Police Accountability Is Not Enough

I don’t know about you, but I am sick and tired of all these police shootings and the ongoing pattern of police overreach. We constantly see viral videos showing police brutality, police losing their cool and repeated patterns of unprofessional and downright unethical behavior. The wake of police violence has left countless dead, and while community outrage is at an all time high, no one is asking the right questions.

Everyone is calling for police accountability but accountability is not enough. When there is a problem, in life, we look for solutions, however, when one does not recognize the root causes, the solution will remain a mystery. Such is the case with the modern state of police violence. No one out there is talking about the root causes or how to overcome them. Do you really believe that the police involved in these barbaric incidents are evil? Do you really believe that they look to hurt people? I assure you that is not the case. When one enters into police work, they are typically well adjusted, have to pass rigorous psychological exams and live normal lives like you and me. Without attempting to make an overly broad generalization; police work creates monsters.

Regardless of who you are before, once you put on the uniform and even before, you begin the process of indoctrination to police culture. You form bonds with the people you work with, they become family and slowly, they become your only family. This is a step toward feelings of isolation that police officers encounter, often wondering why, not seeing the shift from one of us to one of them. Add in emotional stresses, physical stresses, and psychological swings resulting from daily repetition of hyper- vigilance and the crash every officer experiences when they get home, and over time you have a powder keg.

Several years ago, I read a book called Emotional Survival For Law Enforcement, By Dr. Kevin Gilmartin. This book changed my life and opened my eyes to the destructive nature of police work and the negative effects it has on the emotional, physiological and psychological state of the officer. I had been on the road for 7 or 8 years at this point and by the time I reached page 4, I was in tears. I felt as though the author had been spying on my life and wrote this book about me. I had fallen into almost every one of the emotional and psychological pitfalls of police work. This played a major role in my exit from the criminal justice system. In short, police enter into a state of hyper-vigilance when they come to work and they crash when get off work. Imagine the effects of methamphetamine; lifts you up and then you crash. The effects of hyper-vigilance are eerily similar to the effects of crashing on drugs, and the long term effects of this daily cycle result in emotionally unstable people. The shocking thing I found after coming to understand these concepts, was that almost no other cop I had asked had ever heard of these ideas and ALL of them were tangled in their web.

While it is difficult to relay the importance of these concepts and the result they have on police behavior, I can say with certainty that asking for accountability while ignoring the root causes, will get us nowhere. People need to start asking the right questions like WHY did this cop behave that way? WHAT led to this decision to kill? And most importantly, HOW can we prevent this kind of behavior before it manifests a problem? The answers to these questions are simple. The implementation of training programs in police departments which covers these topics is the hard part, as police first have to recognize that they have a problem, and thus far that has not happened.

For more information on Emotional Survival For Law Enforcement and Dr. Kevin Gilmartin, please visit http://emotionalsurvival.com