Employing Police Training as a Tool of Preventive Intervention of Police Complex Trauma: A Brief Report from a Module Presented at the 2011 European Police College Train the Trainers Seminar

Abstract

Currently, the focus and information about training police officers relates primarily to physical and mental fitness and ways to help others. There are very few resources and almost no information available to guide police officers about ways to handle loss and trauma. Officers respond to critical incidents that have the potential to be traumatic and that can precipitate a traumatic response that, in turn, may negatively affect their physical and mental health. The unique nature of a career in law enforcement is that trauma as inevitable and an expected part of the job and that unresolved effects of trauma have the potential to accumulate over a whole career. Police trainers/educators are in a unique position to address this because all police officers are often first-line responders and therefore, first line helpers. The authors provided a module related to training about trauma to European police educators participating in the 2011 "Train the Trainers" 2nd step seminar held in the Police University in Muenster, Germany. They introduced three interventions (education, journal writing, and a mindfulness/awareness exercise) to discern what was effective and possibly could be implemented into police training. It was clear that police trainers made the distinction that they are not therapists, but that they can be a supportive blue brother or sister to their trainees. The principal aim was to create bridges between law enforcement and mental health professionals so that the services developed and offered by mental health professionals could be useful and "palatable" to police officers.

New Directions in Police Academy Training: A Call to Action

“…Moreover, previous research has shown that a combination of lectures and theoretical classroom discussions along with practical application of theoretical knowledge into a simulated training environment has been proven to be quite efficient in improving learning, health promotion, job performance, and officers' capacity to translate theoretical knowledge into police practice. For instance, such training programs were developed for experienced police trainers to help them incorporate resilience promotion techniques in their police training curricula with police trainees [5,6]. Analogously, effective results have been found in previous studies with special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams where SWAT officers were taught about resilience promotion in both a classroom learning environment and a simulated reality training environment; to this end, SWAT officers who incorporated the learning materials into both classroom and simulated reality environments showed a substantially improved capacity to manage challenges on both realistic training environment as well as real life police work [7][8][9][10][11][12][13].…”