Thirty years ago, when Ray Radakovich was a young cop in Wisconsin, wellness wasn’t a concept that was much on police minds. Those who had difficulties were expected to suck it up and tough it out — a dismissive approach common across the emergency services throughout their history.
For Radakovich, now a director of strategic alliances (DSA) for Lexipol, that nonchalant approach to coping quickly intersected with a run of difficult survivor encounters.
“I remember very well I had to deliver three murder/suicide notifications, and the last one really bothered me,” he recalls. “The lady had no idea, and I thought she knew. She really fell apart — it was just one of those bad situations. To have three of those in a row over maybe a year really kind of got to me.”
His colleagues could offer little comfort, telling him it was just the kind of thing he’d have to deal with on the job. And he did, throughout a three-decade career that culminated as assistant chief.
Now at Lexipol, though, he’s part of a broad-based effort to alleviate some of those burdens on emergency providers. Lexipol offers a full arsenal of wellness education and resources for law enforcement, fire and EMS personnel, and others, including help with healthier living practices across key areas of their personal and professional lives. And the company is increasingly getting those tools into the hands of not only today’s public safety leaders but tomorrow’s as well.
Keeping Providers Happy, Healthy and Resilient
Emergency providers today still face plenty of wellness challenges, despite increased awareness and more resources to help.
“Wellness is far more out in the open than it was when I started in 1994,” Radakovich says. “I think nowadays, if someone experienced what I did with those notifications, they’d receive a better response. They’d get a lot of support and resources and people able to point them in the right direction for assistance.”
A few things have gone into this change. One of the biggest has been increased recognition of suicide in public safety.
Police suicides have been systematically tracked in the U.S. for roughly a decade, and with the exception of the COVID-19 years of 2020 – 2022, they now regularly exceed line-of-duty deaths. Reporting still isn’t what it could be, but a study by the advocacy group First H.E.L.P. found an average of 184 law enforcement suicides a year from 2016 – 2022.
Fire-rescue providers have it no better. A widely cited 2018 report from the Ruderman Family Foundation found 100-plus suicides a year among fire personnel, and a rate of 18 per 100,000 compared to law enforcement’s 17 (and the general population’s 13). EMS personnel are overrepresented as well. A 2023 analysis of first responder suicides found they comprised 1% of all deaths recorded from 2015 – 2017 in the National Violent Death Reporting System; this broke down to 58% LEOs, 21% firefighters, 18% EMS, and 2% telecommunicators.
Other factors contributing to greater recognition of wellness needs include:
- High rates of occupational death, stress, and burnout during COVID-19
- High-visibility deaths related to fatigue and accidents
- Data from national research and surveys like Police1’s yearly What Cops Want
- Legislation around areas like PTSD presumption
- Especially for police, public scrutiny and tension following the deaths of George Floyd and others in 2020 that revealed a need for more professional support
These notable conflicts have helped convince skeptics — and, more importantly, those in positions of leadership and influence.
“Wellness and resiliency have become very popular topics in law enforcement and public safety in general, and I think the reason is twofold,” says Radakovich. “One, I think we’re starting to break down the stigma — the fear of coming forward, of appearing weak if you need help or want to process something you’re having trouble getting over.
“Second, I think leadership has come to see that health, wellness, and resiliency do far more than just keep officers happy. They keep the agency healthy as well, as it tackles one of the largest problems we all have right now: recruitment and retention. If you can keep people happy, healthy, and resilient, they’re going to stick around and work well for you.”
“If you can keep people happy, healthy, and resilient, they’re going to stick around and work well for you.”
What Goes Into Wellness?
Suicides are the worst-case scenario but certainly not the only area where wellness shortfalls can harm emergency personnel. Wellness has numerous components and aspects that, if neglected, can diminish quality of life.
Suicide prevention and risk reduction are a component of psychological and mental wellness, which basically describes the ability to process the stress, trauma and emotional strain of the job. This encompasses associated concepts like resilience and prevention of post-traumatic stress from the violent and distressing things providers experience.
Other aspects of wellness include:
- Physical wellness: Fitness and conditioning, cardiovascular health, weight management, etc.
- Sleep and fatigue management: The ability to maintain healthy sleep patterns despite shift work and long hours.
- Nutritional wellness: Nutrition education, access to healthy, shift-friendly food options, reduced reliance on caffeine, sugar, fast food, etc.
- Social and family wellness: Strong relationships and support systems outside the job.
- Financial wellness: Financial literacy, retirement planning, disability planning, etc.
- Career and professional wellness: Purpose, growth and healthy leadership around the job and organization.
- Spiritual and moral wellness: A sense of meaning, ethics and purpose in work.
