Police officers are far more likely to die at their own hands than from a violent confrontation, more prone to commit suicide than other civil servants, and more apt to be involved with domestic abuse. The reason -- and the solution -- have to do with the stresses of the job itself. PNS associate editor Joe Loya is a California writer currently writing a memoir.

Another cop killed himself the other day, but only after he killed his girlfriend.

Officer Philip Michael Garcia, 29, of Newark, CA, rammed his girlfriend's Toyota Camry off the road. He shot and killed Lisa Munoz, 23, as she sat in her front seat. Officer Garcia's body was discovered sprawled on the ground nearby, a bullet hole in his head.

Law enforcement agencies hate to talk about suicide.

Debra Weierman, a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, when asked about suicide among agents, said, "It is really something we keep and consider an interagency concern and it is not really up for public consumption."

A study led by Dr. John Violanti, clinical professor of social and preventive medicine at Rochester Institute of Technology, found that the rate of suicide among police is up to 53 percent higher than among other municipal workers. And police officers are eight times more likely to die by their own hand than by homicide.

And then there is the domestic violence.

FBI behavioral scientist Donald Sheean, who last year organized a conference on domestic violence when it involves police officers, claimed "there are strong indications domestic violence is more prevalent among police officers" than the general population.

And sociologist Leanore Boulin Johnson found 42 percent of 728 police officers surveyed responded in the affirmative to the question, "Have you been out of control and behaved violently toward your spouse?"

There is something clearly not right in the house of the police.

We expect police officers to live in the milieu of violence and not expect that the experience would damage them. We give them jobs as if they were going to package bread, build computers, paint houses.

We should treat them as we do soldiers in combat. We don't leave soldiers in combat long without a rest of some sort. The military understands that the violent work of a soldier is a toxic experience, hazardous to humanity after a while.

A truthful help-wanted advertisement for police would read: "Come join a team that is frequently exposed to violence and human suffering. The common effect of job related stress includes, but is not limited to, intense cynicism, suspiciousness, excessive drinking, high divorce and suicide rates, and beating your wife and children."

If these effects of stress arose from welding or sewing buttons in a factory, OSHA could swarm down hard on the workplace to insure that workers were better protected from harming themselves. In fact, an OSHA-like agency might be our smartest approach to tackling the police stress problem. When police act badly, perhaps we need to think in terms of a public health problem instead of a civil rights problem.

When 77 percent of police spouses report experiencing unusually high stress from their husband's job, police stress ceases to be a departmental problem--something closed to "public consumption." When the wives and children of police officers take unusually high stress to work or school, it becomes a mental health issue for the citizenry as a whole.

Some local public health and safety authorities should call for a change in work practices to protect police families from stress.

Lately, cities have increased the amount of money they spend to settle police brutality cases -- another reason why police stress should be a topic of public discussion. We pay dearly when a police officer shoots a handcuffed man in the head, then plants a gun, as one stressed Los Angeles officer did.

We must begin to think about the public's health when we think about the way police officers and their families are suffering silently.