mark Bridgeman: 6:57

And I've always maintained, you know, I worked my way up to the rank of captain, working in squads, you know, small unit environments that you know you really need to keep an eye on each other, you know, and you know, make sure that you know they got their head in the game. I don't mean that in a negative way, but if one of your co workers or service members. You know, if they experience a critical incident of death in the family, you know sickness, illness, you know, within the family, or something dramatically happens to their personal life, they carry that to work as well. And work is not the place to be distracted in law enforcement, you know, that's, that's one of these things. So I would always preach to my guys as to when I say guys, I mean guys and girls, okay, but, you know, keep an eye on each other, because as a supervisor, I don't interact the same way with the rank and file, right? You know. And if somebody needs help, you need to step up. You need to talk to them, you know. And there's probably, like you said, there's numerous programs out there. It's not that there's, they're they're not, they are readily available, if you want, right? But like you said, there's astigmatism sometimes, you know, I don't want to be that guy that goes to employees assistance, then my Command's going to find out. And then, you know, I'm getting evaluated for fitness for duty, you know, whether I could do the job or not, you know. So how did you get into this, this realm, you know, take us back when you you join the core. And so some of the things you've done done to the core. We shared some stuff last night at text.

William Irving: 8:35

So I was in the fourth grade during 911 in New Jersey, about 45 minutes from the city, hour and a half all of my friends' parents were either law enforcement, firefighters, something like that. So the dream to serve was always there. I was wanted to do law enforcement, but you had to be 21 so what am I going to do between 18 and 21 I don't know. So I joined the Marine Corps because I wanted to serve in some capacity. I wanted to do something fun. Honestly, I did it because I wanted to drive tanks, but I didn't get to do that. I drove trucks instead, but it was the best thing that that happened to me and my wife. I wouldn't have met my wife without the Marine Corps. I'm so grateful for that opportunity to bring me close and share that experience with her. You know, I stayed for the family, be able to provide for him, give him benefits and stuff like that. But after 10 years of missed anniversaries and birthdays, I decided that was enough, and so I went to get out of the military. But, you know, I wanted to be able to provide consistently, so I did the law enforcement thing with Raleigh, because it's guaranteed paycheck, guaranteed be able to pay for help my family out and take care of them, so my wife can continue to stay home with the kids, which I'm so grateful for, absolutely, that opportunity for her, you know, and everything she's done and sacrificed for us. But Raleigh is a big city. I like that because you get to experience a blue bit of everything, oh yeah, instead of just, you know, maybe one or two calls a day. You get 30 calls a shift to 12 hours. It's a lot,

Mark Bridgeman: 10:03

yeah, and it's, you know, Raleigh has high operational tempo. You know, it's with other similar size agencies, Fayetteville, fee, one of them, and across the country too, soon as you're done with one call, you

William Irving: 10:16

know, something else waiting, yeah, there's, there's a

Mark Bridgeman: 10:18

call for service pending, you know. And you know, this is where, you know, it gets into the thing. I remember being a rookie, you know, going to stabbing or shooting or something like that. Take the report, and supervisors say, hey, when you going back in service, you know, we got calls for service pending, right, you know. And then

William Irving: 10:36

you go to a noise complaint, and then you go to a rack, and you never know what you're gonna get into exactly right. And as a cop and everybody has their passions, right? People like to do traffic stops. These are guys, crashes, gangs, drugs, whatever my passion was, the crisis intervention. I love going to crisis calls for service. Anybody can really manipulate somebody into doing something, but it's really hard to talk to somebody who's not in the right frame of mind and calm them down and get them into the back of a car peacefully without touching them, and get them to get some help. And so that was where I found my passion, in this whole mental health world in you know,

Mark Bridgeman: 11:12

for those out there watching this, considering a career in law enforcement, you know, one of the biggest tools that you have is the way you talk to people, and how you talk to people, right, you know, and how you relate that, because you can talk yourself into a fight, right, you know. But then again, you could talk yourself out of a fight, you know, you know. Because I look at the the field of law enforcement, and we're not always fit, but I look at it as kind of like being an athlete, sooner or later. Or later, you're gonna get dinged. You know, physically well, you know we're talking about PTSD. You don't see that unless somebody acts out. So how did the core prepare you for a career in

William Irving: 11:55

law enforcement? The last four years, my career was focused really on training and development, and I served as a combat instructor here in camp June. And while I was a combat instructor, I also participated in the martial arts instructor trainer program for the Marine Corps. So basically, my world was surrounded by training and development. As an instructor, trained over 10,000 Marines. Our goal is to train, you know, basically trained recruits from boot camp. They come to MCT for 29 days. We teach them how to survive MCT, Marine combat training. Okay, that's where they learn their combat survival skills. For the non infantry, moss is so we're teaching kids how to survive combat, which is a lot of you know, going through buildings, clearing towns, going on patrols, walking around, sure, tracking people. You know basic similarities to law enforcement and the martial arts program for the Marine Corps teaches you know the discipline and the respect and you know how to carry yourself. And a lot of the techniques that I learned in that program carried over to law enforcement, knife disarming, pistol disarming, talking to people, talking down people who are amped up.

