Things that go bump in the night
Or why resilience is not the key to police mental wellbeing
This post was originally published on our consultancy blog on January 7 2019.
I write to know what I think.
At least, to know what I think with clarity.
When I undertook my first ride-along with Devon and Cornwall police back in September, something unintentionally borne from my rape and further random physical assault, and sat down for briefing, I had no intention of writing about my experience; I simply felt moved to; the only way I know how to write. I had many thoughts in my head and I needed to ‘put them down’.
When I hit ‘publish’ a few days later, I thought nothing of it; envisaged the only ones to read it would be my readers and the Superintendent who had helped arrange my shift. How naïve.
Not only did many officers and police staff begin to follow me on social media with everyone from RDOs to Chief Inspectors from Devon and Cornwall to the Met but many of those began privately engaging with me about mental health. They (the majority of whom being men) began to confide in me about their own struggles as frontline and senior officers whilst simultaneously asking me how they could help colleagues and officers under their command. I was blown away by the unexpected reaction and saddened to hear of so many officers, regardless of rank, who were suffering in silence but if I were surprised at the online attention my article was receiving, it would be nothing compared to the phone call I received a couple of weeks later.
In mid-October I was invited to attend a closed meeting at headquarters to speak in front of several high-ranking officers, including the Deputy Chief Constable, to discuss both my experience of reporting sexual assault and my views of mental health of frontline officers, with particular focus on men. And though my voice trembled with nerves and adrenaline, I spoke for 30 minutes before taking 15 minutes of questions to a room so quiet you could have heard a pin drop and walked out shaking hands with senior officers in their blues calling me ‘brave‘, ‘strong‘ and ‘inspirational‘, everything I do not believe myself to be, being assured that what I had shared with them would mean a better service for future victims of sexual violence and their officers’ mental wellbeing. As I write this piece, after invitation, I’m now a few weeks into co-writing a paper (the first of several potentially) with a Superintendent addressing mental health of frontline officers, with particular focus on men/masculinity whilst also advising the service with blunt discussions around mental illness of frontline officers, vulnerability of both police officers and public, and trauma-care of sexual violence victims.
I initially sat down to write this piece about my second ride-along (22nd December) – the things I witnessed and the conversations I’d had – but the more I wrote, the more the direction of it changed and as such, I now feel it necessary to discuss resilience within the context of mental health and policing because what my conversations with officers (both on shifts and those who have reached out to me on and offline to discuss their mental health) has allowed me to realise is that many, regardless of considering themselves to suffer with mental ill-health, are suffering with burnout – ‘frustration fatigue‘ as I call it – and that the job itself now both curates and nurtures poor mental health for many (whether or not an officer already suffers with a mental illness) and resilience, or lack thereof, is both a cause and effect of it.
There is much talk in corporate workplace mental health policies and plans of ‘resilience’ as the antidote to poor mental health; the ability to quickly recover, both mentally and emotionally, from difficult situations to prevent a detrimental effect on our emotional and mental wellbeing.
Resilience is something that is often promoted to employees with the suggestion that solely improving it will ease or even cure mental ill-health (or prevent it developing) but what many leaders fail to acknowledge is that by attempting to solely promote resilience as the underlying key to better mental wellbeing of employees, not only allows the individual to feel that they are somehow ‘weaker’ or ‘failing’ if they are unable to appear or be as resilient as others, failing to recognise that police training and the job itself already makes them some of the most resilient people in society, but that one of the key factors to resilience is time for recovery from emotional and/or mental trauma which the police do not have the luxury of.
Resilience is a game of Jenga. The initial tower we build is made from self-worth within emotional intelligence and though it may lose some pieces, wobble or even crumble over time, the foundation, if only a few bricks, remains steady so that we can rebuild. If our towers are made from broken, missing pieces – negativity (public criticism/lack of prosecutions etc.) – we have no solid foundation to rebuild which is why I consistently advocate the power of praise. It doesn’t mean that we fawn over every positive action a person makes but appropriately recognise effort and hard work without presuming the person in question knows they’ve done well and are not in need of recognition.
When I was randomly physically assaulted, I was shown such compassion and got to thank my PC for her help and hard work; she even supervised me on this recent ride-along; to have her remind me of my strength on a day it faltered meant everything! Similarly, I was able to thank Will* for the profound effect he had had on me after he supervised my first ride-along. Though I can’t yet explain why, my shift with him had a huge knock-on effect that helped me take powerful steps in my recovery from sexual assault.
