Search results

Officer wellness has become a popular area of focus in recent years. This purpose of this research is to examine the impact of a police training program, Blue Courage, on officer (n = 174) attitudes toward mental and emotional wellness.

Borrowing from the field of medicine, a data linkage approach is employed to match pre- and post-test surveys from officers who completed the training. This research uses a single-group pre-test post-test design to estimate the impact of the training, and a lagged dependent variable (LDV) ordinary least squares (OLS) model to compare the impact of the training across different types of officers.

Participants who completed the training had more positive attitudes toward mental and emotional wellness at post-test. Officers of higher rank and officers who worked in non-urban departments saw larger changes in attitudes toward wellness. Cynical officers, identified in the literature as withdrawing from training and failing to participate, saw comparable change in attitudes to less cynical officers.

Despite a relative inability of wellness training to work with police officers historically, this research suggests that certain approaches employed by Blue Courage, specifically by targeting officer cynicism, may improve officer engagement in training and improve training results.

The purpose of this paper is to review current research on police officer mental health and to explore the reasons why police officers do not seek mental health treatment.

A comprehensive, systematic search of multiple academic databases (e.g. EBSCO Host) were used to identify studies conducted within the USA, identified definitions of first responders, identified the type of duty-related trauma expected by police officers, how influential stigma is amongst the police culture and what current intervention strategies are employed to assist police officer mental health wellness.

This research was conducted to identify police officer trauma-related mental health and the stigma behind seeking treatment. The research highlights job-related trauma and stress leads to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, substance use disorder and suicide or suicide ideation. The stigma behind seeking mental health treatment is associated with law enforcement organizations and environmental factors. Organizational factors include occupational stress characteristics such as day-to-day of the job and environmental factors such as abiding by social and law enforcement culture ideologies. Further research should be conducted to understand why law enforcing agencies and personnel are unknowingly promoting stigmas.

This is the most current meta-review of research examining the severity of mental health in police officers, the stigma behind acquiring treatment and innovative treatment approaches in police officer mental health. This study will provide a useful resource for those researchers interested in continuing to examine the different aspects of police officer mental health and how to potently approach innovative interventions to help law enforcement personals mental wellness thrive in a field where trauma is experienced daily.

Using online survey data from a sample of 440 police officers in California throughout May 2020, the current study collected time-sensitive information on officers' perceptions and departmental experiences in the wake of the pandemic. It examined officers' perceptions of agency responsivity as well as their perceptions of morale, stress and risk following agency responses and changes in policy patterns, service delivery innovations and other administrative challenges.

COVID-19 had a tremendous impact on the law enforcement community, who continued to work and adapt in order to provide public safety. During the first few months of the pandemic, a number of national data collection efforts set out to understand what police agencies, at the organizational-level, were doing to address the crisis. Largely missing from these initial discussions were the perspectives of individual officers, particularly how they felt about their respective departments ensuring safety and balancing risk.

Results from ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions found that the number of departmental changes made in the wake of COVID-19 that reduced police–public contact was associated with (1) increased levels of perceived agency responsivity to officer needs (i.e. balancing officer safety, taking active steps to maintain officers' mental health) and (2) reduced levels of perceived negative outlook (e.g. stress, low morale, danger/risk). Policy implications and the importance of police executives' decisions during crisis are discussed.

This study is one of the first, to the authors’ knowledge, to examine perceptions of policing during the pandemic from an individual officer point of view rather than an organizational standpoint.

The purpose of this paper is to review the extant published literature using traditional criminological theories in an effort to explain police misconduct.

This paper reflects a narrative meta-review of through a search of several academic databases (e.g. Criminal Justice Abstracts, Criminology: A SAGE Full Text Collection, EBSCO Host and PsychInfo). Twenty-nine studies, across six theoretical perspectives, were identified and reviewed.

The extant research generally suggests that traditional criminological theory is useful in explaining misconduct.

The findings call on agencies to continually strengthen their recruiting and hiring processes to select recruits with suitable characteristics, and to improve their early warning systems to detect officers with patterns of problematic behavior. Also, the findings call for multiple avenues of future scholarship, namely, in theory development/integration and in refining the measurement of police misconduct.

This paper will be useful for researchers who wish to further explore the etiology of misconduct, and for police administrators who wish to reduce the prevalence of such behavior.

A central tenet for safer communities is having a healthy police force. This study aims to understand what police forces should and need to be doing to safeguard police officer wellness by examining the existing scientific evidence on police well-being.

Drawing on the Scale for the Assessment of Narrative Articles, this paper has adopted a case study approach to examine effective practices and approaches for safeguarding police officer wellness.

