Three officers, and the gap in the data

Three retired police officers spoke to the BBC this week about the trauma they carried through their careers, and what it cost them. Complex PTSD. Panic attacks. Years of quietly not being right, before anyone, including themselves, named it.

The detail worth sitting with: Oscar Kilo, the National Police Wellbeing Service, estimates officers can face between 400 and 600 traumatic incidents across a career, against three or four for the average civilian. The Police Federation says more than 100 officers and staff have died by suicide since 2022, and that 47 of the 70 officer suicides it has recorded involved someone who was under investigation at the time. That is an association, not a cause; suicide is never the result of one thing.

Chief constables have now committed to mandatory recording of police officer suicides. Until this point, there has been no consistent national picture. No single source of truth. That absence does not mean the problem was smaller. It means no one could see its shape.

The three officers spoke about policing specifically. What they described, the slow accumulation, the silence, the gap in support, is not unique to that service. Anyone who works on the front line across the emergency services will recognise the same pattern, even where the national data to prove it does not yet exist.

This is the gap Silence Between Sirens exists to close, across all of them. Community, so no one carries this alone. Care, so the right support is there when it is needed. Change, so services take responsibility for what the job costs.

We are early stage. Building connections across services, having conversations that are not usually happening, linking people to support that already exists. There is more to build, and we are honest about that.

The BBC article is worth reading in full. Every figure we use is set out on our sources page.