LANSING — A young officer arrived at the scene of a crash that killed a family of four: mother, father, a 3-year-old and an infant.

At the time, the tragedy bothered Matt Saxton, who responded to the scene and is now executive director of the Michigan Sheriff’s’ Association.

But it was only two years later ,when he held his first-born son, that memories of the fatal crash caused him to cry.

“I can still see that family from 30 years ago,” he said.

At the time, resources to properly deal with such situations were not available to help law enforcement officers like Saxton, who was then a deputy sheriff in Calhoun County.

Saxton recalls that he just “finished that call and went to my next radio call.”

Today, many sheriffs’ offices have mental health resources like peer support programs to help their personnel after such events, Saxton said.

One is the Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) system, which helps first responders cope with traumatic situations.

“If we had a critical incident, we would activate our CISM team and allow those that were directly involved with the incident to sit down and debrief those incidents freely,” Saxton said.

“Prior to providing employee assistance programs or CISM teams and our peer support teams, first responders generally didn’t talk about those issues and kept compartmentalizing them year over year – and those things begin to add up,” Saxton said.

James Tignanelli, the president of the Police Officers Association of Michigan, said stress also can result from lengthy work hours.

“There’s a lot of overtime being demanded of people,” Tignanelli said. “It’s not uncommon for them to work 16 or 18 hours in a day. Those things will tend to make the job more difficult and, I think, it creates family problems.”

The association is a union representing law enforcement officers.

It works with Frontline Strong Together, which is based at Wayne State University and covers all 83 counties in the state.