The Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act, Explained
The Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act has an unusually straightforward premise: law enforcement agencies need support to protect the mental health and well-being of the people who serve in them.
Congress passed the legislation unanimously in 2017, and it was signed into law on January 10, 2018. Formally known as Public Law 115-113, the act directed the U.S. Department of Justice to examine law enforcement mental health practices, identify promising approaches, improve coordination, and support agencies seeking to strengthen officer wellness programs.
Today, the act is most visible through the Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act program, commonly called LEMHWA, administered by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS Office.
The federal program provides funding for initiatives such as peer support, mental health training, family resources, suicide prevention, stress reduction, clinical services, and other promising wellness practices. Its importance, however, extends beyond any individual grant cycle.
LEMHWA represents a federal policy acknowledgment that law enforcement mental health cannot be addressed solely by asking individual officers to become more resilient. Agencies also need policies, programs, leadership practices, clinical partnerships, and organizational cultures that make it possible for people to seek help before they reach a crisis.
What did the Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act do?
The original legislation did not impose a single national wellness model on every department. Instead, it directed the Department of Justice to study existing programs, consult with law enforcement and mental health stakeholders, and identify practices that could be adapted across agencies.
The resulting 2019 report to Congress examined several components of a comprehensive approach to officer wellness, including:
peer support;
access to culturally competent mental health professionals;
crisis lines and other confidential services;
family education and support;
training for officers and supervisors;
suicide prevention;
protections for privacy and confidentiality; and
coordination among agencies and professional organizations.
The law also authorized the COPS Office to support mental health and wellness services through its grant programs.
This part is important. LEMHWA was not designed simply to fund isolated wellness activities. It created a policy foundation for expanding access to services, learning from existing programs and helping agencies build more sustainable systems of support.
The current COPS Office program describes its objectives in similarly organizational terms: increasing an agency’s capacity to provide mental health resources, develop peer support networks and create a culture of wellness through education and program development.
What can departments do with LEMHWA funding?
The precise eligibility rules, award amounts and allowable costs can change from one funding year to the next. Agencies should therefore work from the current notice of funding opportunity rather than relying on requirements from a previous grant cycle.
The overall purpose of the funding has remained consistent: improving the delivery of and access to mental health and wellness services for law enforcement personnel and their families.
For fiscal year 2026, the COPS Office divided the program into start-up projects for agencies without comprehensive wellness programming, enhanced projects for departments expanding existing programs, and a community-of-practice initiative designed to help grantees share knowledge and promising practices.
Depending on the annual solicitation and an agency’s needs, funding may support work such as the following.
Establishing or strengthening peer support
An agency may use grant funding to create a peer support team or improve one that already exists. That work may include developing policies, selecting and screening peer team members, providing specialized training, establishing clinical oversight and creating referral procedures.
A peer support program should not consist merely of naming a few well-regarded officers and telling employees that they are available to talk. Effective programs require defined roles, appropriate boundaries, continuing education, confidentiality protections and a clear connection to professional care when someone needs more support than a peer can provide.
Research suggests that peer support can improve mental health literacy, reduce stigma and give officers a trusted point of entry into a broader system of care. At the same time, the research cautions that programs need standards, sound internal policies and appropriate risk management. Peer support is most useful when it is part of a larger wellness structure rather than a substitute for clinical services.
Expanding access to culturally competent clinical care
Departments may also use LEMHWA funding to improve access to licensed clinicians who understand law enforcement culture and occupational demands.
That may involve contracting with qualified mental health professionals, establishing referral networks, offering confidential counseling or developing relationships with clinicians who can support peer teams and critical-incident response.
Access alone does not guarantee use. Officers may avoid agency-connected services when they are uncertain about confidentiality, fear professional consequences or believe the provider will not understand police work.
A national study of U.S. law enforcement personnel found that more than 90 percent of participating officers believed stigma negatively affected help-seeking. The researchers concluded that expanding services without addressing stigma could severely limit the value of those services.
Agencies must therefore answer practical questions before launching a clinical program.
· Who will have access to treatment records?
· Under what circumstances can information be disclosed?
· Can officers seek care outside the department?
· How will fitness-for-duty evaluations remain separate from voluntary counseling?
· How will those protections be explained to employees?
The answers need to be clear before an officer is deciding whether it is safe to ask for help.
Developing suicide-prevention and early-intervention strategies
LEMHWA funding may support suicide-prevention education, awareness programs, referral pathways and other early-intervention practices.
The strongest approach is not limited to teaching personnel to recognize warning signs. Agencies also need a plan for what happens after someone expresses concern. Supervisors and peers should know:
· Whom to contact.
· How to respond to immediate risk.
· What confidential resources are available.
