Few jobs are more chronically stressful and dangerous.
Social workers taking a closer look at police violence report that a police officer harboring negative stereotypes and irrational beliefs about black people, the homeless, or the mentally ill (they are unpredictably aggressive and/or more likely to carry weapons), may be quicker to resort to violence when confronting these citizens. Imagine this officer is also suffering from PTSD, common features of which include reduced impulse control when feeling threatened as well as exaggerating or overreacting to perceived threats. When it comes to police violence against people of color, adding PTSD to negative racial bias in the pressurized context of police work is like adding gasoline to a fire.
Social workers say that the police have been showing increased signs of PTSD—situational hyper-reactivity, rapid onset of fear/anger/agitation, reduced impulse control, overfocusing on a perceived threat, and failing to read the larger context—raising the possibility that many more of them than we realized had been dysregulated by PTSD. A study in the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research looked at whether there’s a connection between levels of PTSD and “abusive policing,” which was defined as “the excessive or undue use of lethal and nonlethal force, excessive or undue use of threats of force,” and threats of sexual assault, psychological abuse, and “discriminatory slurs.” Researchers found that incidents of police abuse were highest in those officers who reported experiencing a “greater severity of PTSD symptoms.”
More study is needed to fully understand the severity of PTSD in police officers. However, the fact that many more are suffering from this traumatic disorder then was previously understood is an important red flag to our criminal justice professionals.
“The first thing we must do is leave hypocrisy behind. We all realize that our society needs someone to maintain order, but we send young men and women into the fray without concern for their emotional or mental welfare. Being the “sheriff” is part of our pop culture, and we embrace the ridiculous “hero” stereotypes created by Hollywood imagineers, while we’re quick to hold these same young people responsible for anything that goes wrong. That is the worst kind of hypocrisy. We must rethink society’s responsibility for policing itself and help those caught up on both sides of the criminal justice system rather than condemning them when they can’t handle the stress, we put them under,” a criminal justice social worker said.
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