Smith goes to class to be a leader
and learns to be a listener

Ray Smith of Facilities Maintenance Organization, center, hangs out with fellow chaplain Harold Scott and Oak Ridge police officer Don Johnson. Photo by Tommy Maxwell

Ray Smith likes to be involved with people and encourage them. He does that in his job at Y-12 where he is deputy manager of the Facilities Management Organization. This organization provides services to all of Y-12’s other organizations and has formed a partnership with the Atomic Trades and Labor Council, which is proving to be a successful approach to involve everyone in the organization in working safely and improving customer service. He also gets involved with people as a volunteer police chaplain for the Oak Ridge Police Department.

The volunteer chaplains often ride along on patrol and spend time with the officers in other ways. In that way, the chaplains give police officers a sounding board to talk about their work and release some of the stress of a job where what seem like routine calls can turn into life-threatening confrontations.

Smith’s interest in being a volunteer police chaplain started when he was a participant in the Leadership Oak Ridge class of 1998. Leadership Oak Ridge is the local leadership development program led by Carol Smallridge and supported by the Oak Ridge Chamber of Commerce and other local Oak Ridge organizations. Leadership Oak Ridge class members are allowed to spend time with one of the participating civic organizations. Smith chose the Oak Ridge Police Department.

“We were allowed to ride with the police officers for a portion of a shift. We got to see first-hand the kinds of situations and people that police officers encounter and must deal with everyday. It’s very high stress work where almost any call they respond to has the potential to immediately become a life-threatening situation.

“I learned about the police chaplain’s program from the police officers, and about the same time I learned that a long-time friend of mine, Harold Scott, had moved to Oak Ridge and was activating a police chaplains group here. I decided that was something I could do that would help the Police Department,” Smith said.

Police chaplains are there to minister to the officers. Chaplains also help officers in other ways such as assisting with transportation of a person who has been picked up for an offense and needs a way to get home or, on the other hand, delivering the heartbreaking news that a family member has been killed or severely injured in an accident.

“If there’s a death and the officers have to deliver that news, they often will ask the chaplains to go along to help the people get through the immediate impact of that tragedy on the family.

“It boils down to being a good listener. I’m there to listen. They need someone they can talk to who is not a member of their chain of command, not someone who is there to critique their performance, not someone who has any other interest except listening to them, understanding the job they do and valuing them both as individuals and as police officers. Police officers are a close knit group of people. They seldom talk about their jobs with people outside that circle,” Smith said.

As part of the police chaplains work, Smith recently completed a three-day training session by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Critical Incident Stress Debriefing. The intent of the class is to teach the volunteer chaplains and police officers to deal with the aftermath of a violent confrontation or other incidents in which lives are lost, especially where officers have been involved in the fatal shooting of suspects or where fellow officers have been killed in the line of duty.

“Psychologists have found that if the officers do not deal with the psychological trauma and stress of critical incidents within 72 hours of the event, the effects can be profound, sometimes even ending their careers as police officers,” Smith said.

“This training teaches us to ask them to describe what happened, to describe what they were thinking about, what happened to them in their mind and how they are feeling now. It’s not therapy. The chaplains are not trained therapists. We are not there to pass judgment on performance. We are there to listen and give the officers positive feedback; to let them know that what they are feeling is a normal response to an abnormal situation,” Smith said.

Smith has been at Y-12 for 28 years. He’s also an elder in the Highland View Church of Christ, where, he says, part of the responsibilities of an elder involves listening to people and “hearing their hurt and their pain.” And while Smith says the work at Y-12 is nothing like that of a police chaplain, “as a manager, I still spend a lot of time listening and encouraging people, ” he said.