Both officers epitomise good police in as much as to praise them surprises them because they are not only ‘just doing their jobs‘ but because it is who they are without their uniforms which makes it even more important to thank and praise them. Quite simply, being themselves will stay with me for a long time for many reasons and it is important both to myself and them to acknowledge that impact.
The problem with encouraging so much resilience amongst officers, without continual positive reinforcement by management and leaders, is that it creates a damaging by-product; compartmentalisation. Police do this naturally (as is expected of them), out of necessity as they move from job to job but there is only so much space in our mental Pandora’s Boxes to hold trauma. It’s why so many of us in society self-medicate with self-destructive, yet socially-acceptable behaviours, such as excessive alcohol, tobacco, sex, food and exercise; because it is painful to face negative thoughts and emotions and we quite naturally want to suppress and avoid them. Many of us will experience emotional and/or mental crises in our lives; the problem with compartmentalisation of them particularly within the context of policing is that whilst officers are trained to control and calm other peoples crises, when they experience one themselves they can often not only struggle to recognise it for what it is but fail to seek help for it believing themselves to be failures for needing to given that they are the ones we call for help.
Grief, for example, is a mental and emotional crisis that requires time to work through; each passing day after that loss, you feel a little more accepting of the pain because you are not consistently faced with death. The police do not have the luxury of time to work through their ‘grief’ and I don’t talk about grief in the traditional sense but all the other life circumstances and abrupt changes that replicate those very difficult thoughts and emotions. The brutal realisation of the fragility of life when you attend a fatal RTC. The despondence of receiving physical and verbal abuse for the 5th shift running. The devastating disappointment that you didn’t get the promotion you worked so hard for simply due to budget cuts.
There is not a job out there that doesn’t better epitomise the philosophy of ‘death by a thousand paper cuts‘ and that is even before you consider all the other factors which have a detrimental impact on resilience and mental health such as the necessity of lone-working and loss of informal socialising spaces such as canteens and bars. Our job as a society therefore isn’t to tell our officers and those under our command to get better at applying first aid but to do everything in our power to prevent the need to administer first aid to begin with and that starts with positive reinforcement at frontline level and ends with law-makers in Government.
There are many components to resilience but a fundamental principle is confidence or good self-esteem which comes from self-awareness within emotional intelligence and setting (and achieving) realistic goals. Police have to feel and be confident in their abilities and that of each other’s at operational level and, in turn, the Criminal Justice System (CJS) which simultaneously compliments and completes their efforts. If our judicial system continually undermines an officers’ ability to be confident that their hard work at frontline level will be rewarded with an appropriate and successful conviction, it leaves them feeling jaded. More so, police have the added anxiety of knowing that they themselves can be prosecuted for simply doing their job. If police fear that their lawful actions will result in personal prosecutions, they will lose their confidence to complete the most basic of tasks for fear of career and judicial repercussions. That, in turn, prevents them from taking calculated risks which could lead to avoidance of appropriate arrests and life-saving actions. You can’t ask or expect officers to be resilient within the current economic framework of the job when it habitually impedes it.
The police, as an institution, is an evolving entity which consistently seeks to modernise itself through the people it employs to the crime they target as a reflection of the ever-changing technology, society and crime it finds itself governing but they can only modernise within the archaic framework of our CJS which is still dictated by race, class and gender of those who sit in power. Until we have a judicial system founded and nurtured by officials and laws that accurately reflect the diversity and crimes of the society in which it attempts to regulate, we will continue to fail both civilians and officers of the court who seek to protect us with it. That failure is never more apparent than when you begin to look into statistics of assaults against officers and the lack of convictions/sentencing the assailants receive.
When you assault an officer you do not assault the person under the uniform but the institution that they represent and judicial sentences need to reflect that. When you assault an officer you do so precisely because of what and who they are; officers of the court. By that definition, it is of itself, a hate crime. If the CJS does not reflect the severity of the assailants actions and instil judicial fear in those who would dare to commit such acts, they dismiss the polices’ authoritarian standing within society. How are the police supposed to command respect of its people and public when the CJS passively and often wilfully seeks to undermine them through lenient (or lack of) sentencing, whilst the 4th estate sensationalises and inaccurately reports police interactions/statistics and encourages the public to vilify them for taking meal breaks in uniform?
