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The officer’s hidden cost, and why it can be measured and trained.
We ask Police officers to run toward what the rest of us run from, to absorb the violence, the dying, and the aftermath, and then to do it again the next shift and the next and the next. For a long time we assumed they simply could. The evidence now says otherwise.
The scale, in today’s numbers
Police Officers are now more likely to die by their own hand than in the line of duty. In 2017 there were 140 police suicides against 129 line-of-duty deaths (Ruderman Family Foundation, 2018). The most complete recent dataset counts 1,287 law-enforcement and corrections suicides from 2016 through 2022, peaking at 234 in a single year; among those lost, more than a quarter carried diagnosed PTSD and only 23 percent had ever sought help (CNA and First H.E.L.P., 2024). A careful review of more than 272,000 officers puts PTSD near 14 percent and depression near 15 percent, roughly double the general population (Syed et al., 2020).
The cost to the department, not only the officer
The stress that goes unmeasured reappears as disability, turnover, errors, accidents and liability. Decades ago this exact crisis drove the Los Angeles Police Department toward a wave of stress-disability pensions large enough to worry the city’s budget. The bill for doing nothing is already being paid, quietly, in every one of those columns.
The root under the symptom
Behind these numbers is one common thread, and naming it correctly is the whole point. When the U.S. government ran its landmark survey of police stress, more than 2,200 officers across 19 departments, it found that anxiety was correlated with more problems than any other single factor measured: more behavioral, more medical, and more psychological problems than anything else in the study (Hurrell, Pate, and Kliesmet, for NIOSH, 1984). A symptom you can only manage is a very different thing from a root you can change. Anxiety has a measurable signature in the brain’s own electrical activity, and that signature can be trained. By training to increase EEG Alpha activity above the pre-training eyes- closed baseline, anxiety can be reliably reduced. This is science, Brain Science.
A measured, trainable answer
For over fifty years my work has asked one question: can a person learn to change the electrical activity of their own brain, and does it help? In how many different ways does it help? The answer, documented and published, is YES!
- In the journal Science in 1978, Dr. Joe Kamiya and I showed that anxiety is inversely related to the brain’s Alpha activity, and that teaching high anxiety people to raise their Alpha lowers both momentary State Anxiety and the deeper, Trait Anxiety that behaves like a fixed part of the personality.
- Peniston and Kulkosky reported an 80 percent recovery rate in chronic alcoholics with this kind of training, showed it changed the brain’s own beta-endorphin chemistry, and then reported success in treating post-traumatic stress in Vietnam veterans.
- In 1985 I trained two twelve-man teams of U.S. Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. In direct proportion to the Alpha they gained, their depression, paranoia, and rigidity of thinking fell and their intuition, self-regard, and self-actualizing values rose, several of these results came in at high statistical significance. Two-thirds of these elite soldiers chose extra sessions on their own free time.
- The nine detailed Case Histories on this site show the same thing in police officers: the detective, the Deputy Chief, the Captain, the motorcycle officer. And in 1992, after Police Chief Joseph McNamara of San Jose, California did the seven-day Biocybernaut Alpha training himself, he said simply, “Every police officer in the country should do this training.”
With San Jose, California’s Police Chief McNamara’s enthusiastic support, this research became the subject of a formal grant application to the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, to run a Biocybernaut Alpha training program as a controlled study of 200 Police officers. The Alpha training does not ask a suffering person to be stronger. It measures the root cause and trains it away. None of this is a promise of cure or a piece of medical advice; it is a case for measuring the thing that is actually driving the harm, and training it down by training the brain’s Alpha activity up.
What Chief McNamara actually did, and said
He did not simply lend his name. In 1992, while still Chief of Police in San Jose, Dr. Joseph D. McNamara took the seven-day Alpha training himself. At the end of his seventh day he said: “Every Police officer in the country should do this program, because they are so wrapped up, and this will help them unwind.”
He then referred me into the San Jose Police Department, wrote a letter of support for the grant, and served as a paid consultant on the project itself, bringing thirty years of policing to the design.
I presented the program to the San Jose command staff. The session was scheduled for one hour and the questions kept it going for nearly two. After I left, Deputy Chief Walt Adkins asked for a show of hands of those who wanted the training. He told me every hand in the room was raised.
If you carry this state or condition, or you command those who do
What it took, and what stopped it
The NIJ Grant application carried four letters of support: Chief Louis A. Cobarruviaz of the San Jose Police Department; Dr. Joseph D. McNamara of the Hoover Institution; Santi J. Rogers, Executive Director of Agnews Developmental Center where the Alpha training was proposed to occur; and John Vasconcellos, Chair of the Committee on the Budget of the California Legislative Assembly. Virginia Baldau of NIJ had urged me to “move Heaven and earth” to get the department's letter in before the deadline. It arrived four days before we filed.
The grant was never intended to cover the officers' salaries during their week of Alpha training. The San Jose Police Department would carry that, and it is worth pausing on what that means. A hundred officers off duty for seven days is a substantial cost to a department, and there was never even a hint of a question about whether San Jose would pay it. Recall that after I had made the presentation on the grant to the command staff of the SJPD and I had left, Deputy Chief Walt Adkins asked for a show of hands of those who wanted the Biocybernaut Alpha training. He told me every hand in the room was raised.
Read the enthusiastic letter from the new Chief and the show of hands together and the conclusion is plain: the Chief and his command staff judged this training valuable enough that the cost of the 100 officers’ salaries was simply not in dispute. That is not a story about an obstacle. It is the clearest measure available of how seriously the people who run a police department took what this could do for their officers.
If you lead a police department, a union, or a city risk program, the numbers above are your people, and the cost above is already on your books. And if you are the person in that role yourself, quietly carrying more than you can say to anyone, this page is for you most of all.
Please talk with us. My assistants will hear you out properly, with no pressure and no performance review, and they will tell you honestly what they think, including if they think this Alpha training program is not the right fit. Where a conversation goes further, it can sometimes come as far as me directly. I will not pretend that is automatic, because it is not, but people do ask, and it is a fair thing to ask for.
You can reach us at biocybernaut.com/contact-us, or call 855-798-3814. That line reaches Alexis directly, including after hours, and can forward to Kate O’Connor.
And if you are in immediate danger right now, please reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) or your local emergency number first. That help exists this minute; we do not replace it.
References
Hurrell, J.J., Pate, A., & Kliesmet, R. Stress Among Police Officers. U.S. DHHS / CDC (NIOSH Technical Report 84-108), 1984.
CNA & First H.E.L.P. Suicide Data for Public Safety Officers, 2024.
Ruderman Family Foundation, 2018 (2017 data).
Syed, S. et al. PTSD and depression among police. Occupational & Environmental Medicine, 2020.
McCafferty, F.L. et al. PTSD in the Police Officer (1990); Stress and Suicide in Police Officers (1992). Southern Medical Journal.
Hardt, J.V. & Kamiya, J. Science, 201, 79-81, 1978. Peniston & Kulkosky, 1989/1993.