Police Shooting a Carefully Staged Suicide But Why?

When I first heard about the shooting death of Lt. Joe Gliniewicz, I really thought nothing of it, except that this is just another example of poor police work, disregarding officer safety to go after three suspicious persons without back up. I am highly critical of police in general, but not for the reasons that the general public is. After almost ten years of patrol, I came to understand proper police procedure. Every time I hear about police involved shootings, I cringe due to the apparent lack of adherence to protocol combined with an intentionally blind court system protecting these would-be offenders. I find the same to be true when officers become victims, as in most officer related shooting deaths, officer safety took a back seat to ego and inappropriate confidence. Give a cop a couple years on the road and he truly feels that he can handle any situation. When Lt. Gliniewicz was killed, I wrote it off as just that; an overconfident, complacent cop got himself killed. The truth was nothing I would have ever expected.

As it turns out, Lt Joe, a thirty year veteran of the Fox Lake, Illinois Police Department, had been stealing and laundering cash from a police explorer program budget. Shocking, I know. Or is it? People love to look at police shooting videos and say that police are monsters. While appears to be true, the thing that the public fails to recognize is that emotional and psychological state of the officer can be and has been predicted by studies on the effects of police work on the individual. Officers in a late phase of their career, like Lt. Joe, have a great potential to become jaded by the system. They may begin to lose faith in the mission of police work and ultimately resent it. Officers with ten or more years on often feel trapped by the golden pension which hovers in their future. Police benefits are ten times better than anything the general public has access to. The average officer retiring from my last agency had over a million dollars in his retirement account if they had a full 25 year career. Now lets examine Lt. Joe’s death. Lt Joe had been stealing and laundering money from the local explorer fund. This began at around 23 or so years into his career. At this point, he was close to retirement. The money involved in the last few years is far too great to walk away from. The fact that he had begun to steal shows that he no longer believed in the values of police work. Add to that the fact that he was washing the money, shows a calculated attempt to stay out of trouble. How can anyone who was sworn to serve and protect become what he had attempted his whole career to deter? It would appear that he had fallen into a common pitfall of long term police work.

Behaviors like this are rare in general, however when one takes into account, the great probability of life long cops becoming bitter and resentful, if you add unfettered access to money, the scenario becomes more understandable. I make some pretty broad generalizations about late career cops, but I have worked with enough old and bitter cops to feel confident in my analysis. When you look at the facts leading up to the shooting, it becomes clear that Glieniewicz knew he couldn’t go to jail. They were on to him and it was just a matter of time. Now what would have happened to his pension if he just fessed up? Well, that is now gone, he is in jail, and his family gets nothing. That would be acceptable to no one. To a cop, losing his pension is the worst punishment they can receive. It invalidates everything they worked for. Obviously that was not an option. Now why not just commit suicide? Why the big show? Back to the pension. Police pensions have clauses that dictate when a family member could receive the death benefits. Suicide would clearly violate the terms of any insurance policy or pension. So that about sums it up. Glieniewicz knew his goose was cooked and in his final act, probably having taken all these factors into consideration and knowing he would be hailed a hero in death, regardless of his crimes in life, staged his own death.

While much of this is speculation, I can find no other plausible explanation. Another side effect of the shooting would be the fueling of this supposed “war on cops” which is taking place. Staging his own execution was a win win for Glieniewicz on multiple fronts. Behaviors like this are tragic and shocking, but I am a firm believer that incidents as such as well as other incidents of police violence can be avoided by examining the primary stressors of police work and learning to teach police how to deal with the detrimental affects that are caused by the job. Only by understanding the causes can we ever hope to find solutions.