As a measure of how seriously it’s now being taken, in 2025 Lexipol’s wellness education became part of the curriculum at the FBI National Academy.
‘It’s a Different World We Live in Now’
The FBI National Academy is the bureau’s elite professional development institution for law enforcement leaders. Last year it invited Radakovich and fellow Lexipol DSA Aaron Ambrose to help bolster the health and wellness portion of the academy experience.
As academy graduates, both were familiar with the institution and its importance, and Lexipol had an established relationship with its alumni group, the National Academy Associates. Key leaders there were enthusiastic about adding wellness content.
The main tool they introduced was the Lexipol Wellness Mobile App, to which all academy students got access on their arrival. Attendees also received supporting information in their welcome packets. Radakovich and Ambrose then followed up in person on the session’s Professional Development Day, which typically occurs in week eight of each 10-week academy session.
By the next academy session, they’d upgraded things, with content discussion making its way to the classroom and a plan to keep in touch after students graduated. Classroom sessions focused on core features of the app and how its use could benefit officers and their agencies. As academy graduates will become future police leaders, it also emphasized the app’s analytics and department-wide insights.
Participation soared. “For the first class we basically just borrowed a slide deck and walked through it, but we got some really good engagement,” says Radakovich, a 2022 academy graduate. “We saw very large spikes in [Wellness App] adoption and usage,” which included a big jump in downloads prior to the second class.
Over three classes, students began integrating what they were learning and posing relevant questions. Some wrote on how the app — and ideas it was helping them implement — was already benefiting their colleagues and agencies.
“I think we have a very solid solution that really checks a lot of the boxes when people are doing this,” says Ambrose, a 2010 graduate. “But the important thing is that departments are doing something for wellness. There’s really no excuse not to anymore — it’s like driving drunk when you could Uber. It’s a different world we live in now, and you need to be providing this stuff.”
How the App Is Used
The idea of all this is, of course, that academy students embrace what they learn about wellness, take it back to their department and use the app to help orchestrate broader change. For chiefs and leadership, the Wellness App’s advanced analytics provide anonymized big-picture views of how it’s being used.
The Wellness Console aggregates users’ activity without collecting personal data. It can track number of users and which topics and modules are accessed most, allowing discernment of trends and the effects of specific initiatives, as well as overall rates of adoption. It’s intended to provide organizational insight, not individual monitoring.
“The anonymity of our product is a big deal — that’s one of the first things we tell people,” says Ambrose. “It is completely anonymous. The only things tracked are the analytics and what is being accessed. What are people looking at? How are they engaging with the app? Are they talking to peer support? What type of self-assessments are they taking? A department can look at those analytics and realize, for instance, maybe they have a lot of people with compassion fatigue. Then they can provide some training or intervention.”
“I wouldn’t know that you, in particular, looked at something; I’d just know that somebody with this app looked at, say, sleep hygiene for more than two minutes,” adds Radakovich. “You wouldn’t want to see a ton of engagement around mental health stuff — that could mean there’s something wrong. But there are dozens of other different categories in there, everything from leadership to sleep to nutrition, where you’d want to see higher levels of engagement.”
The app’s core wellness content library covers more than 60 topics in the general areas of mental and behavioral health and critical incidents (e.g., stress management, suicide prevention, PTSD), physical health and performance (fitness, nutrition, sleep), resilience (mental toughness, coping strategies), family and relationships (parenting, financial planning, work-life balance), and risk and behavioral health (drinking, isolation, anger management). A wellness tool kit provides videos, articles, and guides that include self-assessments and links to peer support.
Popular areas accessed by law enforcement users often involve finance, nutrition, and leadership, but the number one topic where they most often seek help is sleep.
“The app has a sleep hygiene piece that’s very robust, including little quizzes you can take to find out how you’re sleeping and what you might be doing wrong,” says Radakovich. “It also provides a number of medically proven white noise-type sounds that’ll help you sleep.”
Tip Sheet: 10-point Wellness Program Checklist: DOWNLOAD NOW!
‘There’s a Lot of Value in It’
Moving forward, the enhanced wellness education and Wellness App will remain part of the academy experience, with Radakovich and Ambrose returning each session for classroom presentations and Professional Development Day.
“We’ve had some really good success stories,” says Radakovich. “We’ve had people tell us if they didn’t have the app, they’d have had no place else to go to find support. We’ve seen people who took it back and instituted it at their agency whose personnel have really benefited. There’s a lot of value in it.”
“We don’t look at wellness as being just an app,” adds Ambrose. “With the peer support, clinician training, self-assessments and whole variety of resources we have, it’s really a suite of health and wellness tools public safety personnel can use to improve their lives.”
For more information on Lexipol’s Wellness App and other product offerings, please visit lexipol.com.
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