Al's Morning Meeting

USA Today reports:

The California Highway Patrol (CHP) is developing training for suicide awareness and prevention after eight troopers killed themselves in eight months last year, for a total of 13 since September 2003. The CHP toll is "the largest cluster I've seen for a department that size," says Robert Douglas, executive director of the National Police Suicide Foundation.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police is circulating a proposal, obtained by USA Today, to make suicide prevention tools available to all of the nation's nearly 18,000 state and local police agencies. "Current police culture ... tends to be entirely avoidant of the issue," leaving suicidal officers with "no place to turn," a draft of the proposal says.

The Suicide Foundation says it has verified an average of 450 law-enforcement [officers'] suicides in each of the last three years, compared with about 150 officers who died annually in the line of duty. Douglas says no more than 2 percent of the nation's law enforcement agencies have prevention programs.

Suicide rates for police -- at least 18 per 100,000 -- are higher than for the general population, according to Audrey Honig, chief psychologist for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Large departments (New York City, Milwaukee) and small ones (Holland, Ohio; Lavallette, N.J.) had suicides last year.

Police departments in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Washington State Patrol are among the few agencies with comprehensive programs, including videos, brochures and posters, peer-support training, coaching on warning signs and psychological outreach.

Find a chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention by clicking here.

The Four-Primary Plan

The National Association of Secretaries of State is pushing an idea to end the mad scramble among states to move up their presidential primary dates. The association is proposing a plan that would set up four regional primaries -- one in the East, South, Midwest and West. The primaries would be held a month apart, starting in March 2008.

I have mentioned this before, and since so many big names have announced presidential campaigns or hinted they might run, this is going to be an increasingly important conversation.

Stateline.org has a story on how the regional system might work:

All states in a region would schedule their primaries on the same day. The order of the contests would rotate every presidential election year.

New Hampshire and Iowa would retain their positions as the first two states to choose a presidential nominee.

After nearly a decade of promoting the regional primary plan, secretaries of state at a convention Feb. 9 in Washington, D.C., said that, regardless of how it's done, they're interested in convincing the national Republican and Democratic parties to put the brakes on the nominating process.

Congressional Quarterly says, in recent years, some states, even heavily populated ones, have not had much influence in the primaries because the nominee had things sewn up by the time the election date rolled around. Those states are trying to "front-load" the process:

Candidates seeking to win the two small-state events that have long kicked off presidential voting will have little time to enjoy the December holidays: The Iowa caucuses are scheduled for Jan. 14, with the New Hampshire primary slated for Jan. 22.

New to this election cycle, the Democrats have set caucuses in Nevada on Jan. 19 and a South Carolina primary on Jan. 29 -- to add racial and geographical diversity to the process, and to address complaints from other states that Iowa and New Hampshire have had too much influence over the outcomes for too long.

And there is a growing concentration of contests developing on Feb. 5 that could greatly alter the nature of the process -- especially if California, the nation's most populous state, acts on a proposal favored by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to move its primary to that very early date.

Stateline.org also points out:

The Iowa caucuses are slated for Jan. 14 and New Hampshire's primary is tentatively scheduled for Jan. 22. But states with later primary election dates are threatening to push up their primaries to get in on the presidential nomination action in 2008.

Lawmakers in vote-rich states such as California, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey are considering jumping ahead and cramming their primaries [into] a single day on Feb. 5, the earliest date sanctioned by Democratic Party rules. If so, as many as 22 states could hold a primary election on the same day. Voters in at least four states already would have chosen a nominee, including Nevada and South Carolina. The whole political nominating process could be over in as little as three weeks -- nine months before the general election.

"I don't know if it's too late for 2008, but right now we have total chaos," said Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin (D), a lead proponent of regional contests.

He said a front-loaded primary schedule would mean less face-to-face interaction between candidates and voters after the early contests in sparsely populated New Hampshire and Iowa. Candidates would have to rely on expensive TV ads and mass-marketing tools to simultaneously compete in some of the nation's biggest media markets.

Here is the current national landscape of primary elections and caucuses [PDF], which is open to a lot of revision between now and then.

Al's Morning Multimedia

Finally, somebody did it. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is embedding GPS in stories and mapping its coverage. You can go to the paper's Web page and see an interactive map of its stories. Here is how the maps work.

Cool. Cheap. Useful.