29-year Police Vet Exposes 'Massive Lie' About Capitol Cop Suicides
We’ll 'never know' why the officers took their lives
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A 29-year law enforcement veteran has weighed in on the deaths of four police officers who were on duty during the Capitol riot.
Officers Gunther Hashida and Officer Kyle DeFreytag, who were at the Capitol on January 6, both died in July.
The cops were found dead just days apart, Hashida was found on July 29, and DeFreytag was found on July 10.
Howard Liebengood and Jeffrey Smith, who were also at the Capitol that day, both committed suicide earlier this year.
“We are unable to determine if the officers’ deaths are linked to January 6 events,” department spokeswoman Kristen Metzger said.
Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn's testimony was cited by establishment media outlets, which seemingly pushed their narrative that the event was so traumatizing, some cops couldn't deal with the effects that came later.
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“More than six months later, Jan. 6 still isn’t over for me,” Dunn said, according to CNN.
“I know so many other officers continue to hurt, both physically and emotionally.”
Dunn said he’d received counseling “for the persistent emotional trauma of that day."
But Sgt. Betsy Brantner Smith wants to know where these media outlets were when the police were vilified by the left and Democrats earlier this year.
Smith argued we’ll “never know” why the officers took their lives.
What is strange is that Howard Liebengood and Jeffrey Smith never left behind any explanation blaming their mental health on the events on Janury 6.
Smith did note that suicide is tragically common among law enforcement.
“We don’t know why these officers committed suicide. Police officers see horrible things every day from the minute they get out of the police academy," she said.
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"We don’t know why any police officer kills themselves unless they leave a detailed accounting of why they killed themselves and most do not,” she told the Daily Mail.
“To my knowledge, none of [these four] officers left any kind of detailed accounting of why. That’s why it’s important that we don’t assume and we don’t politicize. We will never know.”
Smith said police are turned off by the fact that Democrats are suddenly concerned about police suicide.
“That’s what law enforcement around the country is finding so distasteful about this … that one riot in one area, and suddenly police suicide is a big deal,” she said.
“No one is talking about all the other cops who are killing themselves. The politicization of this topic is abhorrent.”
“Police officers in the U.S. commit suicide about twice as often or sometimes a little more as we are killed by felonious assault,” Smith said. “In other words, we kill ourselves at least twice as often as the bad guys kill us.
“It’s been a problem for the last 20 years; it’s just now getting some additional attention.”
It’s a particular problem now that police officers have become targets of cultural invective.
WBBM-TV found that 367 officers retired in the first six months of the year, and some without a pension.
In all of 2018, there were 339 retirements.
In 2020, there were 560.
This year has already had 367 through June.
“People see us as the enemy, and we’re not. All we’re trying to do is help the people of the community, the city of Chicago,” one recently retired officer told WBBM.
“We get spit on. We get things thrown at us, you know, you, they’re fighting with us. People are protesting, calling us names and not just the protestors,” the retired officer added.
“But you’ve got the people who are supposed to have our back in government.”
“If someone had our back, we could do our jobs. But again, threatened with lawsuits, indictments, officers getting fired, that is actually, again, stifling us.”
