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ALTON - Officer wellness is a top priority at the Alton Police Department.

Sacred Spaces of CARE, a local nonprofit that focuses on mental health and substance use, has partnered with the Alton Police Department to promote officer wellness. With wellness initiatives and increased support within the department, the goal is to help officers process trauma and make healthy choices.

“We’re people too, and that’s what everybody kind of forgets sometimes,” said APD Lieutenant James Siatos. “We have to be kind of a light switch sometimes. Especially in the city of Alton here, we do have a lot of critical incidents that do happen here. There is violent crime here in Alton. So you’ll respond to a critical incident and then an hour later you could be at home bouncing a 2-year-old on your knee, playing with your kids."

Siatos is a peer coordinator within the department, meaning he works closely with Sacred Spaces founder Megan Tyler. Together, they have created workout plans and meal plans to be shared with the department, and they recently secured a grant to help APD’s crisis intervention team program.

Siatos said a little over 50% of the calls that APD receives include some element of crisis intervention. With funding from this grant, they have an officer who focuses on responding to crisis calls. Siatos also said the unhoused population in Alton “has really taken off,” and the crisis intervention team aims to help with community policing efforts.

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“The important thing that we all try to remember is that any call that you go on, you’re dealing with somebody who it’s their worst day. You don’t call us because you’re having a good day,” Siatos explained. “So that’s how you have to approach it and keep that in mind, and you handle it on a case-by-case basis and remember that that person’s an individual. There’s a person behind the call that you’re there for…As far as taking it home and affecting you, each guy has to deal with that in a different way.”

To mitigate these effects, Tyler, Siatos and the rest of the department have been focused on officers’ mental and emotional wellbeing. Tyler said they are looking for “realistic tools” to help officers handle the chronic trauma that many of them experience. The police department often debriefs after critical calls, and the officers support one another.

“That chronic trauma, you can bury it to a degree, but that mind/body correlation — if you're experiencing exhaustion, if you have chronic pain going on, all this stuff, if you’re not sleeping, that's your mental and emotional state,” she said. “That’s your physical body responding to your mental and emotional state because we tried to process it in maybe more unhealthy coping ways.”

Tyler acknowledges that there’s a stigma around mental health, and it can be “a messy thing” to talk about. But she and Siatos believe that by increasing conversations around officers’ wellness and mental health, they can fight this stigma and support officers through challenging times.

Officer wellness is a major part of the Sacred Spaces of CARE mission, but ultimately, the organization wants to help people connect to mental health and substance use services. Tyler noted that they have partnered with the Hayner Public Library District to host biweekly talks through November about mental health, and she hopes these conversations both in and out of the police department help Riverbend community members.

“We’re not here to be the providers of services. We don’t have those resources. We’re not the therapists. We’re not the treatment centers,” she added. “But what we’re trying to do is ease the load a little bit and see if we can get people linked to those things.”

For more information about Sacred Spaces of CARE and their officer wellness initiatives, visit their official website at SacredSpacesOfCARE.org.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.

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