We wrote earlier about the troubling case of Lexipol, the private agency that is simultaneously drafting policies for law enforcement agencies around the county and lobbying against law enforcement reform, with the ultimate goal being, at all times, to reduce costs for municipalities.
Now it’s being reported that Lexipol is behind an “officer wellness” app, CordicoShield, the ostensible purpose of which is
to provide officers with resources to address PTSD, anxiety, depression, familial adversity, social stress and substance abuse — all of which can arise because of cumulative stress and trauma associated with the job. CordicoShield is a wellness solution designed to provide a host of critical resources to help law enforcement officers learn about the behavioral health issues they may be facing, build and maintain resilience, and connect with vetted therapists and peer support team members.
Sounds lovely. Surely there couldn’t be any privacy concerns, and certainly no conflicts of interest, in having a bunch of lawyers, whose core job is to reduce liability exposure for municipalities, release an app to monitor the mental health of individual law enforcement officers. (Note: While this app is being described as an effort to “help law enforcement officers,” when Lexipol originally acquired Cordico in December of 2020, it explicitly acknowledged that the point of the app was to be “a part of every public safety agency’s risk management strategy,” where “risk management” means management of liability risk to agencies and municipalities, not to LEOs.) Surely the point of this app is to make those individual officers feel “well,” not to monitor them in areas of their lives that would normally be their own private business. All the resources are “confidential,” Lexipol says, and surely LEOs can rely on that representation, which couldn’t possibly be misleading or incomplete, or legally impossible for individual LEOS to enforce. Surely this would not be an effort by Lexipol to insert itself into the employer-employee relationship in exactly the same way it has inserted itself into the relationship between public agencies and the public.