A trauma-informed approach is needed to reduce police misconduct

Abstract

Dhanani and colleagues (2022) rightfully acknowledge the stressful nature of policing as an occupation and highlight the need to promote officer well-being, yet the authors and other scholars underestimate the role of trauma and the potential impact it has on nearly all aspects of policing. Trauma is not merely stress as industrial-organizational (I-O) and occupational health psychologists typically study it; it emerges from “an event, series of events, or set of circumstances, that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being” (SAMHSA, 2014, p. 7). The nature of police officers’ jobs requires them to experience chronic exposure to potentially psychologically traumatic events (PPTEs), that is, direct or indirect exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence (APA, 2013). Moreover, police agencies’ organizational cultures are often unsupportive at best (Dhanani et al.), and officers report very high levels of other organizational stressors including inconsistent leadership styles, bureaucratic red tape, lack of resources, unfair/inconsistent personnel practices, unsupportive peers, and unfair workload distributions (Bikos, 2020; Carleton et al., 2020; Ricciardelli et al., 2020). Organizational stressors are such a problem in policing that they are even more strongly associated with mental health disorders than are operational stressors, even after controlling for exposure to PPTEs (Carleton et al., 2020). This confluence of conditions is the perfect recipe for the onset of posttraumatic stress injuries (PTSIs), including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and subclinical markers of trauma, both of which are abundant among police (Syed et al., 2020). Indeed, police and other public safety personnel have an estimated 20–37% PTSD prevalence rate, compared to the general population at 3.5% (APA, 2013; Marmar et al., 2006). I-O psychologists may be prone to dismissing trauma and these statistics because they seem to belong within the domain of clinical psychology, yet we assert that it is essential for I-O psychologists to incorporate clinical and neurobiological evidence on trauma if we aim to contribute to the science and practice of impacting police misconduct. Moreover, we believe that interdisciplinary collaborations—such as those among I-O psychologists, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurobiologists—are essential to address the complex problem of how to reduce racialized violence and other forms of police misconduct. We thus begin with a brief overview of the neurobiological nature of trauma before outlining a trauma-informed approach.