CHICKASHA — A grant that underwrites a “privatized mental health services program” to benefit members of the Police Department received the blessing of the City Council.
The Oklahoma Electric Cooperative Foundation awards “Operation Round Up” grants in support of the program, and approved $4,000 earmarked for the Chickasha Police Department.
Stacey Stephens is a “well-respected” licensed professional counselor in Shawnee whose service has been invaluable to the Chickasha Police Department, Chief Goebel Music wrote.
Each year the CPD responds to more than 20,000 calls for service, he said. The department is budgeted for 32 officers but only half of those positions are filled, Music informed an OEC foundation executive in an April 28 letter. Consequently, the police chief said, each officer is “responding to twice the normal number of calls,” seeing and experiencing “more traumas than normal.”
For example, he related:
• In 2017 a 14-year-old was killed by a neighbor; an individual committed suicide by immolation, using gasoline; and three police officers were injured during a gunbattle.
• In 2018 a husband stabbed his wife to death, and a double homicide ended in gunfire when officers killed the suspect.
• The next year an officer shot and killed a subject “coming at them with a knife in close quarters.”
• Two suicides occurred in 2021, one by hanging and the other by self-inflicted gunshot within feet of a police officer.
• And already this year Chickasha police have investigated several fentanyl-related drug overdoses and deaths, include one incident where a child found his father dead “and called for help.”
“Each officer must find their own way of dealing with the aftermath of these incidents, but it does not mean we shouldn’t assist,” Music wrote. To be successful requires “a mental health professional who understands” law enforcement officers, he asserted.
The $4,000 grant ensures that CPD employees “are allotted at least another 40 one-on-one sessions” with Stephens “in coping with both personal and professional issues, PTSD, and cumulative career stress,” Music wrote.
Also during its June 20 regular meeting, the City Council approved renewal of the annual jail service contract with the Grady County Criminal Justice Authority. The city will pay $50 for every city inmate who is incarcerated in the county jail for up to 24 hours, and a “holding fee” of $35 for any municipal inmate jailed for less than 12 hours.
In response to a question from Councilmember Georgianne Hebblethwaite, Music said Chickasha hasn’t had a city jail “for 20 years.”