News & Events
October 25, 2023
Webinar: Police intervention with suicidal individuals – Typologies and suicide by police
Date and time: Wednesday, November 15, 2023, 11 am CST / 12 pm EST
As frontline responders, police officers are called to intervene with suicidal individuals. As a result, they can be directly exposed to situations of acting out. In Quebec, “in all cases where a person, other than a police officer on duty, dies, is seriously injured or is injured by a police officer’s firearm, during a police response or while in detention by a police force,” an independent investigation is requested in order to get to the bottom of the event’s circumstances. This study is based on the analysis of the information available from 336 investigation files of police interventions leading to an independent investigation in Quebec, between 2006 and 2015. Of this number, 138 cases involving suicides or suicide attempts in the presence of law enforcement, including suspected cases of suicide by police, were subject to a comprehensive descriptive analysis. This summary will present the results from the perspective of sociodemographic, situational and psychological characteristics of suicidal individuals involved. It will then address a typology of persons who commit suicide in the presence of law enforcement, following the ’’two-step cluster analysis “procedure. Finally, we will discuss the impact of this study with respect to training and police response.
Presented by:
Dr. Annie Gendron
Annie Gendron, Ph.D., has a doctorate in psychology. Annie is a researcher for the International Centre for Comparative Criminology at the École nationale de police du Québec, Adjunct Professor in the Department of Special Education of the Université du Québec à Trois–Rivières, Joint-holder of the Chaire de recherche en prévention de la santé psychologique au travail en sécurité publique (Research co-chair in Prevention of Psychological Health at Work in Public Safety), regular researcher at the Centre for Comparative Criminology—Interuniversity Centre, and collaborator at the Laboratoire de psychologie–légale (Forensic Psychology Laboratory) at the UQTR. Her research interests focus on questions related to the process of candidate selection for police officers, training and police intervention in Quebec. Her work concerns academic and professional careers of police officers, selection tests, prevention of psychological health problems among first responders, practices associated to work in law enforcement, as well as suicide situations in the presence of police officers. She is also interested in the challenges facing police response in indigenous context, and with indigenous populations.
This webinar will be presented in French with the option of English captioning.