Mark Bridgeman: 13:06

Yeah, and that's thing that with law enforcement, you know, we have all these gadgets available on our utility belt, and the firearm is often, it could be the first, depending on your situation, but it's often the last resort of the use of force continuum, you know and having the proper mindset. You know agencies. You know police officers. You know that their communities trust them to, you know, to carry out affecting arrests and you know, taking people's liberty, and up to and including, you know, taking their life if needed. That's the last thing an officer wants to do, is getting that officer involved shooting, you know. So that's why you're pretty unique in the fact you've seen both sides of the spectrum. Now, how do you approach the conversation in both environments? You know, when you go and talk to people and you know, how do you approach that in law enforcement? Yeah, or, like Pete, regular citizens, you know, when they talk about, you know, law enforcement and or military, and they don't have a clue. They only know what they see on the news. The biggest thing

William Irving: 14:15

you know, I like to tell people is, everybody serves for a different reason, right? We all have our reasons. We wanted to get into the service and help other people. And, you know, we're just trying to do our jobs, right? The big thing that I talk about with other law enforcement and, you know, military people is work life balance, right? People become law enforcement officers or join whatever branch of the military, and they get sucked into the identity of what it is, right? And they lose sight of who they are and what what they're really here for, right? I'm a husband and a father first, right? That's my purpose to provide and take care of my family, and I can't lose sight of that just because I got a badge. So just because I'm coming to your house as a cop doesn't mean that I'm not a regular. Human being, right? Absolutely, it doesn't mean that I'm not a husband and a father, and that's the way that I approach nine one call, if someone in my family called for help and someone comes, how do I want them to be treated? That's how I'm going to treat them, right? How would I want my kids to be taken care of? How would I want my wife to be taken care of? If she was in a wreck or something happens? Right? And that's how you start your interaction with people is how you'd want your family members to be treated without losing sight of that.

Mark Bridgeman: 15:25

So with your experience in you know, law enforcement or military, do you think agencies, and this is a general question, some are better than others, but do you think agencies are up to speed on providing the support for mental health for their officers.

William Irving: 15:43

I think obviously, bigger agencies have a better opportunity than smaller ones. You know, just funding and availability of resources. I think everybody knows how to get on the internet and look up mental health resources, and they tell you to do all these trainings and seminars and stuff. It's just, when are you going to allow your guys to do it? Right? They only have so many hours in a day, right? We work 12 hour days. You work Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So you only have Wednesday and Thursday off. You're tired. You got to recover. You got to get your laundry done. You got to get grocery shopping done. You get all this stuff done. So when are we going to get this help? We got to take time off. We got to use our personal time. So I think that's where the failure is, is, when can they go? We encourage people to go get help and do all this stuff, but they're also people who are living lives, and they have families. You know,

Mark Bridgeman: 16:35

in when you say 12 hour shifts, you know, that's very, very common, but a 12 hour shift, release in 12 hours, right? You know, it's by the time you get up, you're ready to work, you go to, you know, roll call, or whatever you want to call it your agency, you know. And then what was the transition like between military and law enforcement?

William Irving: 16:54

Oh, it was easy enough, right at that stage, I'd been in the Marine Corps a decade, so I understand rank and file, you know, Leadership and Learning, all those years in the Marine Corps, all those courses, all those schools and everything you go through PME and everything, and then you go to the police academy. It's, it's about the same, right? Except now I'm 2829 going to the police academy with 2124 year old guys. And yeah, so there's just a difference in life experience, but it's the you know, it's the same. You respect the people who are in front of you teaching, because they're trusted by the command to teach, and sure, you know, try to impart some of that knowledge onto some of the younger guys, you know, like, hey, it's all got a purpose. There's all reason why we go through these kinds of things. 2020 was the best time to become a police officer. January of 2020. Is when the Academy started. So it was really great for us. Great for us. Our six month Academy turned into nine months because covid and everything going on, sure. So it was the best time navigating all those different things and going on in the world. Yeah, that was a volatile

Mark Bridgeman: 17:53

time to be becoming a police officer because of the challenges that were happening on the street. You know, nobody liked the police, you know. And you know all these anti law enforcement sentiments were out there, you know. But I'm glad that you had the fortitude to carry on, you know, because a lot of people just, I don't want to do this, you know, it's not for me, right?

William Irving: 18:17

And you know, just like everybody gets mad at all these different things. You know, if you want change, you gotta, you gotta be the change you want to see, right? So you can ate all these different agencies you want, but unless you're out there trying to make a change from within, you're not doing much to help, right? So that's where people get kind of lost. One thing you can guarantee, as a cop, when you get out of the car, people are not going to want you there. People don't call to say hello and hang out and have fun. They call you because it's the worst time of their life, right?

Mark Bridgeman: 18:45

They all like firefighters and EMS people, you know, cops get out there. They think somebody's going to jail,

William Irving: 18:50

and I don't want to take nobody to jail. Yeah, there's more things for me to do. You know, the first thing I say to people at nighttime, once sun goes down, is, you know, you guys were asleep. None of this would have happened if we just go to bed. Nobody goes to jail, right where I go to bed at 10 o'clock, nine o'clock, I'm not going to jail because I'm gonna wake up in the morning. The sun's gonna be up. I'm gonna do the right thing. But people like stay up late and get themselves into trouble. And, yeah,

Mark Bridgeman: 19:15

it's interesting, you know. And you know, people just don't know, you know. And you could have been just coming off a call for service that you know is horrific, and then you, like you said, you get a barking dog complaint, right? You know, to me, that's like the vast differences of going from a hot call to because somebody doesn't like their next door neighbor's dog. You know it, you know dogs are

William Irving: 19:40

going to bark. I am sorry, yeah, I don't know. I can't take the dog away,

Mark Bridgeman: 19:44

yeah, so there was some research for this podcast, you know, and having PTS myself, there's different levels, different types of, you know, PTs, you know. Can you explain the different types? Gosh, so it's,

