Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act

Officer Safety and Wellness Resources

The Department of Justice is committed to supporting law enforcement officer health and wellness—healthy officers are critical to building healthy and safe communities. The officer and family wellness resources stem from financial literacy to substance use disorders to preventing or recovering from the suicide death of a colleague.

Modeled through the data collected from “Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Programs: Eleven Case Studies,” the passage of the Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act, Congress took an important step in improving the delivery of and access to mental health and wellness services that will help our nation’s more than 800,000 federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement officers. 

The Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act of 2017, called for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to submit a report to Congress on mental health practices and services in the U.S. Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs that could be adopted by federal, state, local, or tribal law enforcement agencies and containing recommendations on effectiveness of crisis lines for law enforcement officers, efficacy of annual mental health checks for law enforcement officers, expansion of peer mentoring programs, and ensuring privacy considerations for these types of programs.

Aiming to focus on innovative but replicable programs in law enforcement agencies of various sizes around the country, this report’s authors conducted 11 case studies of programs in 10 departments and one call-in crisis line in fulfillment of a requirement of the Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act of 2017.  Agencies needing to apply for The FY22 Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act (LEMHWA) Program can access this portal <https://cops.usdoj.gov/lemhwa&gt;