As wellness programming has become a must-have for law enforcement agencies, despite the goal being the same, the work is often done in silos. While some chiefs and agencies lead the way, it seems others are being left behind.
Law enforcement agencies have worked across jurisdictions on drug and violent crimes task forces for decades. The shockwaves of an officer death by suicide will ripple through their neighboring agencies. If they’re working together to combat crime, why can’t they also work together to support officers? Why would the police leader, who is passionate about wellness, allow their neighboring jurisdiction to slip through the cracks?
A regional approach to peer support and officer wellness helps every agency involved—especially the agencies that are leading the way.
Inequities in Access to Wellness Support
As the landscape of law enforcement wellness evolves, the question has shifted away from “Are wellness programs necessary?” In its National Consortium on Preventing Law Enforcement Suicide Final Report, the Consortium stated thatAll agencies can endeavor to create an overall culture that prioritizes and supports the mental health and wellness of their personnel,” and that “agencies and their leadership should continuously emphasize that mental health is as important as physical health. Officers should understand that while stress may be a normal part of the job, suffering harmful effects from repeated exposure to traumatic stressors is not.”.”1.
So, the question instead shifts from away from whether these programs are necessary to “What is preventing agencies from implementing mental health and wellness programming?”
There is plenty of blame to go around, including toward law enforcement leaders. Within the police training community, there is growing concern that resources are often concentrated at the top while the needs of first-line personnel remain unmet, contributing to morale challenges across agencies. However, regional demographics can have as much of an impact on a law enforcement agency’s resources to fund or implement wellness programming as the will of a single police chief.
Funding for state and local law enforcement varies greatly—from $539 (New York) and $636 (California) per capita in highly populated, coastal states to $232 (Kentucky) and $251 (Indiana) per capita in more rural states.2 These funding differences carry a real impact. In its 2023 report Implementing Peer Support Services in Small and Rural Law Enforcement Agencies, the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the United States Department of Justice Community Oriented Policing Services stated, “Rural police departments often have limited personnel and resources, inadequate emergency and community services, and limited technological access and equipment. Socioeconomic, geographic, and workforce factors are significant barriers to rural communities’ health care access.”3
Not only does funding vary significantly, but so does access to mental health service providers. According to a 2024 report from the Health Resources & Services Administration, the majority of Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas are located in rural and frontier regions—often the same areas where police agencies operate with the lowest per capita funding.4 In other words, if an agency is underfunded, its local mental health system is likely sparse, too.
The shortage of mental health providers only exacerbates the challenges of accessing providers deemed culturally competent, or clinicians with an understanding of law enforcement culture, including the stigma associated with seeking help and the unique trauma officers experience, such as losing colleagues in the line of duty, taking a life in an officer-involved shooting, or witnessing gruesome crime scenes.
To paint every law enforcement agency’s commitment to officer wellness as strictly a matter of leadership—without acknowledging these demographic challenges—is unhelpful.
Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Approaches
Industry leaders beat the drum that wellness must come from the top down. This includes not only full implementation of officer wellness programming but ideally integrates top-tier training, mental health care, physical and nutritional wellness programming, financial wellness, and more.
The most vital aspect of this top-down approach is that the chief or agency head leads the way. They are the first to sign up for a mental health check. They are working out in the department’s weight room. They are holding meetings where all the right people have a seat at the table and where challenging the norm is expected. They are giving impassioned speeches to the legislative bodies who oversee their budgets for more—more funding, more training, more mental health support, and more wellness initiatives. To lead, they are in excellent health, immune to groupthink, and able to put their ego aside. Budgetary or political challenges won’t get in the way of ensuring that their officers have the best training money can buy.
It’s a compelling vision. But as a universal standard – one applied to all law enforcement agencies in the United States – it’s simply not realistic. Of the 12,000-plus law enforcement agencies in the United States, 65 percent serve populations under 10,000.5 Even if those leaders personally embody all aspects of a top-down approach, their communities still face challenges to funding and access to appropriate services.
And what if the leaders don’t embody that model? What if they haven’t personally overcome the stigma of seeking treatment for the mental scars left from a career in law enforcement? What about the officers who work for them?
A top-down-only focus is unrealistic for both well-meaning and uninformed agency leaders. It widens the gap for access to services for agencies already facing socioeconomic or geographical barriers.