William Irving: 20:00

it's more like, you know, the phases right? Before you develop full blown PTSD, you know, it starts with the acute stress reaction phase, right? That's in the moment, fight or flight. You know what's going on around you? You know, the chaos, the confusion, all the turmoil, right? That's usually the scenario up until a day or two afterwards, where you're reliving the event, right? Let's say you're in a shooting, right? So everything leading up to the shooting, your body, your adrenaline, everything going crazy inside you, getting ready for that moment, for that fight. And then what happens next? People talk quickly. They do an incident stress debrief or something, and then they go home, yeah. And then the acute stress disorder is like three to 29 days later, where you start having the flashbacks and reliving it, and the what ifs and the Monday morning quarterbacking. And, you know, what if I did this differently? What if I did that differently? And you start to really struggle with what happened, right? Because what we don't realize is you're just the one that went to that call. Yeah, it could have been anybody else doing the same thing. You know, just because you got put in that situation doesn't mean that, you know, you did anything wrong. You know, obviously there's circumstances that change, right? You change the facts, you change the answer. But by and large, we're there trying to do the best we can to dissolve the situation and make sure everybody goes home safely, including us ourselves, right? Because we're volunteering, we're sacrificing our time, our bodies and our souls to cities and towns. You know that we serve, and we want to make sure we get to go home and see our in my case, five kids, yeah, and

Mark Bridgeman: 21:33

sometimes the local governments or non law enforcement portions of our government, they don't always understand, you know, they think of us as the same type of worker as everybody else, when that that's not the case. That gets into a whole different argument. Because, you know, we're like you said, We're the ones out there putting our lives on the line each and every day, in the way we look at it. You know, they're local government, state government, federal government. They're always looking to save money, which is an erosion of our benefits sometimes, if they're trying to save money. So, you know, it's one of those things that, you know they have to understand what we go through. That's where your agency's leadership being. You know, that type of stuff needs to communicate that effectively to the powers that be. You know, they're over his or her head. You know, when you talk about the stress, the difference between, like a deployment type stress, where you're out of the green zone and you're going down range, versus always being outside the wire, you know, depending on where you're working in, you know, if you work a hot area of Fayetteville, you got your head on a swivel all the time, right? You know? So what's the difference between the stress like in those types of instances? Or, you know, you do the 12 hour shifts, day in, a day out, you know, you have a three day weekend, but you know, the first day is really recovery, right? And then the last day, you know, you're prepping for the next, next shift.

William Irving: 23:03

So the difference between, you know, and this is just maybe my opinion, but the difference between a military and law enforcement perspective would be, you know, in a deployment, you do your work up, you get ready to go, you prepare, you train for whatever you're going to go do, and then you go do it. But you know, there's an end date, you know, when it stop, you know pretty closely what you're going to get into right based off of what the Intel is and everything like that. And then in law enforcement, you never know what you're going to get. You go to a noise complaint and it's actually a fight, you go to subject down, and you think it's just an overdose, and then they got stabbed. And you never know who's going to be there. You never know who's around or sees your car coming to the street. People calling just to ambush you, stuff like that. So you're right. There's always the inherent level of risk right associated with these calls. And the problem is there's no decompression afterwards, like you're talking about. So you go to a stabbing, it's the first call the shift, you still got 10 more hours to work. Your next call, somebody you know, get a flat tire, they want you to change their tire on the side of 40, right in a police car that you got a scissor jack and some lug nut wrenches, yeah, and maybe you can help them out, right? And they're mad at you because you're not going fast enough, but you still got the dude's blood all over you from the stabbing. You were just that sure, you know, but this is their worst moment, and you're here to help them, yep. So you got to be able to regulate yourself and focus on the problem at hand and let that pass call go, which is not how our body obviously handles this type of stress.

Mark Bridgeman: 24:34

And so we talk about acute stress reactions, you know, how does one recognize that they're getting into, you know, a disorder type having the acute stress disorder.

William Irving: 24:47

So like the reaction is in the moment, right? So you feel that your ears get sweaty, your neck gets hot, your fingers get, you know, numb, and stuff like that. And then the disorder part is the reflection. Right? The intrusive thoughts, visions, stuff like that, like I said, replaying it day by day. We all like to suck it up and deal with it. We like to fake the funk because we don't want anybody to know that. Man, that was really terrible. Yeah, what I just did was really crappy, and now I got to live with it. The one thing I liked about the squad I was on is we were all older dads. We were all married with kids, so it was easy to talk to everybody, you know. We could tell like, Hey, he's actually going through something, you know. And in many instances where we tackle people with knives or fight people who don't want us to be alive anymore, and we go back and we know like, all right, dude, you good. And people be honest, and that's it's hard to do, you know, like I said, because you're worried about losing the job, you know, people get they lose their off duty, they lose all these things, their streams of income, and so they don't want to process it, right? And like we're saying, the operational tempo, they don't get a time to really go through the full cycle, right? So it's like living in that disorder phase for 20 years? Yeah, instead of going through all the way to PTSD, because you don't get time to process it until you become a detective, or you get a supervisor role or resource officer, you get pulled from the line, and now you're processing 510, 1520, years of trauma that you've been through, because now you have time to sit and dwell on it. That's why you see so many of these senior level guys, detectives or whoever's not answering not one calls, seeking help, going to the police psychologist and doing all that other stuff. Because, again, we're reactive. Yes, we're not proactive. We're not helping them before they get off of the line. And so they're struggling because they don't know how to deal with it, and their families are the ones that are struck, are suffering because of it, right? You got all these patrol guys that go home, they don't know how to turn it off, yeah? They don't know how to leave it at work. They don't know how to go back to their families, because it's hard, yeah, day in and day out. And you know,

Mark Bridgeman: 26:52

it's even like you go out to eat, to dinner with your family, you know, you could always pick out a cop or, you know, some prior service guy, you know, because they're the ones that are sitting in a corner, watching the entire place, right? You know, if I go out with my family, I got to have a certain spot, right? You know? I mean, that's just the way it is. That's where I'm wired, and that's why I feel comfortable. I do not like having my back to the door, yeah, you know. And I've been retired since 2013 right? You know. So it carries with you, you know. So, what are the four like clusters, if you would, you know, with PTSD, the symptomatic like their survival response.