The research presented in this paper yields fours themes, providing contemporary evidence for responding to and safeguarding police officer wellness.

This paper yields several implications for policy and practice. An evidence-based approach to be adopted by policing organisations for dealing with police officer wellness. An improvement to police officer support and prevention of stigma towards those who are suffering from poor mental health. Training for police managers in dealing with police officer wellness. Continuous monitoring and evaluation of police organisation efficacy in dealing with police officer wellness.

Much has been written about police officer mental health and well-being over the past decade, yet arguably, there has been limited attention paid to assessing the evidence and making sense of what this growing volume of research is advocating. This paper seeks to address this deficit in the research and provide a review of the published research with regards to police wellness.

This study explored the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on rural municipal police in Pennsylvania.

The authors surveyed rural police chiefs and sworn officers to inquire about their intra-department organizational capabilities, police-community relations, well-being practices, and how these strategies may have developed since March 2020.

The pandemic affected rural police officers and rural policing strategies in many ways. Moreover, existing challenges to limited rural police budgets were exacerbated suggesting a need for more flexible budgetary capacities, access to wellness resources were limited suggesting better access to these resources and preparation for responding to public health emergencies was limited suggesting more complete training is warranted.

This study draws attention to the unique experiences of rural municipal police across one state by capturing specific areas of concern throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

Law enforcement is a dangerous profession not only due to assaults, accidents and homicides but also due to health risks. This study examined trends in the national frequency and rate of law enforcement job-related illness deaths in the United States over a 22-year period (1997–2018).

Data were obtained from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF) on death frequencies related to health issues at work. Death rates were based on the total number of police officers in the United States [rate = (frequency/population at risk) × 100,000]. Trends were examined using standardized regression.

A total of 646 deaths were attributed to job-related illness. There was a significant upward trend in overall job-related illness deaths (frequency analyses: β = 0.88, p < 0.0001; rate analyses: β = 0.82, p ≤ 0.0001) mainly driven by a significant increase in 911 cancer deaths (frequency analyses: β = 0.88, p < 0.0001; rate analyses: β = 0.88, p ≤ 0.0001). Nearly 82 percent of circulatory deaths were from a heart attack, with an average death age of 46.5 years.

Deaths were not included if they failed to meet medical requirements of the NLEOMF. The data are descriptive, do not estimate risk and should be interpreted cautiously.

Police wellness programs may help to reduce the danger of deaths associated with job-related illness.

This is among the first studies to examine frequency and rate of police health–related deaths due to job exposures.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive literature review of prior empirical studies that have examined early intervention (EI) systems or programs in policing.

A systematic literature search of various government and academic databases (e.g. Emerald, Google Scholar, National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS), Sage, Taylor & Francis and Wiley) was conducted.

This systematic review identified eight EI studies that matched the selection criteria. Of these, two are multiagency studies and six are individual agency studies. Findings across studies are generally positive but overall relatively inconsistent with regard to EI systems' effectiveness.

Police agencies benefit in identifying and addressing at-risk officers to ensure police accountability and officer safety, health and wellness. This research is invaluable for optimizing how EI systems can use agency data for such predictions.

This state-of-the-art review on EI systems in policing is the first of its kind. EI systems have been implemented by many police agencies, yet a limited number of empirical studies have been conducted. This systematic review will be useful for researchers who wish to further explore how EI systems are utilized and whether EI systems are successful/effective.

Burnout is an issue affecting not only individual officers, but also the agencies they work for and the communities they serve. Despite its prevalence, there is limited evidence for effective interventions that address officer burnout. This study aims to advance this area of study by identifying organizational factors associated with police burnout. By identifying these factors, stakeholders interested in officer wellness will have more clearly defined targets for intervention.

Self-report data were gathered from US police officers partitioned into command staff (n = 125), detective (n = 41), and patrol officer (n = 191) samples. Bootstrapped correlations were calculated between 20 organizational stressors and officer burnout.

Findings revealed several shared organizational stressors associated with burnout regardless of role (command staff, detective, patrol officer), as well as several role-specific organizational stressors strongly associated with burnout. Together, these findings suggest utility in considering broad-based organizational interventions and role-specific interventions to affect burnout amidst varying job duties.

Primary limitations to consider when interpreting these results include sample homogeneity, unequal subsample sizes, cross-sectional data limitations, and the need for implementation of interventions to test the experimental effects of reducing identified organizational stressors.

This study may provide command staff and consulting parties with targets to improve departmental conditions and officer burnout.

This represents the first study to evaluate organizational stressors by their strength of association with burnout across a stratified police sample.