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The High Cost of Unwellness in Policing

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Police officer unwellness is a crisis that needs immediate action.

Unwellness in policing is more widespread than we imagine and it is costing our communities more that just dollars and cents.

First, let’s talk about what unwellness in law-enforcement might look like:

In my Armor Your Self book, I defined comprehensive wellness within the domains of physical fitness, mental fitness, emotional fitness and spiritual fitness and gave over 180 tips, tactics and techniques to strengthen and condition resilience in those areas.

So, when we examine unwellness within those domains, it could look like: obesity, exhaustion, fatigue in the physical domain. The mental or cognitive domain could see brain fog, poor decision-making and poor communication skills as signs of unwellness… Continue reading

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Blue Trauma Syndrome 2024

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When I wrote the resilience building textbook Armor Your Self: How to Survive a Career in Law Enforcement several years ago I coined the term Blue Trauma Syndrome (BTS) as a means of discussing all the many factors that erode an emergency responders resilience. I used it to go beyond the simple label of “stress” as a catch all, and frankly far too simple, a description of the toxic effects of this career that eat us up from the inside out.

I want to raise that term again in 2024 to renew our on-going quest to make our law enforcement and other emergency service professionals as healthy, effective and resilient as they can be.

If you read my previous article “The High Cost of Unwellness in Policing” then you know about my beliefs regarding the importance of building resilience within our profession and you know that I believe that it’s not as simple as many people think. I suggest that many police agencies are just “Dabbling” in wellness without any clear strategy nor set of metrics by which to measure their effectiveness.

What I would like to do today is to CHALLENGE YOU to pick up this discussion in your agency, team or with a couple of peers and see what YOU THINK.

WHY?

Because, analyzing and discussing the challenges… Continue reading

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3 Tips to Help You Build Effective Wellness Systems for Your Policing Organization

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Here are 3 tips and 3 questions to help you build a better wellness system for your law enforcement organization.

First let me tell you what I believe, then I’ll give you 3 tips and ask 3 questions to help you, and then I’ll ask you what you believe about police wellness.

I believe: Police wellness should NOT be a program, it should be a system!

Effective Wellness Systems should be strategic, comprehensive, specific, measurable and sustainable.

There are three reasons why most law-enforcement wellness programs aren’t making their people, healthier, safer, nor more professional… Continue reading

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Research Participants Needed ASAP

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UPDATE: This study has been expanded to include events within the last 10 years and the study window has been lengthened by one week! DOWNLOAD THE NEW FLYER BELOW.

The Law Enforcement Survival Institute is supporting the doctoral research project of a graduate student in the Helms School of Government at Liberty University. The purpose of this research is to explore multi-jurisdictional active shooting incident communication. We we are looking for law enforcement officers who have responded to a multiagency response active shooting within the last 5 years; it can be from any form of department (tribal, municipal, state) as long as they arrived at the scene and experienced communication of some sort (radio, talking to other departments).

To participate you will need to take:
A screening questionnaire online (2 minutes)
A scheduled encrypted interview (45-60 minutes)
Questionnaire (10 minutes on their own time)
And provide an oral narrative (15 minutes on their own time)

Deadline to participate is Friday June 28, 2024

Please pass this information along if you know someone who meets these criteria.

Thank you for your help!

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A NOTE FROM THE RESEARCHER: Continue reading

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What’s The Point?

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What is it that is at the intersection of all the problems confronting your people and your policing agency?

If yours is like most law enforcement organizations you may be facing issues of high turnover, citizen complaints, unnecessary accidents, too many on-the-job injuries, too many excessive use of force complaints, low morale and perhaps even an officer or employee suicide.

If you will bear with me, I can help you improve your people and your agency but the first step is just realizing what is at the root of all of your issues.

I have an activity for you. You can do this alone or with your peers, roll-call team, command staff, dispatch staff etc.

#1 WHAT’S THE POINT?
Take a blank piece of paper (or use a whiteboard or flipchart) and draw a dot in the very middle.

In the space… Continue reading