William Irving: 27:38

So the biggest things for me is, like the intrusive memories, avoidance behaviors, your sleep is disrupted, you're irritable and you're hyper vigilant all the time, right? So those are the main symptoms of PTSD. And you'll you don't have to necessarily experience all of them at once, and you never know when it's going to come on. And the big thing for, you know, cops is you got to drive up and down the same street every every day, right? It's your beat, it's your patrol area. You're going up and down the same block every day. So I tackled a guy with a knife in this apartment complex. Every time I go to a noise complaint, I'm thinking about that guy that was holding two serrated knives at me, you know, because this is my spot. This is where I got to protect and

Mark Bridgeman: 28:20

this podcast is a good segue from the last one that we did the podcast on was the Shania Davis case overview. And this is a little girl back in 2009 that her mother sold her to satisfy a day, and perpetrator, you know, sexually assaulted her and killed her, you know. And I had the Tracy Bowman, she was the lead detective at the time on that case, and this, that was the first time in since that case, that she openly talked about it, you know. And you know, we were started talking about PTSD and and now in this podcast, we could go to a lot of different dark places. But, you know, people need to know that they can reach out, you know, because Tracy was talking about that very same thing, you know, like driving around in Fayetteville, worked a homicide in that corner. Yep, I remember responding to that house and what happened. And, you know, those are things that, you know, you go through these neighborhoods, and there's triggers, you know, yeah, I don't mean on the gun, but these things trigger memory responses, you know? And unfortunately, I mean, that's what we have to deal with, right? So what is the baseline for experiencing all this stress? And maybe you get a little bit of relief if you get selected to be a detective, or you get promoted a supervisor or whatever. But what's kind of like, the baseline survival mode, what somebody would go through to, kind of like handle they may not think they have PTSD, but they still feel they have to cope with something. You don't necessarily

William Irving: 29:57

know what it is. Well, you know, a lot of people do the negative. Cases, right? They go to alcohol or drugs or things of that nature, avoiding their families and talking to people, and they just try to figure it out, right, instead of reaching out to someone, some as simple as your squad mate, right, or your supervisor or somebody you know who's been through it, biggest recommendation is always just let somebody know. Let somebody know what you're thinking about, let somebody know what you're going through, because we try to carry all this stuff on our own. But, you know, there was somebody else on that call. Somebody else shares the same perspective as you. Somebody else has been to that same person, probably right. So it's important to remember that, and, you know, encourage each other open dialog. That's where the senior officers and the supervisors and everybody really need to step up and share their struggles and their experiences, so the younger guys know it's okay. You don't change from the bottom, you change from the top, and the top is the ones that's got to be making it more of a theme to get things off your chest. Don't hold grudges, don't hold little disagreements and get get

Mark Bridgeman: 31:02

through these, yeah, life's too short to do that.

William Irving: 31:05

But, and at the end of the day, it doesn't matter, right? Because I'm gonna go to my house, you're gonna go to your house, and we're gonna live our own life. So to be mad at someone over something as simple as they took over on a call because you weren't getting through to the person, yeah, that's okay. It's okay. We're going home. Yeah, we're not getting into a fight. If I can see someone else is leading us down the path of a use of force, I'm gonna try to step in and say, hey, look, I don't want to fight. I'm too old for this stuff. Please don't hurt me. Let's just go home. You go to your house. I go to my house. If you need to go to jail, let's go be friends. So that way, you know, we avoid some type of crisis.

Mark Bridgeman: 31:41

So, you know, we tend to compartmentalize a lot of the feelings that we have, you know, kind of like push it in the back, get ready for the next call for service. And that kind of builds on itself, you know, to the point, hopefully there's not a boiling point, right? Hopefully you're you build to that crescendo where you retire from it, yeah, and hit the lifeboat or retirement. You know, people start building up these walls, you know, they tend to start getting into the self isolation. I don't know if you have, but I've worked with some people that have actually committed suicide, right? You know, yep, you don't want it to get to that point where, you know, they feel that there's the last resort, right? How do you approach, you know, let's say your squad, or your, you know, your peers, to kind of like, just openly talk about it, you know.

William Irving: 32:38

And you know, like I said, the crisis intervention was a big thing for me. That's my what I enjoyed the most. And I did over 400 suicide interventions, you know, in my short career. But one thing I noticed with all of them is, for the most part, this is our last resort. We don't know what to do, the pain, the suffering, the memories, we don't know what to do. And they think nobody cares. Nobody wants to be involved, nobody wants to help them. You stand in so many people's living rooms that say, My family doesn't care. Nobody wants to help me, so on and so forth. And that's just not true, right? Because we all know that we don't want to see anybody dead on the floor, right? We want to get somebody the help that they deserve and they need before it gets to that point. So recognizing that in our guys, you know, like this guy's a stud, works out, takes care of his family, does all these things all the time, starts coming into work late, he's tired, he's lazy, he's cutting corners. He's getting complacent. Complacency is the big one. You can start picking up on. This guy's going through something and, you know, encouraging them to like, look, bro, you're not okay. Let's talk about it. Let's get some help. I do care about you, you know, because I do go home at the end of the day, sure, but if you call me, I'm going to help you, right? I can't know, right, because we're all living our own lives, right? I got five kids and a wife to take care of. You got your family to take care of. So I need you to tell me when, when something's going on, because I do care, but I don't always catch it. Yeah, and these,

