Law Enforcement Family Support: Demonstration Project (L.E.A.F.S.) 1998-1999

The Law Enforcement and Family Support program consists of multi-dimensional stress management services for law enforcement personnel within the state of Tennessee. The Tennessee Sheriffs' Association was awarded a grant to develop, demonstrate, and test innovative stress-reduction and support programs for State or local law enforcement personnel and their families. Over an 18-month period, a framework of stress-related services on a statewide basis for law enforcement personnel and their families was developed. The services cover a range of activities from on-scene defusings to group therapy for families, children, and couples. Its focus is the early recognition and provision of services, which preserves confidentiality while utilizing extensive peer support. The program implemented a model for a stress reduction program at regional law enforcement training academies and produced a text/workbook for educating new recruits and their families on stress related topics. In addition, this program incorporated a monitoring and evaluation component, which consisted of three studies, a Baseline Study, a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (C.I.S.D.) Study, and an Evaluation of C.I.S.D. Peer and Family Teams Study, all of which utilized a design that attempted to test the efficacy of services provided to law enforcement personnel and their families and are described in more detail below.
Baseline Study (Dataset 1) - A baseline survey, the Tennessee Law Enforcement Officer Questionnaire, was developed and distributed to officers in a randomly selected number of departments from each of three regions: West, Middle, and East. The agencies from each region were matched based on demographics such as number of sworn officers. In addition to demographic information, participants were asked to identify their awareness of 19 services that may be offered by their agency as well as the utilization and willingness to use these services. The final section of the questionnaire asked participants to identify post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms that they may have experienced after a critical incident on the job. All law enforcement agencies in Tennessee were organized into groups based on type of agency (City, County, State). Agencies from each group were randomly selected. A summary of the data from Time 1 provides Tennessee with a baseline of the current awareness, utilization, and willingness to use services. In addition, this data provides an understanding of the number of critical incidents that law enforcement officers in Tennessee have experienced as well as the potential to which these incidences have impacted officers' perception of their performance.
Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (C.I.S.D.) Study (Datasets 2 and 3) - The goal of this portion of the project was to determine the effectiveness of critical incidents stress debriefing (CISD) as a means to assist officers in dealing with the negative effects of exposure to a critical incident. To identify the effectiveness of the CISD intervention as well as the support programs in each region, information was collected from officers who participated in a debriefing at three time periods (i.e. prior to CISD, 2-weeks after CISD, 3-months after CISD). The Western region received only Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD), the Eastern region received CISD, and Peer Support, and the Middle region received CISD, Peer Support, and Family Support. Participants were asked to identify what services they and their family may have used (e.g. EAP, Counseling, Family Support Team, Peer Support Team, Training Seminar). Additionally, participants were asked to identify any health problems they experienced since the incident, and lost work time as a result of the incident. A CISD Team member identified the type of critical incident that the officer experienced.
Evaluation of the C.I.S.D. Peer and Family Teams Study (Dataset 4) - The goal of this section of the evaluation process was to identify the impact that the three Teams had on participants. Specifically participants' perception of the usefulness of the Teams and what was gained from their interaction with the Teams was to be measured. Initially, the Team evaluation forms were to be filled out by every individual who participated in a debriefing at the 2-week and 3-month periods. Asking participants to complete Team evaluations at these time periods would allow participants in the Middle region to have exposure to the Family Support and Peer Support Teams, and participants in the Eastern region to have exposure to a Peer Support Team. The procedure was modified so that Team evaluations were conducted at the completion of the project. The evaluation first asked the participant to identify if they had been contacted by
a member of a Team (CISD, Peer, Family).
The Part 1 (Baseline) data public and restricted files contain 5,425 cases and 157 variables. The Part 2 (Critical Incident Stress Debriefing) data public and restricted files contain 329 cases and 189 variables. The Part 3 (Critical Incident Stress Debriefing Matched Cases) data public and restricted files contain 236 cases and 354 variables. The Part 4 (Evaluation of CISD Peer and Family Teams) data public and restricted files contain 81 cases and 24 variables.