The Unspoken Dark Side of Police Work

I watch the turmoil in society that the police killings of Mike Brown and Eric Garner have caused and I understand the situation too well. The fundamental problem is not that police go around killing people, because the vast majority of them will never even shoot their gun once in their career. The biggest problem I see is the lack of true communication between and the police and us . People do not understand why cops do what they do, why they shoot unarmed citizens and why they have shifted from protect and serve to comply or die. My goal today is to attempt to bridge the communication gap between police and us.

The reason police don’t come out and attempt to relay the information that I will is that they are too locked into their ideologies. Police forget what it’s like to be a regular person. For long time, I found myself walking lock in step with the mission of police work. The mission was all that mattered. Yes, as an officer, I had discretion on the streets. In hindsight 99% of the time my discretion fell on the side of enforcement, not understanding. Not compassion. Not improving conditions. I had a job and I did it. Many of my decisions I made on the street were against my own personal beliefs, but fell within parameters of the mission. Over time, the mission starts to take over and you realize that you are losing yourself. I arrived at a point where I realized that after years of being a cop, I just didn’t agree with nor could I continue to do the job I was hired for. When I was in the academy, I had an instructor who taught us to trust your gut. If making the arrest doesn’t feel right, for whatever reason, don’t do it. If a soccer mom has a warrant for driving on a suspended license but has a car full of kids, should you make the arrest? The law would say yes, but your gut would say no. Over time, your gut starts to echo the goals of the mission and that discretion we all had, goes right out the window. This is where police work fails all of us. The compassion and empathy a cop may feel gets shelved for the mission.

Whenever I would talk to people about being a cop, the first question I would get was “that’s pretty stressful, huh?”. I would laugh. Yes it is stressful, but not for the reasons you would think. When an officer is new to working the road and newly indoctrinated into police culture, 100% of the stress comes from your encounters on the street. You don’t know how to work a domestic battery or an armed robbery. You stress over encountering violent subjects, over how to properly investigate, over saying the wrong thing to a victim, etc. The way you perform your job and your desire to succeed in this high stress environment, is what will keep you up at night. You feel like you are part of a family who is there to help you and has your back. Over time, as you come to better understand police work and dealing with encounters, your stress shifts. After a couple years, you build confidence in your abilities and encounters on the street become less stressful. After coming to master the road, your stress shifts almost entirely to administrative stress. Dealing with supervisors, writing reports, submitting evidence properly, watching what you say in car video, dealing with complaints, making sure your gun is clean for inspection-are all examples of things that your stress comes from as opposed to dealing with bad guys. I know it seems that cops always have each others backs, but from my experience, this is anything but true. Depending on the size of the agency and the politics at the time, administration will not hesitate to discipline officers for next to nothing. I was written up once for asking another officer to cover a call in my zone because I was backed up on reports. This is the reality that cops live with. Never knowing what is going to get them in trouble next for what reason is always in a cops mind. I took a stress management course a few years ago through the department. I was caught off guard when I got to a page that said this: Years 1-3 is the honeymoon phase. Cops get in, they love it and swear they will be in for life. Years 4-5, Officers start to truly grasp the system and internal conflicts may arise. Years 6+, officers come to firmly understand the system and either choose to leave or find something else to do within the department. I couldn’t believe that a police text book said straight out that once you come to understand the system, you may want to leave.

Much of the following information comes from Dr. Kevin Gilmartin’s book, Emotional Survival For Law Enforcement. Many times, the physiological and emotional effects of the job are not felt until the officer clocks off. After experiencing the “up” phase of police work while on shift, officers head home and many times fall into the “down” phase of police work. The physiological and emotional dump which occurs when officers hit their “off” switch. When police go to work everyday, the increase in undetectable stress begins from the moment they put on the uniform. Police are in a fish bowl, every thing they do and every thing they say could be captured at any minute by an observer. Police are constantly looking over their shoulder, even when nothing is going on. Police exist in a state of hypervigilance. That constant feeling of being on edge, waiting for something to happen, looking over your shoulder, the “up” phase. Imagine waiting on an important phone call. Imagine the nervous feeling, the tension and anxiety you feel until the call comes. Now imagine that for 8-12 hours straight every day. The effects of hypervigilance I would equate to using speed. You go up and then you crash. After leaving work, the body starts to react in the “down” phase. According to Gilmartin, “Officers who experience an on-duty physiological “high” find that when they get off duty and return home, this hypervigilant reaction stops, as they literally plunge into the opposite reactions of detachment, exhaustion, apathy, and isolation.” It takes 12-18 hours for the body to return to normal after experiencing the effects of hypervigilance. But what does every cop do in that 12-18 hour period? They go back to work. This basically puts the body of the police officer in a constant state of stressful physiological flux, never fully recovering from the day before. This constant up and down is known as the “hypervigilance emotional roller coaster.” That constant feeling of being on edge, the physiological and emotional ups and downs are as destructive as any drug I have ever seen. There are short term and long term effects to the hypervigilance emotional roller coaster. Without going into too much detail, these effects can destroy the personal life of any cop who fails to address this issue. The problem, I found, is that cops don’t realize there is a problem. The majority of cops have not been taught about this nor have they read about these concepts.

Besides the physiological dangers of the roller coaster, many cops find themselves socially isolated. The bonds they form in the work place become more important, subconsciously, and old bonds with family and friends tend to fall to the wayside. The feeling that “no one gets me except other cops” can become prevalent. Cops bond through war stories, which can be on an individual level, emotionally important to an officer. No one outside of law enforcement will ever understand. As these encounters increase over time, the bond with other law enforcement typically increases and bonds with family and friends decrease. This is why cops have such a high rate of divorce. The job becomes all. Following this theme, the isolation from family and friends extends to all of society. After the first couple of years, cops might find themselves thinking that all of society is a “bunch of assholes” and other cops are the only people they can count on. I fell victim to this pretty quickly in my career. I couldn’t get enough. I would go home and listen to my radio. I would volunteer for off duty assignments. I lived the dream. The police world swallows up most cops, isolates them from their former lives and in the end, spits them back out. The point is that the combined effects of hypervigilance and the over-investment in a police career creates emotionally vulnerable individuals.

I highly recommend reading Gilmartin’s book. It sheds a light on an aspect of police work that goes virtually unspoken among police officers. When I look at the negative physiological and emotional effects of police work and then combine them with specific factors, like lack of training, it is no wonder that we have incidents like Ferguson. If we want to prevent another Ferguson, police must first address the emotional and physiological dangers of the job and implement training programs to assist officers in overcoming the negative effects of hypervigilance.

Kevin Gilmartin and the Emotional Survival Homepage – http://emotionalsurvival.com/

Articles on Hypervigilance – http://emotionalsurvival.com/articles.htm