Mark Bridgeman: 34:01

these things, actually, you apply them in practice. You know, I've done that throughout my career in law enforcement, that if you see something, somebody acting out of character, of their norm, you need to pull them off to the side and say, hey, look, you know what's going on. You're not, you know, acting appropriate, you're not yourself. You know, it could be something. You know, one of the officers I worked with got very upset because they didn't get a car, the car they wanted, right? And just like, what? Totally off the deep end. I'm like, over that. Yeah, okay, let's talk. Come on in. You know, don't even hit the road yet. You know, you're coming with me. You know, what is going on? You know, found out that they had a family issue going on, that this is just the, you know, second, third order of effect of what they were going through at all. So, you know, it's same thing when you carry stuff home as well. You. So you have to kind of watch each other. How does trauma work in a home environment, you know? And you come back home from seeing something horrific, you know? I know when I came home, you know how it's work, fine.

William Irving: 35:15

Well, it goes back to the secondary trauma, right? You're not gonna tell your wife about the gruesome, disgusting, terrible place and things and smells and stuff you saw, you don't know how to share that with them. You know, today wasn't a good day, right? Today was a rough one. You know, just symbols, phrases that we can tell our spouses like, you know, because they're still living their life, right? So when you come home after 12 hours, your wife or your significant others, they've been home for 1215, hours, right? Because I had a three hour rule. I woke up three hours before shift, I worked out, showered, got changed, got ready, and then, so it's 15 hours. I'm already gone, leaving my wife to fend for herself, essentially, with all the kids and everything at home, so they're just as tired as you, right? Sure, and you got to come home thinking that, you know, I've been through so much today. I got to come home and relax well, your your spouse, your significant other, they also need relief at home as well. If you have nobody at home, that's even harder, because you got to get your stuff ready for tomorrow all by yourself, and it's all on you. And we have a certain expectation when we get home that the house and things are going to be a certain type of way. And we can't do that right, because they're the ones there all the time, right? We're barely there, so it's really not that big a deal if there's toys on the floor. It's really not that big a deal if our spouse couldn't get anything done today because the kids were a mess. But we just expect things, right? And it's hard to turn it off. You go from telling people what to do all day, and then you come home and it's not your job to tell everybody what to do all the time. Yeah, the biggest thing that helped me reintegrate back into the home was my routine. You know, I refuse to go home in uniform. Some people aren't lucky. If they have take home cars. They have to be in uniform. I didn't have a take home car, thankfully. So I showered at the station. I washed the city's problems off of me. I turned it off, right? I talked to rookies as a field training officer, like, pretend you're an actor, and for 12 hours you're pretending to be a cop. That's not really who you are, that's not really what you do. Sure, it's what you do for money, right? And when you go home, you're you're somebody else, completely different, right? Soon as my truck is put in part in the driveway, I'm Dad, I'm a husband, that's what matters, yeah, and it's so hard to separate the two, right? Yeah, I've noticed

Mark Bridgeman: 37:25

even within myself, that my persona would change between working in plain clothes versus working in uniform, right? Because working plain clothes, you only let people know you're a cop when you want them to know you're a cop, but if you're in uniform, you know, you got to walk the walk. I mean, all the time, you know. And I noticed change in myself that, you know, I had to carry myself in a certain way. You had to, you know, walk a little call, right? You know, you speak with more of a command type authority, right? You know, not necessarily family or anything like that, but you know, if you get out there to a scene, you got to make your press take

William Irving: 38:06

charge, yeah, yeah, you know. And it's like you said, people don't know how to turn that off when they go home, you know, yeah, you're not talking to your wife. The way you talk to a subject to get out of a car is because he's got guns stuffed under his seat. You know. It's just not the same way you talk

Mark Bridgeman: 38:19

to him, yeah? And you can't talk to your teammates, your fellow officers or service members the same way you would talk to a bad guy, right? Yeah, in there's a lot of lessons learned, you know. And I even learned, you know, getting transferred from one zone, one beat to another one, right? Where the first beat I had when I was a rookie. It was a downtown area. I mean, it was, it was great for a rookie, you know. But then I got put into, you know, a middle class area and stuff, and I just could talk to people the same way, you know, that I would in that environment, you know, it was, I had to learn pretty fast, you know, and caught myself, you know, saying, hey, get, get out of the road. You know, you can't do that in every neighborhood. His kids aren't exposed to the same way other people. It's like, oh, okay, he wants me out of the road. So do you recommend training for law enforcement, spouses, significant others as well to kind of like, recognize when their loved one may be going through a difficult time. Some of the tattletale signs. I mean,

William Irving: 39:28

you know, training is always preferred, right? But I think spouses, by and large, know more about the individual than the Yeah, than the squad, right? I've been married for 14 years. I've been with my wife for 14 years. I was with the squad for five so, yeah, she knows me. She knows when something's going on. She knows when I'm going through something. I think as the individual in the field, we need to do a better job communicating with our spouses. You know, what does the schedule look like? What are we going through? What do things look like? So they know what our data. Day looks like they know we're gonna be home late. You know, my wife's got my location. She knows if she can't see my location on my phone, I'm in the jail, right? I got no service in the jail, so I'm gonna be home late. She knows if I'm at the hospital, it's either me hurt or somebody else and social shoot me a text like, Hey, is everything okay? Yep, I'm just with a mental health call or whatever. And so just having an open line of communication with whoever cares, right? Even if it's not your significant other, just friends or family or anything you know, letting them know what does the job look like without telling them the gory details of all the calls? Yeah, so they can tell the differences between that was an easy shift, and that was a rough one. You can see it in the face. You can see it in your your eyes. You can tell when somebody's been through it,

Mark Bridgeman: 40:41

and, you know, I would always encourage to bring your spouse or your significant other or whatever to ride on. May not ride along with you, but with somebody else. Yeah, so that way they can, kind of like, get a taste of what you go through in a shift, you know, the first hand experience. So it's just a matter of exposing them to, you know, things that can help you out as well, right?