And though you may think the lack of judicial confidence is simply an issue of the CJS not appropriately sentencing members of the public for whatever crimes they commit, it also comes down to budget cuts; the painful irony that police simply do not have the level of staffing required to even arrest many of whom, at the lower end of the Threat Harm Risk assessment, they wish to, forcing them as an institution to tolerate behaviour and crimes that years ago would have landed many in a cell or even prison. Frontline officers are now left to ‘pick their battles‘, not because they don’t feel someone is deserving of arrest but often because they can’t afford to lose the arresting officer(s) for the hour(s) it takes to fill out necessary paperwork and find a custody suite that isn’t in another county because their own cells are full. More and more officers are forced to accept escalating aggressive and violent public disorder behaviour for no other reason than a lack of arrest is easier to justify and forcibly accept than the time required to fill 13 pages of paperwork for taser and cuff use and 30 mile round trip to find an open custody cell but when police fail to make arrests for verbally and physically aggressive behaviour of civilians toward police, they (against their wishes) set a dangerous precedent that such behaviour is acceptable and without consequence; free speech should not mean free of consequence.
Every time we attempted – and struggled – to open and close the van door whilst on my ride-along, I couldn’t help but realise just how much equipment and even the station itself was broken and no longer fit for purpose. I was even told that a large motor company offered a deal for new police vehicles but were rejected because it could be perceived by the public that they ‘had too much money’. Whilst we could (and do) as a society, laugh that off, it speaks to a far larger issue; that those in governmental and societal power do not appreciate the common sense approach that to invest in the police (or the emergency sector as a whole) from its equipment to its people is a wider, preventative investment in society. The reason we read so many local and national headlines and tweets from politicians and the public casually blaming the police for not addressing small criminal infractions (which are often gateway crimes and escalating behaviour), failing to recognise that police have neither the time or staffing levels required to convict every offence despite the desire to, is because it is easier to blame the police than it is to address all the systemic failures that come before them, in much the same way as it is easier for a doctor to quickly prescribe anti-depressants instead of attempting to listen and address the social and interpersonal causes of mental illness.
The very serious issue of allowing public perception to dictate police policy and procedure is that it painfully suggests that, not only do the public have authority (not to be confused with transparency) over the police instead of the other way round but that those in parliamentary power fail to recognise the most basic of common sense; that to save long-term money, you have to spend it short-term. To have a police vehicle door fall off whilst driving makes a mockery of the institution in front of the very society they are committed to govern.
The problem with nights like my Saturday ride-along, where many of the jobs are alcohol related in the high street, is the perception both by the public and media that it is the police not doing their jobs when in reality, the police simply sit at the end of a long line of people and establishments not taking their preventative responsibilities seriously. When we turned up for crowd control to a bar with members of the public blocking roads, almost every available unit of the night (including Armed Response) was in attendance – promoting the misconception that the police have appropriate staffing levels – and whilst the majority of the crowd were cooperative and non-combative, it was obvious to anyone sober (me, alone in a cold van at 12.30am) that if the establishment we were attending and their door staff were doing their jobs properly, the bar/public wouldn’t have needed to call police to begin with leaving them available for more appropriate calls. Public premises, particularly those with alcohol licenses have a duty to their community not just their bank balances and that is even before you ask, and expect, people to take personal responsibility for their safety and actions.
All this is not to say that there isn’t a place for promoting and encouraging resilience within the police as part of wider teachings around emotional intelligence (something I consistently educate and coach people on) but in the current financial climate of the police, the job has become an affront to resilience in of itself. Resilience is a soft skill that we either have or we don’t, in much the same way as we all have the gut instinct we listen to. It can be improved upon, as naturally occurs with experience on the job, but it is not something that can be taught as it is instead, something felt and learnt through personal adversity; it is part of who we are. As the saying goes “rock bottom builds more heroes than privilege” and though I wished to be rid of all my rock bottoms over the years (including the one I currently find myself managing), they have taught me far more self-awareness, emotional intelligence and resilience than people more than twice my age who have had easy lives. I am not weak when I cry or go to therapy about my sexual assault and the devastating consequences of it; I am strong for continually pushing through those tears and turning the worst year of my life into something positive for other victims of sexual violence and officers struggling with their mental health. Despite widespread belief to the contrary, resilience is not the absence of suffering but the ability to recognise your suffering and push through it. At the time of writing this piece I am coaching/supporting a number of friends, readers and police officers, running several times a week, writing a paper with the Superintendent, designing a new mental health survey and network for a business, job-hunting, planning my men’s mental health workshop for a conference later this year and continuing my self-study of both men’s mental health and interpersonal sexual/coercive violence all whilst suffering with PTSD, major depression, an incurable liver illness and not sleeping through the night in 387 days since my rape. People like myself don’t get called ‘inspirational’ because we have never suffered but because we flourish despite it.
