Comstock's magazine 0620 - June June 2020 | Page 33

Vacaville Police Chief John
Carli helped bring a wellness
application to his officers.
PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN CARLI
APP HELPS
FIRST
RESPONDERS
In 2018, Vacaville Police Chief John Carli
approached David Black with an idea to
develop a customized wellness app for his
officers. Black, a psychologist and CEO
of Gold River-based technology company
Cordico, says first responders enter their
professions in good psychological health,
but over time, on-the-job stressors can
lead to elevated rates of depression,
post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol
abuse, suicide risk and other problems.
“They’re constantly putting themselves
in harm’s way for the sake of
strangers and the sake of their community.
… They’re taking these horrible calls
one after another,” Black says. “My mom
was a nurse. Nurses are on the front lines
of pain and suffering and trauma. It’s all
these people doing these very thankless
jobs that people take for granted that
takes enormous tolls on their psychological
well-being.”
Black hired Sacramento app developer
Rich Foreman as chief technology
officer to lead the development of the
wellness apps, which have selfassessment
modules and toolkits, including
access to peer-support groups
and therapists vetted for their expertise
with law enforcement. Black says the
app is useful because it is “in hand,
on demand.”
Keith Hopper, a Vacaville police
lieutenant and watch commander, first
used the Cordico app about a year ago,
after a series of troubling events — his
father’s sudden death, his witness of a
suicide in public, a horrific car accident.
Then, on Jan. 14, 2019, he responded to a
call involving a suspect who had allegedly
stabbed his wife and children and set
their house on fire. After the ensuing
manhunt, the suspect was shot and killed
by police after stabbing a police dog and
attempting to stab an officer.
“As police officers, when you’ve been
doing this job long enough, you experience
certain things. … It really doesn’t
affect you immediately,” says Hopper, an
officer for 28 years. “But that night, there
was an effect on me that other people
were seeing. The next day, I went home
and I was talking to my wife, and she
says, ‘You know, you haven’t been the
same for several weeks now.’” He says
speaking to a therapist he connected with
through the app proved invaluable to his
mental health.
Vacaville officer Mike Miller, a 21-
year veteran, was also at the scene of
the January 2019 incident. Only a few
days before, on Jan. 10, he was involved
in the manhunt to locate the person who
ambushed Davis police officer Natalie
Corona, and he was outside the suspect’s
house when the suspect shot and
killed himself. Miller says he recalled
feeling angry and robbed of a sense of
justice — the unsettling feeling remained
with him until he spoke with a therapist
via the app.
“I think the biggest problem with
being a police officer for that extended
period of time is that you have all of this
built-up trauma over the years, and you’d
never have a place to put it, because in
the past there was never a place to put
it,” Miller says. “It’s cumulative trauma
that never has a place to go. Well, for me,
the second call was easier to deal with
because I had a place to put the trauma
from the first call the week before.”
This February, Carli was notified
that the first possible case of
community-spread COVID-19 in the
United States had been treated at a
Vacaville hospital before the patient was
transferred to UC Davis Medical Center,
where she tested positive. Carli says the
pandemic along with related public health
orders — enforceable by law — have
increased pressure on first responders,
as law enforcement agencies figure out
how to adapt. “It’s like trying to build an
aircraft while it’s flying,” he says.
Hopper says he’s encouraging his
patrol teams to see their role as providing
a sense of calm and security to the community
through proactive policing, like
driving through parking lots and neighborhoods,
“waving and smiling at people
just in an attempt to show some sort of
normalcy and encourage people that together
we can and we will make it through
this,” he says. In his daily patrol briefings,
officers meet outside to maintain physical
distancing and do a “check on everybody’s
emotional well-being, and how
are we doing collectively and individually.
And then also how are we doing at home?
How are our families doing?”
– Sena Christian
June 2020 | comstocksmag.com 33