William Irving: 41:07

And again, you know, it's big thing that we seem we forget sometimes is, you know, we signed up for this. Our spouses didn't sign up for this, just because I decided to be a cop, just because I decided to join the military, she didn't. She decided to sign up to love me and care for me and be there for me and be by my side. So all the extra stuff that I bring with the baggage of work, it's not her fault. She didn't do it to me, right? She didn't put me in front of that stabbing. She didn't put me in that murder. She is at home and she cares for me, and she does all these things that I can't do because I'm not around, so I can't carry the drama from the day and make it her problem. It's not her fault, right? And that's the losing, not losing sight of what matters most, right? Because when you retire, they're all that's there, right? Yeah, your family's the only ones that are there for you when you leave. You know, we all have great friends and people we talk to all the time. But when you retire, or you leave the agency, or you go somewhere else, yep, we lose contact. We lose touch.

Mark Bridgeman: 42:09

Yeah, in experience, you're going through retirement, you know, I have had a 90 day kind of not rule, but you know something to go by, like, if you're gone from your agency like 90 days. You know, people don't, they forget about, oh, yeah, you know, especially if you're retired, yeah, they're those guys down, are still in a grind, yeah,

William Irving: 42:31

you know, they're still at their head down, plugging away. They're doing what needs to be done. And you get forgotten. And so if you don't have a good relationship with the family and people who care about you, when you walk away, you're going to struggle so much more, and that's where this PTSD and everything starts to really come in, because now you're regretting, you know, I should have spent more time with my family. I should have taken care of myself better, physically, mentally. I should have processed these things a little bit better, because now I'm on my own.

Mark Bridgeman: 42:57

How does it you know that I've seen where the profession becomes their identity, you know, and they, you know, don't want to give that up, because they don't know who they really would be if they didn't have the

William Irving: 43:10

job, right? And one of the things I asked people when they come in for counseling is, who are you? Right? Tell me about yourself. Tell me something about you. I don't want to hear that you're a cop. I don't want to hear that you're a veteran. I want to know who you are. I want to know what you enjoy that doesn't involve guns, that doesn't involve doing something police or military related. Who are you as a dude, as a woman, who are you as an individual? Because that's, that's the hardest part, is just having an identity. Well, that's trying to,

Mark Bridgeman: 43:41

you know, write your own resume today. It's very difficult sometimes, the fact that they have that identity, you know that sometimes they just don't want to give it up. They go home, they still feel like, Hey, I'm in charge, and

William Irving: 43:54

we're not really in charge. You're not in charge. You're not in charge of yourself. You don't make up the laws, you don't make up the rules. You're just a guy who enforces them. Sometimes, yeah, you know, you might do a noise complaint or an ordinance or a civil matter that you're not enforcing. So, you know, I think that people get so caught up in the responsibility, you know, and sometimes it's people who didn't have responsibility growing up, and now they're in that position of authority, and they lose their minds, because now they have a chance to tell people and make people do whatever they want, and they lose sight of, why are we really here to serve the community and help them out? And everybody goes home happy, right? And better for our interaction? Yeah. And one

Mark Bridgeman: 44:34

of the things I noticed that, you know, talked about identities, you know, like, ask somebody their name, I'm Officer so and so. Yeah, it's your title. Yeah, Officer is your title, yeah, which, you know, I get, I understand that, you know, I still have people, depending on where I landed in their career, they'll remember me as a sergeant, a lieutenant or a captain. And I got people that. Still call me those titles to this day, and I always tell them, said, Look, that's the title I held a long time ago. That's not who I am. But, you know, some people, they say, Hey, I'm Captain, or I'm a chief, or, you know, at the end of the day, you know, like you said, you know, when you go home to your family, your dad, you know, you go home, and that's who you who you are to them, right?

William Irving: 45:21

And and, you know, we only have 18 years for the most part, with our kids, you know, yeah, and you have a 30 year career. And so the relationship you have with your kids before they leave the house, it is what it is. Sure, I'm sure there's many people out there that could say that their relationship didn't get better with their parents once they left the house. So if you suck into off duty, if you work non stop, if you can't turn it off, if you can't be a dad, there's no incentive for them to come back when you retire and check in with you. And so you got to remember them, because they're supporting you just as much as you're supporting them. And for me, I always try to remember like the public, the community. They can't help what they're going through, right, right, whatever crisis, whatever problem, they can't control that. The only people who can control their environment is the officers. We can control how we interact with each other. I can control my relationship with my supervisor. So yes, I have a high standard for my supervisors and for my squad mates, but the public can't control they got into a crash. Somebody broke into their house, someone stole their package, whatever the case may be. So you know, remembering that it's not their fault. Whatever they're going through is anybody could be going through it, right? And we get disgruntled because we deal with the same people or the same thing all the time. Well, you're really only there for 2030 minutes of their whole life. You know, their whole life has been this chaos and confusion, and you just happen to be the one that gets called, and you just know that, oh, that's the address. So I'm gonna go, because I built rapport with him, and he doesn't fight me, but I know he fights officer so and so. So I'll go talk to him. I'll suck it up and deal with it. I don't want to eat because I got to go deal with this, right? But you know, again, we lose sight of why are we doing this, just like every profession, right? People want to be teachers, people want to be nurses, people want to be doctors. They want to help people. And then they get into the job, and they realize it's tough. People hate you. They're super critical of everything you do, and they get burnt out. They get tired of it. Yeah. And then

