Resiliency Training. Who is responsible?

Officer Safety: It is not your department's responsibility to train you to be safe. If you are concerned about safety read a book, or watch YouTube.

Could you imagine if this was the attitude your department took? Now, there are some in society right now, even some in political realms, who would resonate with that attitude, but we know that idea is ludicrous. Police departments have the privilege and the burden to make sure their people are properly trained. Training in the use of force, policy updates, state-mandated training, legislative updates, firearms, de-escalations, and the list goes on. Training is always ongoing as it should be. When it comes to officer safety, should we consider resiliency training a part of officer safety training?

Check this out:

On average, a national average, the primary areas of training at the police academy include five categories:

-       Operations (213 hours)

-       Firearms and Use of Force (168 hours)

-       Legal education (86 hours)

-       Mental illness (10 hours)

-       Self-improvement (89 hours) - the self-improvement category refers mainly to health and fitness and an average of 6 hours is focused on what could be loosely categorized as resiliency (https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/24/4941/htm). 

Resilience training as an officer safety issue.

Renee D. Kosor, Ph.D. defined mental resilience as “the ability to absorb external stressors, a body’s capacity to anticipate and defend against risk and change, and a person’s level of adaptation to the environment to avoid potential loss” (https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/intentional-grit). Like a lot of people, police do not take personal resilience seriously until they are going through a divorce, struggling with alcohol, or see their finances in chaos. Why do they wait so long? A study by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF, 2019) showed that police officers were dying by suicide more than in the line of duty. This being the case, why are we still so behind the curve on training police on resilience? The effects of any officer killed in the line of duty are devastating. We resonate with the loss, we know it could have been us and might be one day, and that is a police officer’s reality. When an officer commits suicide or destroys his career because of an alcohol-related incident, even worse when it was well known that the officer was struggling before the said incident, we are left wondering if we could have intervened. Or, was there anything that could have reached him/her before it happened.   

The academy is not for cry babies

Putting resiliency training in the genre of officer safety requires a culture shift. Resilience training should begin at the police academy. This is where the basic, fundamentals of police work are taught. I know, we have all heard it from every FTO whoever picks up a DOR, forget what you learned at the academy, I am going to teach you how to be a real cop. Of course, with a few exceptions, we mean we are now going to show you how to apply what you learned in real life, and we know it is different than the controlled environment of the classroom. What is also different than in the classroom are the mental, emotional, and physical consequences of our actions regardless of how correct those actions were. We should be sprinkling resiliency training throughout the academy and throughout the careers of police officers. Too many officers are coming out of their careers worse than when they came in. As administrators and trainers, we should be proactive with the people we serve. If you are an administrator and do not see yourself as a servant to your line officers, detectives, and everyone for that matter in your organization then you are serving yourself and your people are suffering because of it. For you I would recommend reading John Maxwell, virtually anything by John Maxwell on servant leadership will do.