First of, ACAB. There’s no denying that American police are steeped in institutionalized racism and violence.
But secondly, I’d like to point out that conservatives will never view men’s mental health as a real issue (cops are disproportionately male), and liberals will never view cops as human enough to have mental health issues.
The United States is the country with highest rates of civilian gun ownership in the world. Every police encounter has an inherently higher risk of gun violence. Now, cops frequently provoke when they should deescalate. But multiple things can be true at the same time. Policing as a profession attracts narcissists and sociopath, policing as an institution enables that behavior, and policing in a country with rampant gun ownership is a highly stressful and traumatic experience.
I say this as a survivor of a mass shooting. Gun violence changes how you look at your environment and the people in it. There is no room and no person that escapes your unease and suspicion. I can only imagine what a work environment that perpetually affirms those suspicions could do to one’s mental health.
None of this excuses police brutality. I just think that we need to start looking at cops as legitimately mentally ill people, whether they are sociopathic or traumatized.
Destigmatizing men’s mental health means every man’s mental health, and the left’s inability to address this blind spot is allowing the manosphere to dress its alpha male bullshit in police and paramilitary aesthetics.
Great comment, and I’ll add that police, by the nature of their jobs, have to deal with a lot of things that people would (and should) find traumatic: grisly accidents, homicides, overdoses, etc. Obviously, EMTs have to deal with that kind of thing, too, but at least they usually have a partner they can talk to. Despite TV always doing the buddy cop thing, cops usually work alone.
Everyone knows it’s a problem, but the main solution has been absolutely shoveling money at grifters like Dave Grossman to give seminars and write books on “killology” (wish I was making that up). The guy’s highest level of schooling is a masters in education in counseling, but he disguises that to try to make you think he’s a proper psychologist or psychiatrist. Once you know his hypotheses, which are pulled out of thin air and unsupported by data, you see them absolutely everywhere steeped into the culture of cops and military in the US.
Absolutely, the fact that every time you interact with a person it could be on the worst day of their lives, but for you it’s just Tuesday is a massive contributor to mental health issues. Being unable to talk about it makes things much worse, and while the ethos like ‘killology’ and similar might cops less traumatized by their jobs it is definitely for the worse.
The amount of othering I hear from cops who talk about the people they interact with in their jobs… Well let’s just say I’ve never heard a cop talk about their job and go “boy am I glad that person is on the force”, and it definitely seems like at least partly a coping mechanism.