Can police be trained in trauma processing to minimise PTSD symptoms? Feasibility and proof of concept with a newly recruited UK police population
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X19864852 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Can police be trained
in trauma processing
to minimise PTSD
symptoms? Feasibility
and proof of concept with
a newly recruited
UK police population
Jessica K Miller
Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Alexandra Peart
Dorset Police Force Headquarters, Winfrith, Dorchester, Dorset, UK
Magdalena Soffia
Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Abstract
Neuropsychological trauma processing techniques based on hippocampal-dependent
spatial and episodic memory were trialled with 71 newly recruited officers within one
UK police forcebetween March 2018 and February 2019. Resultsindicate that the skills are
teachable within an operational training environment,have a positive impact on feelings of
ease about difficult or traumatic work-related incidents, can improve recall of events and
may mitigate against the impact of age and trauma exposure on memory. Participants
report the techniques to be useable, sharable and operationally relevant to trauma man-
agement and personal resilience. Results will inform a larger randomisedcontrolled trial.
Keywords
Trauma, PTSD, resilience, training
Corresponding author:
Jessica K Miller, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Floor 2 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge
CB2 1SB, UK.
Email: jkm35@cam.ac.uk
The Police Journal:
Theory, Practice and Principles
2020, Vol. 93(4) 310–331
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0032258X19864852
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Introduction
At the Manchester Arena attack on 22 May 2017, 22 people died, many of them
children (Kerslake Report, 2018). Over 1,000 Greater Manchester Police (GMP) offi-
cers and staff were recorded as having been involved in responding to the incident.
Preparedness for – and resilience to – trauma exposure is becoming a pressing public
health issue – not least for policing and not least for the hundred new recruits who
joined GMP in January 2018. This article reviews a study with that cohort, testing how
feasible it is to train police to direct their attention more effectively towards trauma
processing with a view to increasing resilience to disorder that emanates from unpro-
cessed trauma exposure on the job.
Literature on the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in contempo-
rary UK policing is scarce, perhaps mainly because (despite its recognition back in 1980)
PTSD is not uniformly monitored within occupational settings (Skogstad et al., 2013),
and not least in the police service (Green, 2004). Where studies of PTSD prevalence have
been embarked upon, sample sizes are a consistent limitation (Lee et al., 2016). Along-
side this degree of invisibility, stigma surrounding police traumatisation cannot be
ignored (Heffren and Hasudorf, 2014). Even when science steps in to introduce a non-
subjective understanding of trauma impact in policing – measuring changes in cognitive
function and brain structure as a result of trauma disorder (Baldacara et al., 2017, Miller
et al., 2017a, b) – these have not yet been framed in the context of resilience.
Nonetheless, the impact of long-term trauma exposure in policing is becoming
increasingly well understood, thanks to tools su ch as the new self-report diagnostic
measure of PTSD and complex PTSD (C-PTSD), the International Trauma Question-
naire (ITQ; Cloitre et al., 2018). Using that ITQ, recent (unpublished) data from Police
Care UK and University of Cambridge (2019; Policing: The Job & The Life, n ¼16,857)
suggest that 12%of trauma-exposed officers and staff likely have C-PTSD and a further
8%PTSD, equating to one in five having some form of trauma disorder. Over 90%of
respondents reported trauma exposure in their everyday role and yet fewer than half said
they had the opportunity to make sense of what they had experienced.
Such high prevalence of C-PTSD in policing may have been masked up until now by a
certain social acceptance of the ‘drip-drip-drip’ effect of trauma exposure on the job, that
‘burn out’ inevitably awaits the long serving. As contemporary policing adapts to fewer
resources and changing demand, it is all the more vital to challenge this resigned
acceptance. The impact of trauma exposure on the job needs to be addressed directly
to help those heading towards burnout and to give those joining the profession the
greatest chance of maintaining their resilience.
This is not a new calling. The need for trauma management has long been clear
through adoption of military-inspired trauma risk management (see Greenberg et al.,
2010) and other interventions such as psychological screening, ‘debriefing’ and ‘decom-
pression’ (Rona et al., 2017) – all with mixed results and some contrary to National
Institute of Clinical Excellence (2018) guidance. This article describes a different
approach. Our aim is to teach new recruits practical skills to help them adapt to the
extraordinary and difficult incidents that lie ahead. To do so, we translate neuropsycho-
logical techniques of trauma processing into training materials for the operational police
Miller et al. 311
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