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.
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.
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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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.
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…
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.
Folks being brutalized and ripped off the streets- sent to continents some of them have never stepped foot on. Yet the most heavily armed populace in the world has yet to lift a finger.
Any cop who’s scared or distrustful of the average civilian is delusional, and unaware of just how pacified the U.S populace is.
You want to coddle them- I want to give them pretext for fear and see you justified to be worried on their behalf, yet still wrong for seeing them as people worth any care.
because and this is how many police departments see it. If you are seeking mental help then you are unfit for duty, if you are not asking help then you don’t need it. Needing help is weakness and that makes you unfit. Would it be better to have regular mental check ins, yes it would be but it is a real up hill battle. Not only do you the departments that see needing help as the problem but you just have police trained to give the right answer to get a passing score and many many men see needing help as weakness, weakness is the problem. It doesn’t matter how much people on the outside of the police tyr to push help if they just reject it.
I hope your idea of mental health doesn’t involve psychiatry.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything you wrote but you do raise a great point of this issue not getting much attention.
Those who benefit from the way the police currently operate are incentivized to preserve the status quo—mental illness and all.
October 2011 a bad cop said he was on mental pills. Then he false arrested me for calling 911 when republican stepfather screamed he will “kill” me. He said it has to be a psych ward because I am bisexual.
Recently Nassau county built a mental center for police. There are no psych injections. Instead, free massages. I even met a cop who used to be a security guard at a psych ward, so he wouldn’t process a police report against them.
Problem is cops rarely investigated/proved that I was a danger to self or others (I never had any weapon). They are biased, blindly believing others who are of the same religion and age as them. We need to stop assuming that antipsychotics are a cure for civilians and government employees. Every time I was in a ward someone was violent while on them and I wouldn’t trust cops to have guns under that intoxication.
