DonateChaplainUSA, a John Cooley legacy project.
About This Project
The family needs immediate support at the door, the department needs clear decisions in the chaos, and the community is already watching.
Because these tragedies are rare, most agencies lack institutional memory for a line-of-duty death. They are left navigating complex logistics, benefits, and protocols while processing overwhelming grief.
Aftermath bridges that gap. Built on thirty years of John Cooley’s field-tested protocols, it provides leadership and chaplains with the missing roadmap before crisis strikes.
Who it serves
For any agency that loses one of its own — to line-of-duty death, suicide, trauma, or public loss.
Six domains, covered in advance
The worst time to figure out what to do is when you are already in the middle of it.
About John Cooley
For a decade, Cooley served as the Officer-in-Charge of the LAPD’s Employee Assistance Unit — personally overseeing how the nation’s second-largest police department responded when one of its own was lost. In that role, he planned and conducted more than 80 police funerals and memorial services, including 21 line-of-duty deaths: 18 for the LAPD and three for neighboring California agencies.
He saw what worked. He also made mistakes — and he has never stopped thinking about them. In a field where every error is paid for by a grieving family or a department in crisis, those lessons became the most valuable thing he had to teach.
He believes a funeral can heal. That conviction — and everything it cost him to earn it — is what Aftermath exists to carry forward.
Watch & Listen
Scroll to explore all six videos.
For years, Cooley traveled the country conducting seminars for chiefs, command staff, chaplains, and agency leaders — teaching what he had learned and, just as importantly, what had gone wrong. He covered the full scope: pre-planning, family care, death notification, funeral protocol, and departmental recovery. What the manuals leave out. What mistakes teach when manuals fail.
John Cooley identified the problems that undermine a department’s worst day — and the solutions that prevent them. We offer both here: sixteen posts distilled from thirty years of field experience.
Sixteen Posts · Field-Tested Protocols · Checklists
Showing all 16 articles
John Cooley learned to distinguish arranging an event from serving the people inside it. The difference begins with listening and continues months and years after the burial.
Read article 3 min readTwo young officers needed something their sergeant never offered: permission to be human. The hardest calls don’t end when the shift does.
Read article 4 min readThe question is not how much can we do — but how much do we want to do. Real preparation demands more than a protocol on a shelf.
Read article 3 min readA police funeral is one of the most visible and vulnerable settings a department will ever manage. Security cannot be improvised the morning of the service.
Read article 3 min readAt his father’s funeral, a seventeen-year-old heard eulogies about a man he did not recognize. A quiet reckoning with what officers sometimes leave at the station.
Read article 5 min readA trash bag for personal property. A widow put on hold. Every procedure sends a message — the question is whether it is the one you meant.
Read article 4 min readJohn Cooley met families the evening before their appointment to explain the questions and decisions ahead. Preparation gave them room to think before anyone asked for an answer.
Read article 3 min readTen years and dozens of funerals, reduced to one principle: “If not me, who?” It is the difference between offering lip service and providing service.
Read article 5 min readA widow had to pay for her husband’s funeral herself — not because resources didn’t exist, but because no one on the planning team knew to ask.
Read article 3 min readEvery chief must decide what a retired officer’s service deserves — and that decision must be made before the phone call arrives. Protocol, not improvisation.
Read article 4 min readA borrowed protocol can miss the structure, resources, and people of the department that must use it.
Read article 2 min readA useful protocol helps a coordinator find what matters when time and attention are scarce.
Read article 3 min readThe first people told about an officer’s death need the same compassion we prepare to offer the family.
Read article 3 min readKnowing a family’s private circumstances is a responsibility—not permission to share them.
Read article 4 min readA death outside the line of duty still leaves a family and a department needing support.
Read article 3 min readAfter the service, review the work and remember the people who carried it.
Read article 3 min read
The Checklist – that humblest of quality-control devices is key in managing complicated, once in a lifetime events like a police funeral.
The equivalent to a pilot’s or surgeon’s checklist – a CRISIS CHECKLIST offers police leaders a lifetime of experience in ready to use checklist form.
Compiled by one of the nation’s foremost authorities on managing a police funeral, each checklist is designed to help police leaders master the myriad of decisions they face following a line of duty death.
“The volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.”Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto
The question John Cooley returned to in every planning meeting, every family notification, every funeral where something could go wrong and someone had to make sure it didn’t.
ChaplainUSA Blog
