Introducing Our Wall of Remembrance
A permanent place to remember police officers who have died by suicide, share memories, light a candle and ensure those we have lost are remembered as people, not statistics.
When a police officer dies by suicide, the impact reaches far beyond the individual and is felt by families, friends, colleagues and the wider policing community. In the days and weeks that follow, photographs are shared, tributes are written, fundraisers may be established and people come together to remember someone they worked alongside, cared about or loved.
Over time, however, those posts inevitably become less frequent and disappear further down our social media timelines. Fundraising pages close, news coverage moves on and the immediate public attention fades, but for the people who knew and loved that officer, their memory does not.
That is why one of the most important features of It Stops Now is our Wall of Remembrance.
A permanent place to remember
We want to create a lasting place where police officers who have died by suicide can be remembered as people, rather than simply becoming another statistic.
Each officer featured on the Wall of Remembrance will have their own dedicated space where family members, friends and colleagues can share photographs, memories and tributes, or simply visit and light a virtual candle in their memory.
Wherever possible, we want those pages to tell us something about the person behind the uniform, including who they were, the things they enjoyed, their policing career, their personality and the memories they left with the people who knew them best.
Their life should never be defined solely by how it ended.
Creating something families can keep
We also want the Wall of Remembrance to become more than a digital memorial.
As the website develops, we intend to introduce the ability to take the messages, memories and tributes left on an officer's memorial page and produce a high-quality printed book of condolence, which can then be presented to their family.
We hope this will give families something permanent to keep, containing memories from the people who served alongside their loved one, knew them personally or simply wanted their family to know that their service and their life mattered.
For children and other family members in particular, those memories may become even more meaningful as the years pass.
We will need the policing community's help
We know there will be officers whose stories we are not aware of, which is why we will need help from across the policing community to build the Wall of Remembrance properly.
If you have lost a colleague, friend or family member who served as a police officer and believe they should be remembered on the Wall, we would like to hear from you. Equally, if an officer already appears and you have a photograph, story or memory that you would like to contribute, we would encourage you to get in touch.
We recognise how sensitive this is and will always seek to approach the Wall of Remembrance with dignity, care and respect for the wishes of families. This is not about creating a database of police suicides; it is about making sure there is somewhere permanent for the people behind those names to be remembered.
Remembrance must also encourage us to learn
The Wall of Remembrance will inevitably be difficult to look through because every name represents a life lost and people who have been left behind.
It Stops Now was created because we believe there are important questions that need to be asked about welfare within policing, including the impact that lengthy and difficult disciplinary and misconduct processes can have on officers, staff and their families.
The Wall will never be used to make assumptions about why an individual officer died or to attribute their death to particular circumstances where that has not been established. However, we should not be afraid to look collectively at the pressures facing people within policing, listen to the experiences of families and colleagues, consider the available research and ask whether there are things that could and should be done differently.
Remembering those we have lost should be part of that conversation.
More than a name
Our hope is that the Wall of Remembrance becomes somewhere people can return to over the years, whether on an anniversary or birthday, when thinking about an old colleague or simply when they want to spend a few moments remembering someone who mattered to them.
Social media will continue to move on, news stories will eventually disappear and fundraising pages will close, but that should not mean the memories of the people behind them disappear too.
We want to create somewhere those memories can remain.
We will remember them.