ChaplainUSA.orgDonate
Menu

ChaplainUSA, a John Cooley legacy project.

Illustration of Sgt. John Cooley in front of an LAPD patrol car

When an officer dies in the line of duty, the clock starts immediately. The family needs someone at the door. The department needs someone making decisions. The community is already watching.

The days that follow will be amongst the most consequential and complicated in a department’s history. The problem is most departments have no institutional memory of a line-of-duty death.

About John

Thirty years. Eighty funerals. Nothing left to chance.

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.

His core conviction: a police funeral is not merely a logistical event but a ceremony with the enormous potential to heal survivors and ennoble the law enforcement profession. That conviction — and everything it cost him to earn it — is what Aftermath exists to carry forward.

“A police funeral is not merely a logistical event but a ceremony with the enormous potential to heal survivors and ennoble the law enforcement profession.”
— Sgt. John Cooley, LAPD (Ret.)

Watch & Listen

In John Cooley’s words

Scroll to explore all seven videos.

Sgt. John Cooley speaking at a law enforcement seminar

He took that knowledge to departments across America

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.

About This Project

That wisdom is now here

Aftermath gathers everything Cooley knows — protocols tested over thirty years, lessons learned from what went wrong, and the guidance he gave at seminars across the country. It covers what to do, what to avoid, who to call, what to say, when to act, and when to stop and listen.

Available to any agency. Before the call comes.

Aftermath provides clarity when confusion can do lasting harm.

Who It Serves

Built for the people who have to act

Chiefs and command staff. Chaplains and peer support teams. Officers asked to lead when their agency loses one of its own — to line-of-duty death, suicide, trauma, or public loss.

His work covers six domains every department must address in advance: pre-planning, family care, death notification, funeral protocol, departmental trauma response, and the chaplain’s command role.

Cooley’s core teaching: the worst time to figure out what to do is when you are already in the middle of it. Aftermath gives every department the chance to know before they need to.

John Cooley · Illustrated readings

Where funeral planning
goes wrong.

Nine readings on preparation, compassion, and the responsibilities that continue after the service. Drawn from John Cooley’s original writings.

Continue to the original ten-post collection ↓

The Aftermath Series

John Cooley’s Rules for Law Enforcement’s Worst Day

Ten posts distilled from thirty years of field experience — the protocols, the hard lessons, and what every department must know before the call comes.

Ten Posts  ·  Field-Tested Protocols  ·  Policefunerals.com

Honoring the Fallen

Crisis Checklists

A lifetime of experience, ready at a moment’s notice.

Sample pages from the Honoring the Fallen Walk-through Lead checklist

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.

Get started
Read the introduction

“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

An officer in dress uniform at a memorial service

Someone needs to care.
If not me, who?

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

More from Aftermath

Browse all articles →