A Family Member’s Perspective on Service, Stress, and Health in Law Enforcement

Growing up in a law enforcement family in the 1980s was a particular blessing. My father ran operations that brought turncoat spies, drug lords, arms dealers, rogue financiers, and mafiosi to justice. Though he traded his undercover passport and G-ride Austin Healey for a three-piece suit and a desk when my older sister was born, I later learned that he was still navigating dangerous people, places, and situations when we were teenagers. He did all this while making it home for dinner through Northern Virginia traffic, refereeing soccer, and driving the family to Ocean City on summer weekends. By the time he led the NYPD in the late 1990s, I had both a law school student’s understanding of criminal justice and a front-row seat to the 24/7/365 effort it takes to protect and serve “the Greatest City in the World.” My mom, now leading the Howard & Carol Safir Foundation, was his soulmate for his 60 years promoting safety and delivering justice.

When my sister joined the FBI in the years before 9/11, and my cousin the DEA at the start of the opioid epidemic, I saw another generation take on demanding, consequential work. As the country reimagined how it countered terrorism, peddled poison, and associated crimes, I watched them raise kids and maintain meaningful relationships through shifting schedules, unpredictable assignments, and the full spectrum of humanity and organizational issues that made their careers both rewarding and challenging.

After 25 years working with thousands of people who serve in police departments and sheriff’s offices throughout the country, and co-founding SWORN to counter stress and improve their lives,  I want to share and provoke some thoughts on health and well-being from the perspective of a son, brother, cousin, and colleague.

I will admit up front that I am 100% biased toward serving and protecting those who serve, love every quirk and cranny of my family, and, despite spending an unreasonable amount of time consuming, writing, and speaking words, try to live in the real world of sense, sensibilities, and constraints.

Identity & Work/Life Balance
Is your job who you are?

What lawyers, plumbers, doctors, ironworkers, coders, and accountants do for a living shapes them and their relationships. Is law enforcement different?

Through my family, colleagues, and focus group participants who have worked distinct varieties of patrol, caseloads, dispatch, crime analysis, and protective details, I’ve seen patterns in how the mission can imprint itself on a person. Law enforcement attracts people with passion beyond their own egos. They are people drawn to serve, to stand for something, to do the right thing even when no one is looking. It’s meaningful, type-A work with daily wins, losses, and cumulative impacts on the body, mind, and spirit. 

While law enforcement can be tragically isolating for some who serve, unusually high rates of divorce, anxiety, depression, and suicide plague the profession. People in law enforcement can also maintain unusually deep and decades-long relationships. I’ve seen couples, families, and friendships survive moves, promotions, transfers, career shifts, life-altering illnesses and injuries, losses of children, and every kind of stress, trial, triumph, and tragedy you can imagine. And while there certainly are cultures where the very people who need each other “eat their own”,  I’ve been particularly blessed to witness and contribute to ones where people who have been through it help others through it. 

Whatever your profession, imagine a video of yourself at the start of your career and another at the end. Your posture? Voice? Weight? Expression? What changed simply because time passed—and what changed because of how you spent that time?

Now imagine your bloodwork and a full physical taken at those same two points. Your arteries, hormones, joints, bones, and teeth. Do they reflect your chronological age or the workload, stress load, and approach you brought to your career? 

And your relationships: your spouse, kids, parents, and close friends. How were they affected by what you did for a living? Were you able to be present with them? Did they thrive alongside you, or did the job’s demands pull something away from them as well?

Now extend that reflection over 5, 10, 20, or 40 years of meeting the public at their best and their worst across every neighborhood, personality, and problem. In some moments, you can help. Others you can’t. Many involve danger or strain. Nearly all trigger some level of cortisol. Add the complexities of staffing, schedules, oversight, benefits, commendations, scrutiny, and internal frictions, and you have a better sense of what can impact a modern law enforcement career.

Does that shape you differently than if you worked in sales, accounting, or finance? While the answer certainly varies person to person,  the direction is unmistakable: law enforcement influences identity in ways other professions do not. Less in ways portrayed on screens, and more in the subtle ways people carry themselves, their experiences, and their relationships.

At SWORN, we give people who serve the tools to track and understand what’s impacting them, and connect them with resources to turn that awareness into habits that improve and lengthen their lives.

Operational & Organizational Stressors
Operational stressors like danger, trauma, conflict, and neglect matter deeply. But for many, it’s the organizational stressors that take the larger toll: the bureaucracy, policies, leadership styles, paperwork, staffing, and schedules. These are the forces that most often drive burnout, sleep problems, injury, turnover, and long-term cardiovascular risks.

Layer onto that a culture where the public broadly supports police while publicly highlighting mistrust and misconduct, and the gap between Hollywood policing and real policing, and the stress can outpace even the strongest sense of calling.

Understanding these stressors and how they impact you is essential, not just to avoid or mitigate harm, but to grow through it. While old stigmas once kept people from seeking help, leadership and culture in many agencies have moved light-years beyond “suck it up, buttercup.” Health and well-being are now mission-critical to performance, retention, organizational development, and risk management.

I watched my father navigate six presidential administrations in his 26-year federal career, working with appointees he respected deeply and others whose main qualification was campaign loyalty. He went in early, stayed late, took risks, and poured his heart into a system where people at the same GS level earned the same paycheck regardless of their engagement or productivity. As an outsider leading FDNY and then NYPD, I saw him work through bureaucratic puzzle palaces to discover, promote, and support the talent that drove extraordinary service and transformative results. 

I’m in awe of how he managed it all, not just the stress but the breadth of experiences and relationships. Long after he retired, he stayed close to colleagues, stayed passionate for the mission, and found that rare intersection where two things were true at once: he was still a law enforcer at heart who was focused, intense, driven, and able to “turn his collar around” and help anyone in his orbit navigate life. I see this same earned compassion in my sister, my cousin, and many others who’ve protected and served, including my colleagues at SWORN. It’s an awareness that can show up with a little extra vigilance, but it is also the kind of awareness society needs and must value.

SWORN
SWORN delivers personalized health intelligence that meets people where they are, helping them sleep, eat, move, and thrive in ways designed to lengthen and improve the quality of their lives.

What SWORN does and delivers does not replace support, care, and resources from family members, friends, peers, and organizations,  services from professional health providers, or the 24/7/365 capabilities of wearable biometrics and health trackers. Rather, SWORN leverages real-time data and evidence-based approaches to take each of these vital assets to the next levels of relevance, engagement, and practical use. 

 Just as I’m blessed to come from a law enforcement family, I’m also blessed that the team at SWORN continues to innovate with all the passion, humility, creativity, skills, and focus to deliver a system that benefits those who serve.