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.
The most important thing is to first have a governing body that governs the police, without being police.
Without this, nothing here matters because they haze, and brutalize those who do not conform to their awful internal group standards.
You can literally see what happens to good cops. They get forced out.
The problem with your post, is that you can’t help someone who does not want to be helped.
Ideally that type of person would be kicked out of the force, but instead they comprise of the majority of these forces.
Just to be clear, many if not most agencies have mandatory psych evals, visits etc after different types of incidents, but as you can see, they just don’t solve the problem.
Mental health is a concern that does not discriminate by profession.
Because fuck the poor.
This is one of the only cases where the snarky boomer remark “if you can’t handle it get a different job” actually applies.
Seeing people at their worst, victims of violence, shootings, car accidents, mothers screaming over a dead child, etc it is no wonder they become cynical and some turn to drugs or alcohol. People will lie to their face, have a bloody knife in their hand or a home packed with stolen goods and say they didn’t do it. They need mental health care as much as vets.
Mentally unstable cops are a feature, not a bug.
There’s a reason why they drugged soldiers in war. It sucks :/ they think of us as disposable once they fill us with patriotism propaganda.
Cause mental isn’t a concern for anyone really. It’s taboo. And we don’t talk about it. The mental health system is totally broken. And don’t ever talk to anyone about it. Ever.
This is why we are turning to ChatGPT for mental health. Cause the system is broken.
I think there are a few reasons, firstly while conservatives put many issues within society under a mental health umbrella, they simultaneously make no efforts to fix this problem and in fact actively make it worse since poor housing access, wealth inequality, healthcare access, food access etc are all major factors for pretty much all mental health issues. There are only a few explanations I can come up with for this:
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‘mental health’ is a smokescreen; it’s an umbrella so vague and monumental an issue that it gets put in the “I can’t affect this problem, so there is no point in worrying” basket.
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People with mental health issues are so othered to them that their solution to people with mental health issues is “a cop with a gun”.
As for cop’s mental health, that’s a bit easier:
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I can’t speak for other countries, but where I’m from if a cop gets diagnosed with pretty much any acronym they risk getting their gun taken off them which directly restricts the jobs they can take and their career advancement. Where I’m from won’t even take on a recruit if they’ve been diagnosed with something. This means cops are terrified of taking any work provided therapy.
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pretty much all police orgs have a really bad machismo problem, which is one thing that keeps men from seeking mental healthcare in general.
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police tend not to require much formal education to start training and tend to pay better than other jobs with the same starting requirement (moral hazard pay), this can lead to the ‘golden handcuffs’ situation of not wanting to jeopardize this career because you’ll have to start at the bottom for a career which pays worse.
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it’s very common for society to see police as ‘essential workers’, which puts it under the umbrella of “we can make your work conditions terrible”; things like shift-work with really unpredictable hours tends to isolate people from their friends and family, making mental health worse and makes them more reliant on their job for their support network.
Reforming the police a tolerable institution seems impossible to me, but a decent start would be disarming them and making sure they are not the people who respond to mental health calls. Problem is that this requires a large part of the population to accept that you can’t simply shoot your problems, even if you hire a goon in blue to do it.
Regarding the US and their gun ownership: yeah, disarming cops is a lot more complicated and probably involves training them about de-escalation and the peelians. It also requires setting up some aptitude requirements, since basics like “time, distance & cover” are regularly forgone in favour of “warrior cop”, and currently there is a very strong pipeline from “that kid who tortures animals” to “corporal”.
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.
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liberals will never view cops as human enough to have mental health issues
I take issue with this. It’s because I see cops as humans with all the mental issues and trauma that I think we load too many expectations on them while simultaneously absolving them when they abuse their power.
Narrow the scope of policing. Have more social services and emergency mental health resources so cops aren’t expected to do all that. And hold cops responsible when they do abuse the power they have.
Narrow the scope of policing. Have more social services and emergency mental health resources so cops aren’t expected to do all that.
“Defund the police” never meant “Remove all funding for police”, it means “Reallocate potions of police funding to more comprehensive social services”
I’ve taken a listening course taught by a former cop. It turns out there is an active curriculum for police on how to actively listen to diffuse situations; it just isn’t taught as default to all cops.
That’s a good point. Conservatives often excuse the abuse of power because the scope of police work demands it, without acknowledging that there are non-police alternatives that are likelier to descalate a situation.