Mark Bridgeman: 47:23

yeah that I've always kind of made this statement too. You know, you come into law enforcement, you know, you think you're going to change the world when the world changes you, no matter what you see and what you do and interacting, you know. And a lot of the stress isn't necessarily in maybe you could speak to this, a lot of the stress that we deal with, you know, other than the traumatic calls and stuff like that, it's not on the street, it's internally, you know, through the agencies, you know, and the administrative challenges that are laid before us, even though we don't want them,

William Irving: 47:59

you know, yeah, and that, like the agency betrayal, we'll use the word betrayal. I might be a little bit of an extreme word, but it's something I talk about with people, because, I mean, I've, I've been through it right? When you get into an officer, an officer shooting, you're on admin, you're around the guys, you talk to people, you do things right? In my world, I broke my ankle on duty. You know, some guy had a knife. We didn't shoot him. We didn't do anything besides handcuff him and get him to jail. Broke my ankle for three months. Nobody talked to me, right? Nobody cares. Nobody checks in, nobody does anything. And then you come back to work, and they don't even make sure you can go upstairs. They just say, All right, here's your car. Go answer the calls. You know they're so quick to have the public's back, and I understand right in this climate, you have to assume the officers guilty until you can prove that they're not, because you don't want to take the officer's side and they did something wrong. But, you know, I got a citizen complaint because a 16 year old boy tried jumping off a bridge, and I pulled him down and I sent him to the hospital. The parents didn't want to go to the hospital. They said, Who cares? I'm not going. We gave him a chance. We gave him a chance. Mom had a warrant. She went to jail. Son went to the hospital. Told the staff he wanted to kill himself. They sent him to Wilmington. Yeah, dad calls the agency and complains because I sent him to the hospital without their permission. Well, your son was 100 feet in the air, yeah, about to jump off a bridge, and his girlfriend had just been playing the violin on her forearm with a knife. She's covered in blood. I have both these juveniles on Athens drive bridge over 440 and you're going to complain because I made your kid get mental health help, yeah, you know. And, but they have to entertain those complaints, they do. And then you have to deal with the stress level. What if they what if they take the other side, you know? Yeah. And then I had this on my record forever when I retired medically, all that stuff was in my my record, my file, all of those complaints for people. People complain because my phone number, area code wasn't 919, what do you want to do about that? You know, but the agency that entertain it, and then they make you feel like, you know, crap because somebody doesn't like what you did. And, you know,

Mark Bridgeman: 50:00

well, yeah, and this is one of the professions that is really scrutinized to a high

William Irving: 50:08

degree, and it should be, it absolutely should be right. We should be better. We should do more, right? Yes, but we are human, and we make mistakes, yes, and we can be perfect every single time. You know, there's 100 different ways to talk to somebody, right? And, yes, I should have been calmer and more patient, but you're complaining about your neighbors walking on the third floor. What do you mean to do? Yeah, right. So people lose sight of that, right? They don't understand that you're one call about your neighbors walking on the third floor. They have kids, and the kids are so loud with their feet. You moved into the middle floor apartment. What do you expect? Right? What do you mean to do? The officers never do anything about this. You're right. I can't do anything about it, right? And and then the agency gets mad at you for the way you talk to somebody. But instead of telling the person, there's nothing we can do. Please stop calling 911, for this.

Mark Bridgeman: 51:03

And that's how they reach out. Some of them, that's how they they, they just need somebody to talk to, right? You know? And yeah, it, while it's an inconvenience, you know, it's okay to take a couple of minutes to talk to absolutely, you know.

William Irving: 51:16

But that's where officers get really tired and burnt out from just the things that we just can't control.

Mark Bridgeman: 51:24

Yep, and sometimes, you know, dealing with the administration in the admin side of the house, at least on the road, you can control your environment to a certain extent. You know, when you go to the station, you know you got all the people they they're making decisions for you before you even know it, right, you know? And sometimes that's frustrating. Why do we have to do that? Just because, yeah,

William Irving: 51:48

and you know, the one thing, and you hate comparing the military and law enforcement, right? Because it's like you get annoyed hearing it, but the one thing that would help law enforcement from a military lens, is in the Marine Corps, for example, every different job supports the infantry, correct? That's our purpose. The infantry is the backbone of the Marine Corps, and I'm a truck driver assigned to an infantry unit. I'm going to drive them wherever they need to go. I'm going to bring them the food, the water, whatever they need. I'm going to help them, because that's my job. That's my purpose. In law enforcement, we need to look at patrol as the infantry. They're the boots on the ground. They're the ones interacting with the people. If you don't train and take care of them, you can make 101 different specialty units, community, family, intervention, kid, whatever, if the patrol guys don't have the resources they need to help the people who dial 911, it don't matter, right? I don't care how many neighborhoods you walk through and take pictures for social media, if your patrol officers, if there's only six patrol officers to 100,000 people, it doesn't matter. It's irrelevant, because that guy is the only one that those people are going to see and interact with, and if he's tired, because he's on his 15th, 20th call of the shift, but they're just trying to survive. You know, we went from 12 people on a squad to six. That's a tremendous difference.

