Moment of Silence: We’re Here For You

Moment of Silence: We’re Here For You
By Daniel Del Valle

For over a decade, Moment of Silence has been saving lives by raising mental health awareness and preventing law enforcement suicide, which we call blue suicide. One thing that we've always believed is that the community has a big influence on our profession and a big attachment to it as well.

For over ten years, during Christmas time we've been giving toys to hard-hit neighborhoods like Paterson, New Jersey. Santa comes to Paterson is an event we've been doing for over 10 years. Each year, we would go to the schools and give out toys from kindergarten through fifth grade. We would bring Santa Claus and his elves alongside many organizations and police unions. It's a beautiful time to bring a smile to the faces of so many children. In the last three years, since COVID-19, when the schools closed down, our organization continued and took it to the next level.  We brought Santa Claus and his elves to share joy directly to the streets of Paterson.

Our brothers and sisters in blue take days to volunteer their time to wrap toys and on the big day, which we normally do before Christmas Eve, we go out to the streets of Paterson and deliver gifts to children and their families. This is what we've been doing as an organization, and we've never publicized ourselves to the news because we've always believed in doing it for the right reasons. This is something that we strongly believe in.

Paterson is one of the roughest cities in New Jersey as far as low income and underprivileged kids. We drive through the city starting at approximately 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. with a convoy of officers, trucks and toys, and we give out over 6,000 toys to all the kids right in front of their houses. We tour the city while playing Christmas music announcing to the kids to come out. Santa Claus and the elves hand out gifts and you’d be amazed how it looks and feels like a Christmas in wonderland.

Each year, many officers dedicate their time and their passion to help the kids. These are the same officers who have at some point either set the tempo to help Moment of Silence save lives or at some point Moment of Silence has touched them in such a positive way that now they want to give back to the community and to everyone because of their healthy mindset.

As a charity, we are building a team and alliances that are helping us develop, become stronger, smarter and better prepared to bring mental health awareness and conversation to a different level. We have broken this down by starting “10-13 officer needs assistance” to help officers deal with the threat of blue suicide. In some cases, law enforcement officers have to hide their emotions for so long. Many times they can't even trust their department, their coworkers or their unions. So often they reach out to other organizations.

We have been one, where we have quarterbacked officers to a safer mindset while being able to keep their jobs through their hardest times, their darkest times and at the same time making sure that mentoring means bringing them back to mental stability.

We all know that in our profession, if you have a problem with mental health and ask for help, your gun may be taken away and it spirals into something very bad, that makes things much worse mentally and physically.

Our initiative with “10-13 officer needs assistance” is to be there for the officer when they need us and to help get them right back to where they need to be.

Our charity Moment of Silence comes together with mental health awareness by bringing together people from different places through dinners and events. We take the opportunity to advocate for people to be outspoken about their incidents. We believe that when more officers speak the truth about their mental health challenges, it actually helps many more officers open up about their problems. Because of this, we encourage officers to be there for one another, be sincere and be real.

We always aim to expand our initiative of helping our brothers and sisters in blue who face challenges that can lead to them ending their life. We recently had a beautiful dinner event in Florida where we had over 500 people in attendance. Our plan is to expand the passion of helping our first responders.

On a national level, we are now in the process, for the first time ever building a law enforcement progressive index chart. This index chart is going to be a tool. This chart will help guide officers from the moment they graduate the police academy and the possibilities where their career will take them.  This information will be gathered through data that we collect on a national level from officers all across the nation, which will give us a play-by-play. Through this first-ever index chart, we will be able to give the officers a sneak peek of the future. Therefore, we’ll prepare and guide them by providing them with the proper tools; mental health tools that they would need to offset any future problems. It's just like if you knew that it was going to rain tomorrow, then you would prepare yourself with an umbrella in the morning and therefore would prevent yourself from getting wet. This is how this progressive index chart is going to work for an officer from  one to 30 years in the profession. We will identify what could happen, what has happened, and how to fix it.

Here’s one example of the progressive chart: When you graduate the police academy, you come out in top-notch physical shape. In the first one to three years, you will have the choice after the academy to keep on by eating well and exercising, or you have the option not to. Your weight will not reflect your choice until probably the fourth or fifth year. This is why we believe that we have to tell the officer to be careful. The problem may start by not taking care of your health, and then you will see it four years later in how you will look and feel. We believe by that one example that if you put this together this way, the officer might think twice on weight and so many other situations.

If you have an issue or something that you feel that you cannot handle, please reach out to us. And although we might not have all the answers, we have the passion to really want to do the best for you. So we will mentor you, find whatever we can do and help you in any way within our capacity. We care about you. We're here for you. And if you want to join this coalition and this movement to save law enforcement lives, please reach out to us. We must stop blue suicide. We're here for you.

For more information please visit our websites momentofsilenceinc.org and bluesuicide.org