Ann Marie Hall sat next to her husband on the green sofa, trying to talk the gun out of his hands. “You know you can’t kill yourself,” she said. “Think about the boys, and your mother, and your brother and me. How will we feel?” Michael admitted he wasn’t thinking straight. “It’s not about anything but you and me,” he said. Even as cops’ marriages go, theirs was badly bruised. They had fallen in love fast; he proposed five months after they met, on bended knee atop the Empire State Building, and they were married eight years ago. But since then, the fights had become more frequent, as Ann Marie learned what it meant to marry into the force. She remembers a night they spent cruising up the Hudson River at a wedding reception on a yacht. “Mike and I went up on deck, and we were the only two up there,” she recalls. “We were slow dancing, and I was thinking about how romantic it was. And then Mike says, ‘Do you have any idea how many dead bodies there are in this river?’ ” Michael had grown quiet, withdrawn, in the days leading up to that Sunday afternoon in July. She glanced at the heavy flashlight on the stone fireplace and thought of grabbing it, hitting him on the head and getting the gun away. But she was afraid something would go wrong, so she stayed where she was. He put the gun to his head. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, “put that thing down.” “Oh, I’m ridiculous?” When he pulled the trigger, the bullet passed through his skull and lodged in the wall behind the couch. Their three small children were playing in the next room. When they heard the shot, they came running, saw the red stain spreading over the sofa and didn’t say a word. Michael Hall, an officer in the 46th precinct in the Bronx, became the seventh of 10 New York City cops to kill themselves so far this year, already tying the record set in 1987. No one has an adequate explanation of what finally drove him over the edge, and so the speculation runs a predictable course: it was the danger, the pressure, the grinding sorrows embedded in the daily routine. Last week the New York police department released the results of a three-year study that found that cops were more than twice as likely to kill themselves as were members of the general population. Though every case is different, the experts do see some patterns: male officers are far more likely to kill themselves than female ones, alcohol often plays some role, and corruption scandals within the department are usually followed by a spate of suicides. The cops themselves rarely blame the obvious culprit — the tension of living forever in the cross hairs. Veteran officers and the experts who study them agree that the pressure on police officers actually comes from some surprising sources. The most crushing battles, they argue, often occur not on the streets but in the rundown precinct houses, and the courtrooms, and the $ privacy of their own homes. Too often, police complain, the commanders and commissioners who cops imagined would guide and protect them seem to ignore or betray them instead. “Frequently, officers feel that somewhere on the line between lieutenant and captain, these people change,” says Scott Allen, clinical psychologist for the 3,200-member Metro-Dade police department in Florida. “The command loses touch with the soldiers.”
