A mortally wounded police lieutenant draws his last breath as a chaplain keeps vigil. An officer shaken after shooting a suspect or despondent because job stress is affecting life at home turns to a chaplain for counsel.
As police officers increasingly face lethal confrontations in a city beset by violent crime, and cope with stress on and off the job, chaplains stand ready to offer spiritual support.
The demand for chaplains' services is growing as chaplains expand their mission beyond ministering to officers and their families to include families of violent crime victims.
To respond to the increasing workload, Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier is doubling the size of the Baltimore Police Department chaplain unit. Other jurisdictions say that for a variety of reasons, their chaplains are responding to more calls, and they are seeking additional clergy members to volunteer their time.
The Rev. Theresa E. Smith Mercer, whom Frazier hired in December to be the department's full-time chaplain coordinator, is recruiting 10 chaplains to join the nine serving the department.
"Our chaplains are volunteers," said Mercer, who was a chaplain for Liberty Medical Center. "They are pastors of churches. There are time constraints for them. To put together an effective program to support the officers and the sworn personnel, the best way to do that is to increase the numbers."
Suburban police departments are also feeling the squeeze and are contemplating expanding their chaplain corps.
In Howard County, where the rate of violent crime is much lower than in Baltimore, a new factor in the demand for chaplains is the cellular phone.
"The trend today is on serious accidents. We get family members who are called on cell phones and begin to arrive on the scene," said the Rev. George Grimm, a Baptist minister who coordinates Howard County's six chaplains. The traumatized family members need someone to comfort them, and chaplains can do that, freeing officers to do their work at the accident scene. "That's a need that's probably increased tenfold in the last several years," Grimm said.
Said the Rev. Rowland D. Scott, acting coordinator of Baltimore County's chaplains, "There is a lot more stress on police officers."
Scott said that when officers ask to speak to one of the department's chaplains, it's not necessarily because of something traumatic that happened on the street. "It's not usually so much what happens on the job, but what happens on the job creates personal problems," he said.
