ASSISTED SUICIDE

This study describes historical, personality, behavioral, and situational factors of law enforce-ment–assisted suicides, which are also known as suicide-by-cop (SbC) subjects. These factors were then used to compare differences between SbC subjects who successfully forced officers to shoot them and those subjects who were unsuccessful. SbC subjects appear to share several risk factors with other suicide victims. This study detected some differences in the characteristics of the SbC subjects who were successful in forcing the officers to intervene with lethal force and those who were not. Substance abuse, previous suicide attempts, stressful life events, length of residency in the location of the incident, and homicidal conversation during the SbC incident did have weak relationships with the outcome of the incident. Suicide attempts using law enforcement officers, more commonlyknown as suicide by cop (SbC), have received very little attention from researchers. Perhaps this sparsity is due to the perceived small number of cases, as noted by Alan Berman, president of the American Association of Suicidology (Lewan, 1998). Although his conclusion may reflect the perceptions of suicidologists, the limited research that has been conducted on law enforcement–assisted suicides suggests that the phenomenon may be more prevalent than is generally real-ized. For instance, an examination of 384 officer-involved shootings in Los Angeles County between the years 1987 and 1997 found that approximately 10 % of the victims met criteria for SbC (Scoville, 1998). These numbers do not indicate the impact that these types o