But there’s another way, one that’s less attractive to the industry since there’s less money to be made: the bottom-up approach. The budget for this approach is free or minimal, and it can start with one officer, a single peer. Built on a foundation of education and care, its rallying cry is simple: You are not alone.
Regional Approaches
A regional approach is like building a net. There is still room for star agencies and leaders to shine, but access to wellness and peer support no longer depends solely on one exemplary agency or leader. A true leader builds systems that continue supporting their people long after their tenure ends.
New sheriffs are elected. New mayors are elected. New commissioners are elected. Public attitudes toward law enforcement shift.
A leader passionate about wellness should guarantee that their successor will be. If not to their successor, leaders should direct some of that passion toward creating a network of well-informed, well-resourced peers across the region. Wellness should not hinge on individuals. It should be shared across agencies and regions. No one should fear that support will vanish when one champion retires.
The wellness stars—formal and informal—still shine in a regional approach. Their impact is multiplied. Their legacy is built into a network that lasts long beyond their last day on the job.
Starting a Regional Approach to Peer Support
Whether acting as the model chief supporting his people in every way, or the officer watching colleagues sink further into alcohol misuse after a suicide, the first place to start is by reaching out to surrounding agencies. The goal is to leave no agency behind.
Form the Coalition
Wherever the process stands—from brainstorming to full implementation—get on the phone and start contacting surrounding agencies. Maybe these are all the agencies in the same county. Maybe they include sheriff’s offices in neighboring counties. Maybe include 911 dispatch centers, fire departments, or emergency medical services. They all need support and connection, too.
An official role is not necessary to start building a list of contacts at other agencies who want to do the same work. Making these connections and allowing those new connections to link with each other instead of through one single person, begins breaking down silos and prevents gatekeeping, intentional or not. Remember: wellness isn’t about single stars; it’s about constellations.
Put People in Charge
Even if wellness is not anyone’s full-time role, each agency should designate a point person to the regional network. Agencies with supportive leadership should allow their designated contacts time to help build the network and create shared training opportunities. Even the smallest agencies, working together, can lift up their neighbors.
Connect with Clinicians
Accessing mental health professionals can be difficult, especially in rural areas.
In law enforcement wellness, the term “culturally competent” has evolved to describe clinicians who truly understand public safety trauma, stigma, and culture. But the reality is more complicated. Some organizations offer brief first responder clinician certifications. Others simply claim cultural competence based on past experience as a former responder, a family member, or having treated a few officers. In many regions, no such clinicians exist at all, meaning agencies may need to grow their own through relationships, exposure, and shared learning.
Sherri Martin, the national director of wellness services for the National Fraternal Order of Police, recognizes the challenge in finding appropriate care for law enforcement personnel, “Competent help is out there, but it may take some effort to find it. Get out in your community. Learn about the clinicians that are located there. You never know who might want to learn. And it can be just as important to learn which providers to steer personnel away from.”6
As connections are built with surrounding agencies, connections with nearby clinicians should be as well. Even if a clinician isn’t fully culturally competent yet, their willingness to learn— and to train with the regional network—is the place to start.
Just remain clear: they are referral partners. This is not their show.
Gatekeeping from clinicians, insisting all matters be directed through them, can be just as damaging as gatekeeping with agencies and individuals. Well-being is relational, not clinical.
Train Together
Training can be expensive, but regional collaboration reduces the burden.
The International Critical Incident Stress Foundation’s two primary peer support courses, Assisting Individuals in Crisis and Group Crisis Intervention, remain widely used.
Costs vary widely depending on instructor and format, but regional cost-sharing can significantly reduce the per-student burden.
A model agency might consider hosting a training and inviting smaller agencies to participate, helping build a sustainable foundation for the region.
A newer option, Power in Peers, created by the National Fraternal Order of Police, trains officers, support staff and clinicians in peer support grounded in positive psychology. It is free due to DOJ COPS Office grant funding and offers train-the-trainer pathways, opening the gates to sustainable, long-term peer support training across the United States.
“With class sizes of 25, and a maximum of four attendees per agency, officers walk in on day one with only the folks from their agency, but they walk out on day five with a class full of connections for consulting and collaborating, whether it be across a county or across a state,” Martin shared of the built-in network the program is creating.7
It is just as important to invite clinicians who are willing to support law enforcement. They can learn alongside the network.
