- Sgt. Betsy Brantner Smith is the spokesperson for the National Police Association and worked as a Chicago cop for 29 years
- She says there is no proof that the four Capitol cops who killed themselves did so because of January 6
- Two of the cops worked for DC Metropolitan Police Department and had done for 5 and 18 years
- She said in that work, they’d have been exposed to ‘lots of crime and depravity’ because DC has high crime
- The other two cops worked for the Capitol Police; None of the four who killed themselves left notes or if they did, their families have not disclosed them
- Brantner Smith says cops around the country are disgusted by how the four suicides have been politicized
- The suicide rate among cops is 17 out of 100,000 whereas in the wider population it is 13 out of 100,000
- Brantner Smith says Washington Democrats are only focused on the Capitol cops’ plight because it suits their anti-Trump agenda but that they should widen it to look at cop suicide in general and not just from the riot
A veteran Chicago police officer and the spokesperson for the National Police Association has slammed the left for suggesting that the suicides of four cops who responded to the Capitol riot were a direct result of it, telling DailyMail.com we will ‘never know’ why they took their own lives so shouldn’t assume the reason to suit political bias. Sgt. Betsy Brantner Smith was a police officer in Chicago for 29 years. She is now the spokesperson for the National Police Association, a lobbying group and charity which acts on behalf of police officers at every rank around the country. She says she and other cops have become disgusted with how Democrats in Washington and ‘the media’ have politicized the deaths of Howard Liebengood, Jeffrey Smith, Gunther Hashida and Kyle Defreytag – four officers who responded to the riot and have since killed themselves. Brantner Smith – who has advocated publicly about the mental health of cops and campaigns for greater support for them now through the Association – says there’s no direct proof that the riot caused the officers’ deaths, and that suicide, as a whole, is a common tragedy across all of America’s law enforcement.