Mark Bridgeman: 53:10

Yeah, absolutely, especially with the lot of the agencies are short on personnel, and they're burning out the current workforce. Right? A lot of

William Irving: 53:21

the young guys, it's their first time away from home. Sure, you know, now they're in a city that doesn't like them all the time, and they got to deal with all this stuff, plus the commands always looking over their shoulder. And you know, why did you do this? Why did you do that? Why did you pull out your taser? Why did you draw down? Why did you you know, and then they come back and they see people living the plush, cushy life, yep. And you know, everybody says, Well, back in my day, or this is how it's always been, or I earned this spot. You know that? Sure. Well, that means you forgot where you came from. Yep, you forgot what it's like at the bottom. And these are the guys that are going to replace you, and if you don't take care of the people that are going to replace you, they're not going to take care of the people that replace them. And it's just a vicious cycle of,

Mark Bridgeman: 54:07

yeah, yeah. You can be negative. It's easy to be negative, right? But, you know, it's intentional to be positive, to find, you know, something good to say about something you know. And that's where it gets somewhat frustrating. So what are some of the intentional decompression techniques that one could use, you know, in their patrol cars, you know, in their offices or whatever.

William Irving: 54:37

So it it's all about your body and regulating your body, right? We're so amped up all the time. We're eating crappy food, we're not sleeping. Our body's dysregulated, you know? And just a simple check in with your body to see where you're at, you're wearing a belt, you're wearing your vest, you're wearing whatever, and your body's sore and it's tired and it's not being fed what it needs. Needs. So, you know, one thing that I like to talk to people about is body scanning. You know where you sit in a chair and you just close your eyes and focus on the different parts of your body, right? You start your feet and you work your way up. You focus on your calves, your quads, your glutes, your core, usually for us guys, we carry all of our tension in our traps, right? So telling people to intentionally relax your shoulders, drop your shoulders, unclench your jaw, take some deep breaths, focus on the present. Slow things down. Slow down your body, slow down your mind, and get back out there, right? Because we don't right. We're just go, go, go, go, go. And then we go home, and then we stuff our face full of whatever, and then we go to bed, and then we drink our energy drinks, or our coffee, or whatever the case may be, and we don't ever just take a second to slow it down. Yeah, you know,

Mark Bridgeman: 55:50

and it's important. And what about breathing? There's a very interesting individual, Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, you know. He has written books about, you know, the you know, the killing mind, the kind mindset, you know. And he does presentations for law enforcement and communities, and he talks about controlled breathing to, yeah, box breathing

William Irving: 56:14

is usually what you'll hear people say, right? And, you know, to kind of help. You could take your finger and put it on your leg, or sometimes they make things for the back of your phone you can trace, but you just kind of trace a square along your quad, right where you just do like a in for four seconds and then over for four seconds out, and then in for four down and over. And you just keep practicing that. And the important thing is doing it in the best environments, practicing just like any sport or anything, practice it when things are the best. So when you're in that high incident stress, you can slow things down, right? And that comes with training and experience. But if you can't regulate yourself in the moment, you're not gonna be able to control the outcome.

Mark Bridgeman: 56:58

Well, that's the thing that you know, being in the environment, law enforcement, and then we have to be able to regulate our adrenaline flow. You gotta, because if you're driving, you know, way too fast, yeah, to get to a call, you know, which I've done, you know, your adrenaline's pumping, you know. And then after the incident is over, you're gonna get that dump, you know, and you're gonna basically crash down to somewhat of a normal level, right, right?

William Irving: 57:31

And like for me, the biggest thing I would tell myself before I get out of the car is, Don't scream, don't scream, don't yell, don't shout, right? Because when you yell and shout and scream and you curse. It looks like you've lost control. Correct? On the body cam, around the public, you go into a Food Lion because somebody stole something, and you start screaming at the guy in front of everybody. You look terrible. You got to slow it down, just because you everybody can yell, right? Sure, I But does that mean I know what I'm saying, what I'm doing? You got the adrenaline rushing. If you can just keep your voice calm and slow, you can get your commands out. They can be heard, they can be understood. It looks better, you know, and it's hard to do, but again, I would always say, if you have to yell, you probably lost the argument, because you you just can't control what you say. Sometimes, when you're just screaming and shouting, and you're so amped up, and you tell someone to get on the effing ground, instead of calmly saying, sir, please stop. Don't reach for the knife, put the gun down. I don't want to fight you. Why are you making me do this? It's better. Looks way better on a on a body camera, versus get on the effing ground, you f and f or f, you f. Or, you know, like, Come on, guys, we got to be better than that, right? They can be however they want to be, but we are supposed to have some level of control. And when, when you scream and you curse, you lose it. I'm not saying you don't always got to talk like that, but when you're around the public, you know, that's our responsibility, and it's hard to do, but that's the most important thing. Don't scream on the radio.

Mark Bridgeman: 59:00

Don't scream Well, you know. And that that's one thing, even the radio traffic, you know, and talking on the radio, knowing the people that you work with, knowing when their voice changes on the radio, saying they're getting ready to get into something, yes, you know, just by listening to the radio, you know. And I always paid attention to the radio, especially when I was, you know, working at patrol that, you know, if I heard the octaves in their voice go up, their vocal cords are restricting because of stress, right? I knew they'd get ready to get it. I'd start heading that way. And I would teach my guys say, Look, you know, if you hear somebody's voice, it's doesn't sound normal. Start heading that way, you know, so this point of the podcast, we honor your service, and you know, we recognize survival. William, you stood on foreign soil in defense of this country, and you been on the streets protecting our communities. Now you stand in defense of the MARC. Lines of those who are still wearing the uniform. This coin represents more than just the thin blue line. It represents resilience. Trauma may shape us, but it doesn't own us. You know, we must make the decompression as a routine as our qualification and our training. You know, must protect our marriages like we protect our partners. We must teach officers the seeking help is operational discipline and not weakness. So this coin is recognition of all that you know you're paying it forward. You know you're helping those that that need the help. So keep fighting for the mission. Thank you for standing behind the thin blue line and helping others and stand again to go either go back to work or get the help that they need. Thank you for being on the podcast, William.

Unknown: 1:00:49

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