Sustain the Network
Create infrastructure that sustains the network over time. A memorandum of understanding can include participating agencies; a mission statement; a scope of collaboration (cross-agency support, joint training, information sharing, clinician coordination, and a cohesive regional model); a confidentiality agreement; roles and responsibilities; rotating leadership; meeting and communication expectations; resource sharing; and voluntary participation.
Meetings should occur at least quarterly or more frequently when training opportunities arise.
Consider collaborating with a local nonprofit or community foundation to create a fund outside the local government budget. These funds make it easier to accept donations from businesses or organizations that want to support officer wellness across the region.
Lisa Rollings, the executive director of the Central Indiana Police Foundation, explains why local businesses should want to support the well-being of local law enforcement: “Whether they see it or not, businesses and law enforcement are directly entwined. Businesses have an interest in supporting healthy officers and healthy departments.”8 Rollings emphasized that community foundations who are interested in supporting local law enforcement wellness efforts in this way don’t need to start from scratch. She encouraged groups to seek out others already doing this work and learn from their experience rather than building in isolation.
No single agency needs an expert in every area. By fostering mutual support and encouraging agencies to work together rather than in silos, passionate wellness advocates can learn from one another, and just as importantly, they know exactly whom to call when they have a question or want to learn more.
In Practice
The South Dakota Highway Patrol’s wellness coordinator, Nikki Farrar, has been working to connect not only their 13 Patrol Squad Areas to peer support and mental health resources but also neighboring local and state agencies, including the conservation officers with the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish, and Parks.
With a 400-mile, four-and-a-half-hour drive between its two most populated cities—Sioux Falls and Rapid City—Farrar knows that the well-being of the officers they answer calls alongside matters just as much as the well-being of the troopers in her own agency.
She and a small group of representatives from some of the state’s larger law enforcement agencies meet monthly to share training resources and ensure that when a critical incident occurs, anyone involved, regardless of agency, has a seat at the table. Somewhere between the top-down and bottom-up approaches to officer wellness, Farrar makes an important point: “Sergeants have the most influence on our boots-on-the-ground troopers. And if they’re not supportive of that well-being message, then it’s not filtering down.”9
Seeing sergeants as force multipliers of wellness, she dedicates significant energy to understanding what they need—both in supporting their teams and in maintaining their own well-being. “I remind people at every meeting: check in on your people. Peer support is there as a resource, but it’s really your job as a supervisor to know if something is off with the people you see every day,” Farrar said.10
A Rising Tide Lifts All Shifts
Law enforcement wellness done in silos is stifled. Gatekeeping expertise and resources for peer support hurts more than it helps.
The heavy lifting in law enforcement wellness isn’t done on an individual or single agency basis because wellness is a matter of culture, and law enforcement culture doesn’t stop at jurisdictional borders. By approaching peer support and wellness on a regional level, police leaders can build a net that not only supports smaller and underfunded agencies but also creates networks that sustain wellness far beyond any one leader’s tenure.
The impact of trauma and the stigma surrounding mental health support didn’t start with a single officer or agency. Reversing the shift won’t either.
This is something police are meant to do together. d
Notes:
1National Consortium on Preventing Law Enforcement Suicide, Final Report, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, 2020).
2U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances, 1977–2020 (Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, 2021).
3International Association of Chiefs of Police, Implementing Peer Support Services in Small and Rural Law Enforcement Agencies (Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2023).
4Heath Resources and Service Administration, “Health Workforce Data, Tools, and Dashboards.”
5Bureau of Justice Statistics, Local Police Departments, 2020.
6Sherri Martin (Director of Wellness Services, National Fraternal Order of Police), email interview with author, January 21, 2026.
7Martin, email interview with author, January 21, 2026.
8Lisa Rollings (Executive Director, Central Indiana Police Foundation), interview with author, December 5, 2025.
9Nikki Farrar (Officer Wellness Coordinator, South Dakota Highway Patrol), interview with author, November 20, 2025.
10Farrar, interview with author, November 20, 2025.
Please cite as
Katie Carlson, “A Rising Tide Lifts All Shifts: Mapping Out a Regional Approach to Officer Wellness and Peer Support,” Police Chief Online, May 27, 2026.
