WELLBEING WHERE IS THE LOVE?


The police are one of the last institutions devoted to the discovery of truth based on evidence, says a former police chaplain


their bodies on the line. In recent commentary about the police there is often an acknowledgment that the vast majority of police officers are dedicated, law-abiding public servants doing their best in challenging circumstances. After this acknowledgment comes the big “but”.


How do we give due weight to the


Before I started working with the police, first as a police chaplain and then as a counsellor, I hadn’t much thought about the role of the police in our society. I grew up going to peace marches, and the police were there to keep order. Now, my view has changed. I see the impact police work has on officers, and consequently I have greater respect for what the police do for us. While it’s not my role to comment on criticisms of the police, I would like to share what I have learned. A statistic I find sobering is that most people will encounter three or four traumatic events in their lifetimes, while a police officer will encounter 400 to 600. These could be things like finding a person hanging, doing CPR on a corpse because death has not yet been declared, having to view images of child abuse, or repeatedly attending incidents of domestic violence. On top of this is the violence and anger directed towards police officers themselves, and the twenty first century experience of being constantly filmed and photographed. The only way to function while dealing with this level of trauma, combined with personal risk and constant pressure, is to develop powerful psychological defences. Police forces were not set up at a time of sophisticated understanding of the impact of trauma and they are only now beginning to catch up. In the absence of this support, police officers found ways of surviving their experiences by finding spaces where informal debriefing could


26 | POLICE | APRIL | 2024


take place – internal bars and canteens, for example, or conversations with colleagues inside police vehicles. Dark humour is often part of these coping strategies. For financial and cultural reasons, however, private internal spaces are being eroded - force bars and canteens have closed, and there has been a move towards single crewed cars. While there is now more focused trauma support, informal places to talk with each other exist less and less. Has


“My own experience of police officers is that they are often those drawn to structure. There can be a tendency to see the world in black and white.”


this contributed to pushing the darkness underground, where it becomes more dangerous and there is greater risk of acting it out?


My own experience of police officers


is that they are often those drawn to structure. There can be a tendency to see the world in black and white, “us and them”, but people also join the police because of a powerful desire to do good. Most officers think about the causes of crime, and not simply about locking up the bad guys. We expect the police to contain the darkness in society, whilst keeping it from us. We experience it in the sanitised form of films and TV shows, where the threat is manufactured and unreal. From this vantage point, it is easy to criticise the people who are putting


sentence before the “but”, honouring the majority and giving credit for the important and often thankless work they do? Where is the love? Real love is more than a feeling, it is also a discipline that involves treating others with humility and respect. ‘Love God and your neighbour as yourself’ is the great commandment of the Abrahamic traditions. Criticism and judgement without love bring defensiveness and despair. There are those who are angry at the police with good cause, and there are relationships requiring healing and attention. As we address racism, misogyny and homophobia in our social world, we must also address its expressions in policing. But there is also an ugliness to our current public discourse that


feels rooted in a self-righteous judgement of others, rather than in loving desire to create a better world. The police are one of the last institutions devoted to the discovery of truth based on evidence. While there may be egregious failures to deliver this at times, and while improvements can always be made, this fact alone makes the institution of British policing a precious good worth speaking up for. Having worked for a handful of years with the police, my own instinct, faced with the men and women who offer this vital public service, is to kneel in gratitude before them and wash their tired feet.


The writer was first a police chaplain and is now a counsellor for police officers


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