(PatrioticPost.com)- Four of the US Capitol Police who were on duty during the January 6 melee at the Capitol subsequently took their own lives. And Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, along with Democrat Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton, have been fighting to classify their suicides as “line of duty” deaths – no doubt to bolster the narrative that January 6 was a “deadly insurrection.”
But Sgt. Betsy Brantner Smith, a veteran police officer and current spokesperson for the National Police Association has slammed the Democrats for suggesting that these suicides were the direct result of the January 6 melee.
Brantner Smith said that she and other police officers have grown disgusted with how the Democrats in Washington, as well as the media, have exploited these officers’ suicides for political purposes.
Brantner Smith is an advocate for the mental health of police officers and campaigns for greater support for them through the National Police Association. She said that suicide has become a common tragedy throughout America’s law enforcement, however, there is no direct proof that being on duty during the January 6 melee had anything to do with these suicides.
Pointing out that police officers see horrible things every day “from the minute they get out of the police academy,” Brantner Smith added that we don’t know why any officer kills himself unless he leaves a detailed account of why. And most do not.
None of the four Capitol Hill police left any kind of suicide note or the like explaining why they took their lives. “We will never know,” Brantner Smith said, adding that this is why there is so much disgust from law enforcement around the country about what the Democrats are doing.
Among American police, the suicide rate is higher than among the wider population. In the US, thirteen out of every 100,000 people die by suicide. But among law enforcement, that rate is 17 out of 100,000.
In 2019, 200 law enforcement officers committed suicide. Another 173 took their own life in 2020. And thus far in 2021, ninety police officers died from suicide.
“No one is talking about all the other cops who are killing themselves,” Brantner Smith said. “The politicization of this topic is abhorrent.”
Brantner Smith does not dismiss the events at the Capitol on January 6, saying that they were no doubt traumatic for the officers tasked with responding to it. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is no evidence at all that the four who later took their lives did so because of what happened on January 6.