We spend much of our lives working and as such, it has a large influence over our mental health. As the ‘Thriving At Work‘ report highlights, being in ‘good work’ is vital to good mental health. Harry’s Masculinity Report goes one step further demonstrating that job satisfaction is the highest factor in determining a man’s good mental health and, as currently frontline service is still inherently male-dominated, it is something we must address. ‘Look after your staff and your staff will look after your business’ may be a cliché but not one without merit. The problem we have is that supervising officers often feel that frustration fatigue on top of helping their teams through it and so, diminished resilience remains prevalent (and therefore escalates) throughout the entire chain of command; that is consistently obvious with a quick check on Twitter of PFE Chairs and police spokesmen on any given day to read their latest appropriate rants directed at misinformed media and grandstanding politicians.
Resilience requires emotional intelligence, self-awareness and transparency of thoughts and emotions therein and though it would seem a swear-word in such a masculine-dominated workforce, the key to fostering conversations around officer mental health and wellbeing isn’t resilience at all but vulnerability and validation of it; the foundation of all my teachings. That isn’t to be confused with the College of Policing’s definition of ‘vulnerable person/people‘; those who sit on the outskirts of a high-functioning society and need taking care of but the natural vulnerabilities we all experience in life.
When we lose people we love we naturally feel sensitive, ‘vulnerable‘ to people addressing that loss in the days and weeks after. Feel vulnerable/’fragile’ on anniversaries or reminders of that loss but we are still high-functioning members of society despite our grief and tears; we experience vulnerability without being vulnerable people in much the same way as you can fail without being a failure. That distinction is never more important to acknowledge than within the culture of police because to be seen as ‘vulnerable‘ denotes a person to be ‘weak‘ to the point they are unable to care for themselves. If constabularies and companies wish to foster open discussions around mental health, they must recognise and redefine vulnerability and validate it when shown. If, like diminished resilience, you do not treat emotional/mental vulnerability with the care that it deserves, you run the risk that the officer (at whatever rank they may be) will shut down completely, never asking for help again fearing that same emotional and mental dismissal from colleagues, senior officers and/or medical professionals. The reason I have the honour of having so many friends, strangers and officers confide in me both on and offline is because I am open with my own vulnerabilities which is disarming; to put it simply, my ability to remain vulnerable in a world that tells me not to saves lives. So whilst vulnerability may seem the antithesis of policing, it underpins everything from how officers feel toward themselves and each other to their interactions with the public and victims of crime.
If, as an institution or person within it, your vulnerability (i.e. poor mental health) is consistently dismissed, your rightful frustrations and fears downplayed and anger left invalidated and un-soothed (frustration fatigue), resilience diminishes and you are left with a demoralised and unmotivated workforce wondering if or how they are making a positive difference to the communities they swore to protect!
It was gone 3am when my shift had ended and my head finally hit the pillow, thinking about the drunks they had supported or moved on who would likely not remember the ‘night before’ despite the level of vitriol they insisted on spewing at officers. As I began to fall asleep, I couldn’t help but think of all the thousands of people across the country who were already in deep sleep completely oblivious, through no fault of their own, to the alcoholic chaos police would experience that weekend on top of their woefully heavy caseloads or how many officers would be assaulted or on shift over the Christmas holidays missing their families. Oblivious to how many officers who were just like them; wondering how they were going to keep themselves alive for another day.
There are many things that go bump in the night.
Sometimes that’s crime and disorder. Sometimes that’s Santa. And sometimes it’s an officer with insomnia dreading their next shift.
Our job as a society, from civilians to law-makers, is to make sure the police continue to bounce back from those bumps, not break because of them, because even our societal ‘knights in shining armour‘ are still just humans underneath.
‘Protect the protectors’ isn’t just a hashtag; they’re words to live by.
*names have been changed
Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece. Nothing written in this piece is intended to be perceived as criticism of Devon and Cornwall police, the police service as an organisation, its employees or the general public. I was not asked to write this.
Toni White is a men’s and workplace mental health specialist working from a 20 year lived experience background together with 8 years of combined self-study & research. She supports several dozen men individually whilst being credited with changing & saving many men’s lives and is the founder of For Our Men.
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