Editor's note: Suicidal thoughts and behaviors can be reduced with the proper mental health support and treatment. If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. Reach Cop2Cop at 1-866-267-2267 (1-866-COP2COP).
Nearly 20 years later, the horrific scene is still seared in the memory of the retired East Orange police officer.
A woman had called 911 after discovering her husband had shot himself inside their home. As he had countless times before, Anthony Woodson responded to tragedy — only this time, it nearly broke him.
The dead man was his best friend, Woodson realized as he came onto the porch that day in 2007. A fellow police officer. Upstairs in a pool of blood, his gun still in his hand.
"I was so used to going from crime scene to crime scene, seeing this suicide, this homicide," said Woodson, a former deputy police chief who also served in Vietnam. "But when you see someone you love and care for, it's different."
"Everything changed," Woodson remembered.
In his time of darkness, Woodson turned to Cop2Cop, a call line that pairs police officers in crisis with retired cops who have lived their experiences.
For more than 25 years, the program has helped officers cope with their on-the-job traumas, in a high-stress, high-impact profession that often experiences humanity at its most desperate.
And now, Cop2Cop is asking for help of its own.
Amid a national epidemic of police suicides, Cop2Cop is seeking to expand its services, despite funding that has remained flat since its inception in 2000. A bill pending before the state Legislature would more than double its funding — to $900,000, from the $400,000 that the service run through Rutgers University Behavioral Health Care now receives.
The money would allow the 24/7 call center to increase the number of retired officers it has at a given time handling the phone calls, emails and online chats that come in.
It would also permit the program to expand other mental-health initiatives it offers. Those include training sessions at New Jersey's police academies and debriefings it conducts at local departments after traumatic incidents like a police-involved shooting or the violent death of a child.
"They have gotten people down off the proverbial ledge," said state Sen. Linda Greenstein, D-Middlesex, the lead sponsor of funding increase in the Senate. "People at the end of their rope, who didn't feel they could go on."
The extra money wasn't included in the state budget signed by Gov. Mikie Sherrill in June, and the fate of Greenstein's bill and a companion proposal in the Assembly remain uncertain. But Greenstein said she is hopeful it will ultimately advance, given the urgency of the need.
"It's a very small amount to make sure that our law enforcement officers are able to do the important jobs that they do," Greenstein said.
Across the nation, more than 715 police officers have taken their own lives since 2021, including at least 26 in New Jersey, according to Blue H.E.L.P, a nonprofit that tracks the figures. And observers say those numbers are likely severely underreported, given the stigma that suicide still carries.
Yet mental health is a topic that police departments have traditionally been reluctant to address head on, amid a tough-it-out culture and a fear by officers that if they admit their struggles, they could be deemed unfit for duty and lose their livelihood.
That silence contributes to a host of other problems: alcohol abuse, domestic violence and absenteeism from the job, said Joe Orgo, a retired Newark police officer who has worked at Cop2Cop for 25 years.
The program was established to try to break that cycle, by connecting officers with peers who have walked in their shoes and can refer them to counselors and treatment programs that are law-enforcement friendly. The call center, based in a Rutgers office building in Piscataway, also runs other help hotlines, including for veterans, firefighters and EMTs.
Cop2Cop is strictly confidential, and callers don't have to give their names or even their departments. The calls aren't recorded. The service is open to current and retired officers, as well as their families.
Such peer-to-peer interactions fill a critical need, said South Brunswick Acting Police Chief Jim Ryan, who has spent more than three decades in law enforcement.
"They can give you some hope that whatever you're experiencing, they've gone through it and you will get through it," Ryan said.
"And hope is what you want. You want to know that, okay, you're not the only one who has had trouble eating or trouble sleeping."
Though Cop2Cop started as a suicide prevention line, not every caller is in crisis. Some have just had a bad week that they want to talk through. Others stay with the program long-term: Orgo said he has been helping one retired cop for 12 years, calling him once a week to check in and hear how he is doing.
"We're now friends more than clients," Orgo said.
Many of the peer specialists survived their own strife during their law enforcement careers. Some were once callers to the line, and now want to give back.
In 2012, state parole officer Monica Braun said her life was upended during what should have been a routine conversation with a parolee she was monitoring. The woman confided that she had been molested, triggering a memory Braun said she had suppressed of her own childhood abuse.
Braun remembers how she began shaking while talking to the woman. She started having nightmares and would wake up terrified at night. She descended into alcoholism for years, drinking until she blacked out.
Braun survived her ordeal, and credits Cop2Cop with helping her along that road. She began working at the call line in 2024, after she retired.
"I felt that I needed to help others and try to break that stigma against asking for help," Braun said.
Her message: "It's okay to not be okay. We're humans, we're not robots."
Woodson, the East Orange deputy chief, has been at Cop2Cop since 2011, after he retired following more than 37 years in law enforcement. He's seen firsthand how the culture around policing has slowly changed.
"Back in the day, there was no outlet for police officers. They didn't have nobody to call," Woodson said. "So what the officers did was they internalized it. And it eats away at you like a stick of dynamite."
After his friend's suicide, Woodson said he started having panic attacks and nightmares. He would be in his patrol car and would just start crying. He knew something was very wrong.
He called Cop2Cop and ultimately decided he needed a break from policing. He took four months off of work using vacation time he had built up, and met with a therapist to talk things out. In the end, he was able to return to the job and finish his career.
Now, he tries to offer the same support to others.
"A lot of times, they just want you to listen and show them that you love them, that you care," Woodson said. "That's what they have this line for, and that's what they need."
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