I think this ties into their inability to acknowledge mental health as a real and treatable issue. Perhaps because doing so would require acknowledging their own while being inhibited by the shame and cultural conditioning they grew up with.
Relevant, but there was an incident in the news where a Californian cop murdered a couple in their home. It later came out during investigation and audits that he failed his psychological exam. The same thing with many others just in that department - failing the exam and still being active duty. So the sheriff’s dept was under fire and had to re-test people and strip their badge/gun if they failed. But the problem is likely very pervasive amongst law enforcement. This whole sweeping mental health under a rug.
It is horrifying for so many to fail their psych exam. However, I would also question if this is the most effective approach to better policing outcomes.
Psych exams in volatile workplaces are contradictory due to self reported elements in the exam. In aviation, there is a phenomenon where pilots historically masked mental health issues because a diagnosis was a death sentence to their careers. Paradoxically, acknowledging and allowing pilots to fly with these issues while being medicated has led to better outcomes.
The police who answered truthfully in the exam were fired, but that begs the question of whether the remainder were mentally sound or simply knew how to mask themselves in the psych exam.
I don’t think you’ve missed this but I’m going to say it anyway…maybe don’t make failing the exam a punishable offense.
had to re-test people and strip their badge/gun if they failed
And I wonder how many of those stripped of their badge and gun went a county over and got hired?
Problematic officers are usually just moved around when they get in trouble, so I have no faith that the officers with mental health issues actually got help or actually removed from the force entirely. And that’s assuming those who didn’t fail the second time legitimately got that score and didn’t have a thumb in the scale…
100%
liberals will never view cops as human enough to have mental health issues
Where is this coming from? Do you make that assumption about liberals and military? Because (while not perfect, and continually improving) mental health care for military has made huge advances in understanding and public acceptance in the last 2 decades.
I would like to see the same shift happen for police.
I would like for police leadership to truly normalize mental healthcare, and not just give it lip service.
I would also like for police as a whole to maybe adopt similar rigorous criteria for new career candidates, much like lawyers, CPAs, and other professional licenses. I’m held to a high standard of conduct and criminal liability because I have the technical knowledge to really destructively ruin peoples’ lives. And the most dangerous tool of my trade is merely a calculator.
No, I am speaking about the police specifically.
The advancements being made to mental health care in the military are meaningful, and the reduction of homeless veteran through housing programs speaks to the progress and recognition of difficulties in reintegrating into civilian life.
The people who like cops enough to want them to be actually taken care of sneer at mental health. The people who care about mental health and want people to thrive sneer at cops.
When a cop beats his wife, it’s because she’s his property just acting defective (like the good book tells us) so why would Republicans have an issue with it?
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.
I get what you’re saying, but IMO you’re being overly generalistic, particularly with regards to ‘liberal’ positions, which AFAIK by their very nature tend to view cops as human, too.
Anyway, far as I know there are indeed mental wellness departments within police depts. Based on a quick search just now, it looks like most departments in the States do indeed have such a service(s), altho it may go under a variety of names and have somewhat different focus from area to area.
I just think that we need to start looking at cops as legitimately mentally ill people, whether they are sociopathic or traumatized.
I’d scale that back to reiterate what you said earlier, which is that being a cop includes plenty of legitimate stressors, which naturally call out to be addressed. One thing I think factors in is that police in the States only receive ~6mos training IIRC, which seems dangerously low to me, and perhaps contributes to various individuals making it through the program that really shouldn’t, and I would think cuts down on the amount of nuance and preparedness a cop has at their disposal to deal with future situations.
Anyway, that’s my quick dos centavos, there.
The brevity of police training program is definitely a major contributor.
While there are mental health programs present, the stigma of mental health has rendered many of them unused. Police surveyed in North Dakota found that an overwhelming majority will not disclose their mental health issues to their colleagues or supervisors, most expect to be discriminated if they do, and see mental health issues as a personal failure.
Of the services provided, only debriefings and weight rooms saw significant use. Outside of that, few used therapy, peer support groups, mental health checks, and resilience therapy.
Good point!
And it’s not hard to conceive of them having ‘their own way’ of dealing with stress and mental health issues. Just that it would be pretty amateur and peer-driven by its nature.Unfortunately, I’m not sure there are any useful levers the public, the mayor and the commissioner have to overcome police unions’ typically furious and dogmatic resistance against any such useful progress.
Those who benefit from the way the police currently operate are incentivized to preserve the status quo—mental illness and all.
