A unique mental health assessment form that can help officers better communicate with medical personnel and may contribute to reduced wait times in hospital emergency rooms is becoming more widely used now after successful pilot studies. The simple, one-page checklist of various “mental state indicators and behaviors” is designed to give street officers and hospital...Read More
Additional evidence of the phenomenon known as inattentional blindness has emerged from a new study of sensory focus and memory, this time with a professional group other than cops. “At Force Science, we write and teach about inattentional blindness in a law enforcement context,” says Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Institute....Read More
Having a policy on critical operational matters is one thing. Training on it is another. And if the two aren’t yoked together, brace for the worst. That caution has recently been emphatically underscored by both a jury verdict and a judge’s ruling in a U.S. District Court in the state of Washington in a case...Read More
“Policing,” writes Dr. John Violanti, one of the leading researchers of law enforcement stress, “is psychologically stressful work filled with danger, high demands, ambiguity in encounters, human misery, and exposure to death.” And that may be the least of its dark side. “Law enforcement is one of a number of often stressful professions that has...Read More
Dispatchers can be the forgotten first responders when it comes to departmental concerns about the psychological well-being of service personnel. Yet they experience many of the same traumatic reactions to critical incidents and cumulative stress as police officers. Dr. Michelle Lilly and research associate Heather Pierce of Northern Illinois University have conducted what is believed...Read More
The scenario is one that’s often in the headlines and ultimately in the courts: A distraught and frightened family calls for help in controlling a mentally disturbed or suicidal relative. When cops respond, the confrontation escalates and the subject ends up injured or dead from police use of force. The family claims the force was...Read More
Union reps, trainers, and human behavior experts who have been campaigning to get police fatigue recognized and addressed as a critical professional and public safety problem have been given an armory of ammunition for their battle by a comprehensive and complex new study of cops and sleeping disorders. A team of 13 sleep specialists, headed...Read More
Swearing can help you better tolerate physical pain, provided you don’t do much of it in your ordinary daily life. That conclusion comes from a British research team reporting its latest findings on the analgesic benefit of cussing in The Journal of Pain, the official publication of the American Pain Society. Back in 2009, Dr....Read More
Two law enforcement agencies have begun field testing a new screening form that may eventually lead to a better means for identifying people with severe mental illness who may be a danger to themselves or others. The brief form, a checklist consisting of some 20 factors and/or indicators that are commonly associated with mental illness,...Read More
A prominent medical researcher has launched a landmark study he hopes will change the grim facts that LEOs have a higher incidence of illness and death related to cardiovascular disease than the general population, and suffer unnecessary musculoskeletal injuries and disabilities. With the help of 2 sheriff’s offices and 2 police departments in the Pacific...Read More