· How the agency will support an employee returning from treatment or an extended absence.
Families should also receive information about available resources and how to raise concerns.
A program that increases awareness but leaves personnel uncertain about what to do next may identify distress without creating a dependable path to care.
Supporting officers’ families
Law enforcement stress rarely remains within the workplace. Shift schedules, sleep disruption, repeated exposure to trauma, public scrutiny and organizational uncertainty can affect spouses, partners, children and other family members.
Family programming may include orientation for new officers and their households, education about common occupational stress reactions, counseling referrals, relationship support and information about recognizing changes in behavior.
Including families is not simply an added benefit. Family members are often among the first to notice that an officer is struggling. They should not have to wait for a crisis to learn whom they can call or what assistance is available.
Training leaders and supervisors
Many departments begin with general wellness training for the workforce. That can be useful, but supervisors and command staff need additional preparation.
Frontline supervisors frequently observe changes in attendance, behavior, performance or interpersonal relationships before an employee formally requests assistance. They need to know how to begin a supportive conversation, make an appropriate referral, respond to a possible crisis and protect the employee from unnecessary disclosure.
Command staff also shape whether the program is trusted. Their budget decisions, personnel practices and everyday language communicate whether wellness is treated as an operational responsibility or as a temporary initiative.
A grant is not a mental health policy
Federal funding can help an agency start a program, but the presence of a program does not necessarily mean personnel can or will use it.
In a national study of 3,994 U.S. police officers, employee assistance programs, peer support, chaplaincy and formal or informal debriefings were among the most common wellness resources. Officers who used services often viewed them as effective, particularly those experiencing psychological distress. Yet help-seeking stigma remained a concern, and experiences differed by factors including gender, years of service and agency size.
This is why an agency’s police mental health policy matters as much as its list of services.
A credible policy should address confidentiality, access, clinical qualifications, peer team standards, supervisor responsibilities, crisis response, family involvement, evaluation and long-term funding. It should also examine whether existing administrative practices discourage help-seeking.
For example, an agency cannot credibly encourage voluntary counseling while allowing widespread uncertainty about who will learn that an officer sought care. Nor can it build trust if employees believe that asking for help will automatically jeopardize a specialized assignment, promotion or career.
The most effective grant proposals will connect proposed activities to a larger organizational strategy. Rather than beginning with “What wellness program should we purchase?” agencies can ask:
What needs are present in our workforce? Where do personnel currently turn for help? What barriers prevent earlier care? Which employees and family members are not being reached? What policies need to change? How will we know whether the program is working?
Those questions lead to more useful investments than selecting a program because it is familiar or easy to implement.
Using LEMHWA as a catalyst for systems change
LEMHWA gives departments an opportunity to build infrastructure that may otherwise remain unfunded. It can help a small agency establish its first comprehensive wellness program or allow a more experienced department to close gaps in services, strengthen clinical partnerships and expand support to families or civilian personnel.
The funding is most valuable when it produces lasting organizational capacity.
That means adopting policies that survive leadership transitions, training more than one group of peer supporters, collecting meaningful data, budgeting for future years and creating partnerships that continue after the federal award ends. It also means evaluating more than participation numbers.
Agencies should consider whether employees know where to seek help, trust the confidentiality of available services, receive assistance without unnecessary delay and believe leadership supports help-seeking in practice. Those measures provide a clearer view of whether a program is changing access and culture.
The Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act did not solve the mental health challenges facing law enforcement. No single federal law or grant program could.
It did, however, establish a durable policy principle: protecting officer mental health is a legitimate responsibility of law enforcement agencies and the governments that support them.
Departments can use that principle, and the funding attached to it, to move beyond stand-alone wellness activities. They can build systems in which support is accessible, confidential, professionally sound and integrated into the way the organization operates.
For agencies considering a LEMHWA application, the central question is not only what the grant will fund, what the department wants to be different when the funding period ends.
References
Drew, J. M., & Martin, S. (2021). A national study of police mental health in the USA: Stigma, mental health and help-seeking behaviors. Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 36, 295–306. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-020-09424-9
Drew, J. M., & Martin, S. (2023). Mental health and wellness initiatives supporting United States law enforcement personnel: The current state-of-play. Journal of Community Safety and Well-Being, 8(1), 12–22. https://doi.org/10.35502/jcswb.298
Milliard, B. (2020). Utilization and impact of peer-support programs on police officers’ mental health. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 1686. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01686
Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. (2019). Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act: Report to Congress. U.S. Department of Justice. https://portal.cops.usdoj.gov/resourcecenter/Home.aspx?id=COPS-P370&page=detail&utm_source
Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act of 2017, Pub. L. No. 115-113, 131 Stat. 2276 (2018). https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/PLAW-115publ113?utm_source