Hey Chaplain: The Police Wellness Podcast

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail Moral distress, mismanaged, can lead to dysfunction and what we call moral injury.  Today's guest is Dr. Jaimie Lusk, a Marine Corps Iraq veteran and a psychologist from Portland, Oregon, with expertise on moral injury.  Dr Lusk talks to us today about moral distress and injury and what we can do about it, including how ritual impacts your recovery after tak...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail This is episode 144 and we're going to talk about autopsies.  Don't worry I'm not going to take it too far; you can go ahead and keep eating your breakfast.  But I'm going to share with you the my recent visit to observe an autopsy and also my conversation with the local Chief Death Investigator.  First I made a recording of my thoughts as I d...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail This is a special bonus episode of Hey Chaplain and we're giving you a replay of Episode 319 of the Blue Grit Radio podcast by Eric Tung.  In this episode Eric interviews chaplains Jared Altic and Matt Domyancic about police wellness and various chaplain related topics, including some of the problems helpers have when engaging police culture and what a chapl...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail Imagine that someone with a knife or another deadly weapon is charging at you with intent to kill.  How close do they have to be for you to deploy deadly force?  Did you say 21 feet?  That's what I've always been told.  But what if you take that shot and now you're on trial for murder and the prosecutor has evidence that says the assailant was twen...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail Today we're coming back to our interview with identical twin first responders Stuart and Steve Littlefield.  Stuart is thirty-year cop, on the SWAT team and also a homicide detective; Steve is the thirty year firefighter.  Both worked at the same time in the same city, my home of KCK.  Today we're going to to talk about a couple of dramatic critical inc...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail Identical twins but one's a firefighter and the other one is a cop and both have 30 year careers in the same city.  That's not a bad premise for a tv show… but it's also the background of the two guests we have on today's show.  Returning guest and friend of the show, retired detective Stuart Littlefield, has brought his brother, retired firef...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail START HERE:  Welcome to the sixth year of Hey Chaplain, the police wellness podcast. https://buymeacoffee.com/heychaplain Music is by Wes Hutchinson and by Chris Haugen Hey Chaplain Episode 000.6 Support the show Thanks for Listening!  And, as always, pray for peace in our city. Subscribe/Follow here : Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hey-cha...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail This episode marks our fifth anniversary where we go back and do follow ups and business checks, checking in on some of our past guests to get updates.  This year I built the episode around an interview I recently had with Steve Keogh, the retired Scotland Yard murder detective who was on the show a few years ago. We also hear a behind-the-scenes canine for Broth...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail When a cop tries to go to counseling, the counselor typically gets one chance to make a good impression.  Either this is going to go fairly well and the cop will come back again or it won't go well and the cop will swear he'll never go to another counselor the rest of his life!  A growing number of second-career, cops-turned-counselors are determined to...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail When I was at the line of duty death funeral of Deputy Elijah Ming, I met officers from all across the midwest, but I also ran into uniformed officers from further away, specifically one officer who traveled all the way from New York City.  This was my introduction to Brotherhood for the Fallen, an organization of police officers who send representatives to every...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail Some of the funniest people I know are cops.  Comedy is a coping mechanism and humor, even dark humor, helps us regain control over uncontrollable circumstances.  So today I want to introduce you to a cop turned comedian, Jim Perry.  Jim was an officer near Chicago for several years before a medical retirement and now he's a comedian and comedy club owner in...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail Today we're talking again to Phil Reeves. This is part two of my conversation with Phil.  In part one we talked about his background, in which he has been a working actor in Hollywood for decades while also serving as a police officer.  We talked about the fun stuff last time, here in part two we're going to be talking about the tougher stuff: difficult...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail Our guest today is Phil Reeves; Phil has been an actor in Los Angeles for decades but he has also been a police officer and is now a law enforcement chaplain and a vocal advocate for first responder chaplaincy.  This first part, I'm just going to introduce you to Phil and let him tell you how he went from Hollywood movie sets to law enforcement.  In part two...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail This is part two of my recent conversation with Jake the International Security Specialist Guy and if you haven't already listened to Ep 138 or when Jake was on the show last year in Ep 117, then stop what you're doing and go back and catch those episodes.  In this portion we are talking more about contingency planning with your family.  The specific co...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail Today, back by popular demand, is Jake the International Security Specialist Guy. This time I'm catching  up to him while he was at home in Thailand.  Jake has been doing security work in trouble spots all over the world and was gracious enough to drop in a let me pick his brain on several topics.  In this episode we're going to talk traveling in a coun...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail Police Social Workers are not a new concept but until now there's not been a nationwide standard for how they are trained or how they are employed alongside police officers.  Caroline Ban teaches at Valparaiso University and she has started the first public safety social work certificate program in the nation for people who have their masters in social work...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail This is a special bonus episode of Hey Chaplain recorded on site in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Officer Safety and Wellness Conference.  Chaplain Phil Reeves from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department was my partner in giving a presentation on embedding chaplains.  We recorded that talk and the Q&A t...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail How do you know when to call it quits, especially if you're in the first half of your career?  It's incredibly difficult to give blanket advice because everyone and everyone's circumstances are unique and constantly changing.  For some officers, the best advice is wait a moment for the storm to pass.  For other officers it's time or maybe past...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail This is Part 2 of our interview with Dennis Kleyh, Jr.  Part 1 was about defensive tactics and the differences in mindsets between veterans and the police recruits who have never been punched in the face.  But in putting that episode together, I was left with an equal portion of the interview where Dennis talked about his careers in the Marine Corps and law enfor...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail How would a defensive tactics class in the police academy be different for a combat veteran than for someone without that experience? Today's guest Dennis Kleyh. Sgt Major Kleyh spent 30 years with the Marine Corps and is now a police captain, with over twenty years of teaching defensive tactics in both settings. Today we talk about how the combat mindset is...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail This quarterly update episode looks at the Chaplaincy resolution from the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).  Police Chief Jim Sutterby is our special guest host today. Jim was previously featured on episodes 003, 007, and 041. The IACP site that lists this resolution is https://www.theiacp.org/resolutions Music is by Chris Haugen Hey Chaplain...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail We can't control everything in police culture and we certainly can't control how outsiders talk about police, but we can control our attitudes and our end of the relationships within the department.  Today's guest is Eric Tung, a police commander and the host of the podcast Blue Grit Radio.  Eric wants to talk about the empathy or lack thereof that...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail This is a special bonus episode I'm calling the Pursuit Channel; here you can listen in to the excerpts of Hey Chaplain interviews that get cut for time or strayed off topic but are still worth a listen. In this episode I also talk about where I'll be IRL this year. Music is by Chris Haugen Hey Chaplain Bonus Episode 48 Tags : Police, Addiction, Chaplai...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail What happens when the cop who was taking down bad guys and drug addicts, becomes a drug addict…  for years… ruining everything and costing everything?  Today we're talking to Brock Bevell, a medically retired cop who lost everything to opioid addiction.  We're going to talk about the injuries, the pain, the addiction, the cost, and Brock's recovery...

Text the Show or Leave a Voicemail Today we return to police officer JD Pettey to talk about what happens when an officer starts talking during someone else's tragedy and how badly that can go.  JD's family has had a number of serious tragedies and he was gracious enough to share those difficult memories with us because each story is an example of cops saying the wrong thing at the wrong...