A YPD mental health advocate honored by the state organization

The work Greening has been doing with the YPD was recently recognized by the South Dakota Association of Chiefs and Sheriffs for his contributions to officer mental health and his efforts to improve YPD’s hiring and retention practices .

It is common in large companies or organizations for employees to take personality assessment tests. In theory, it helps facilitate a better work environment by matching people’s personalities and placing them in situations that will set them up for success.

Greening began working with the YPD nearly two years ago meeting one-on-one with new recruits and other members of the police department to open a dialogue and get to know them.

(Jason and I) looked at some of the current trends that the department was facing, I think probably every department in the country is facing this, he said. There has just been less recruitment and retention. I just took the approach of examining people and then understanding who those people are and maybe a little bit about what makes them vulnerable.

We did a lot of research to find out what makes a good candidate and developed 10 core competencies that would fit our community. There wasn’t a lot of research on rural police departments, it focused more on inner cities and big cities.

This lack of research is part of what makes this program exciting for Greening and the YPD.

As we worked through this, I told Jason Id like to keep some of that data so we can figure out how to keep improving the program, he said. We’ve already made adjustments and seen some pretty impressive numbers.

Foote said the improvement in communication and openness in the department has increased since the program began.

So far, so good, he said. It’s almost two years into this, and we have officers open (regarding mental health). Coming from a time when we didn’t talk about the incident and what happened, now people are talking about it. I was making much more use of our critical incident stress reporting teams. Our goal is to continue to build on it and make sure our officers are taken care of.

Greening completed his master’s degree at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. That degree majored in military social work, an educational track where I was able to explore evidence-based methods to help those who have dedicated their lives to protecting ours, she says on her website.

That’s what makes this partnership perfect, according to Foote.

Brooke understands the culture and the way we operate, he said. Their commitment to researching best practice in these areas demonstrates a deep understanding of the challenges facing agents and a genuine desire to make a positive difference.

Greening explained the process.

When I say we look at what makes people vulnerable, obviously officers and first responders encounter more misery and are the main witnesses of misery than most other professions, he said. What we have learned is that there are some things that people have experienced in their own lives that make them susceptible or vulnerable to struggling with critical incidents.

So we took the approach of, if we can find out what our people have been through, what they’ve experienced, we can know to look for those vulnerabilities. It really helps us to have the ability to know what kind of supervisor they have to work with and what kind of officers they have to train with. You know who this person is as an individual and how best to make them successful in the department.

The progress made in this program has improved the atmosphere at the station, according to Foote.

I think the biggest thing is communication, openness and the ability of officers to recognize, Hey, this officer might have some problems, he said. We need to have a conversation and it’s an easy conversation. It’s not a difficult conversation. It used to be hard to go up to someone and say, Hey, let’s talk about your feelings. Not so much anymore.

Greening received the Citizen of Merit Award in Deadwood last month at the South Dakota Association of Chiefs and Sheriffs.

Foote wrote the nomination for Greening and said he would do it again.

Brooke has worked very hard to help me with the recruitment and retention of our officers and to make sure they are prepared for good mental health throughout their careers, she told the Press & Dakotan. And he did it without me paying him. Basically, he did it out of the goodness of his heart.

I mean, it came up just in a conversation about what we were seeing in law enforcement, he continued. I think Brooke had some clients in law enforcement so she understood what she was talking about. She just said, Let me investigate. She shared it with me and said maybe you should look at changing your hiring process and look at these types of questions. He took the information I gave him and ran with it.

Greening said she was excited about the opportunity to work with the police department.

This is not a population that is (generally accessible or easy to reach), he said. The fact that I am trying to specialize in this makes it difficult, so I am very grateful for the opportunity to work with this department.

As the program gathers more data and begins to show trends and results, Greening and Foote hope to continue and possibly branch out to help other area law enforcement agencies and perhaps a grant as well.

They actually gave us a grant to do some training with our command staff, Foote said. We have been looking for other grants to provide more critical incident stress information to trainings, so hopefully I have more staff in my department that are trained to do briefings. The idea with that, too, is that we can help places like Vermillion and other areas around us if they have first responders who are going through something.

Greening has been impressed with the departments’ ambition.

Our goal was to make it a very agency thing, and I think it has become that, he said. In the beginning, I was more involved and now they’re taking it and running with it.

I want to say one more thing, Greening added. There’s not a lot of command staff or police chiefs that are that open to really wanting to help their department and their people to someone who really wants to understand more because it’s a very difficult subject to talk about. Jason works hard for this community and its officers.