Roles of the Police Psychologist in the Law Enforcement System - Essay Example

Roles of the Police Psychologist in the Law Enforcement System School Police psychology is quite a new branch of psychological science. Although it is quite specific and deals within the scopes of law enforcement system only, still there are a lot of issues it resolves, maintaining the entire organization of police. Thus a police psychologist should deal not only with human resources of law enforcement system but also with victims of crimes, which is happened to be a vast amount of work and requires a high level of responsibilities. Still the branch of psychology is very helpful for the work of police system and makes a great contribution to its organization in multiple aspects of work. Police psychology as a special branch of the discipline of psychology officially appeared in the middle of 1970es and ever since has been rapidly developing throughout the entire United States. The first American police psychologist Harvey Schlossberg started his career in NYPD and demonstrated by his own example that the branch of psychology was actually very helpful for effectiveness of the entire law enforcement system (Reese & Horn 1988). Though since those times police psychology has gained much more responsibilities and started working with almost all the aspects of police service. However, not all police departments have their own psychologists, they mostly work in big cities’ departments; smaller police departments usually seek for psychological consultation from their part-time psychological employees. One of the most important realms that a police psychologist works in is human resources management, which includes multiple requirements and responsibilities from the psychologist. First of all, a police psychologist is supposed to provide incoming personnel with a precise monitoring in order to define whether the applicants are suitable for the job of policeman (Reese & Horn 1988). However, it is important to note that police psychologists not only work in police departments, they also occupy positions in other law enforcement structures like FBI and its local departments. Thus a police psychologist should conduct a special interview and psychological tests to check whether the person is ready for the job. This part of pre-employment screening is crucially important, because it literally plays role of employees’ filter that forms the entire personnel of the law enforcement structure. The pre-employment screening is being conducted in few steps. First of all, a psychologist should evaluate an applicant’s intelligence level in order to define whether the one is prepared for dealing with challenging situations and handling them by rapid orienting in new incoming circumstances (Bartol & Bartol 2004). This task that police psychologist is supposed to do allows law enforcement system to make an accurate selection of appropriate personnel, which might build a good cooperative team later. One more important aspect of pre-employment screening process is psychological profiling of all the employees of law enforcement institutions. This part of a police psychologist’s job is especially significant because it might prevent a lot of cases of exceeding of the limits of authority among policemen, which frequently lead to lack of trust to law enforcement system and decrease of positive image of them among citizens. For instance, psychological testing reveals a future police officer’s inclination to racism and hidden aggression, which might cause certain professional prejudice during discharging of their duties (Poland 1978). Researches conducted by Australian police psychologists on a group of policemen revealed that often the work of policemen evokes authoritative, ethnocentric and racial prejudices in people. They feel that they are powerful and start exceeding the limits of their authority (Wortley & Homel 1995). In order to prevent the situations where policemen might abuse their power, law enforcement system should have special psychologists in its regular staff; thus they would be constantly monitoring psychological conditions of policemen and would keep ethical standards on appropriate level. Personality screenings first of all, reveal employees who are not suitable for multiple reasons, including psychological problems and mental weakness. As far as policeman job requires strong mental resistance, the tests must be conducted by professionals and experts. Thus an applicant might not fit the criterion because of two major reasons, which are lack of personal resistance to extreme situations and anti-social psychological tendencies (Bartol 1982). The first type is usually a dependent personality who cannot make rational decisions by one’s own; the person is also afraid of unpredictable circumstances and doesn’t have adequate communicational skills. The anti-social type of inappropriate police employee is a selfish person who cannot obey precise instructions, has negative dispositions to different kinds of prejudices about people and passive aggressive inclinations. The results come from special situational tests and psychological experiments, where people’s best and worst traits of character are usually get revealed. Researches show that people who fit the two types of personality issues are more likely to get involved into accidents and failures while doing their job (Bartol & Bartol 2004). By identifying an applicant’s personal features and constructing his psychological profile a police psychologist finds out whether the candidate will be efficient in this job. Second of all, a police psychologist is supposed to work on monitoring of the existing police workers who deal with stressful issues on their workplace and check whether these policemen are able to keep working in these departments. The assessments are the routine checks of all the employees that occupy positions that require high rates of risk and responsibility for someone else’s lives. However, the assessments are also conducted on policemen who have killed someone during performing their duties (Scrivner 1994). These consultations are especially important for policemen, because killing someone, especially when it happens accidentally, is a burden that might be morally difficult to carry for a policeman. Thus when a policeman kills someone, his moral condition must be obligatory checked and fixed if it is needed. The most common psychological problem that occurs in such situation is called Post-Shooting Traumatic Reaction, which might be manifested in multiple symptoms of the policemen’s anxiety concerning the situation when he was supposed to shoot another someone. Such policeman often feels himself in constant danger, he becomes mad at people and becomes very aggressive and ascetic; moreover he might have sleep disorders and feel angry at the entire society for putting him in the situation when he had to shoot a human being (Bartol & Bartol 2004). The assessments of moral condition are of crucial importance as they affect both normal psychological conditions of police employees and maintenance of the organization in general. Because the job of a policeman is really difficult and as far as policemen are normal human beings, they need psychological help after handling situations that are totally overwhelming for normal humans. Thus the assessments not only define who needs psychological help and who doesn’t, they also check whether people can keep working in the positions with such high rates of stress. Moreover, along with personality monitoring police psychologists provide new employees with special trainings that prepare policeman for the job they will be doing (Rostov & Davis 2004). They acquaint them with their responsibilities and teach new policemen how to act in difficult situations. The most important parts of such trainings mostly concern issues of hostage negotiations with terrorists or just people who might be dangerous in some way. As far as a policeman often deals with malefactors of different levels of danger, his job requires awareness of such situations and knowledge how to handle the risks; frequently it is possible to be managed by constructive and efficient negotiations, which in fact deal with human factor of the offenders (Butler, Leitenberg & Fuselier 1993). Thus a police psychologist should train policemen the specific instructions of how to handle such cases. Furthermore, police psychologists often take part in such critical negotiations in order to help policemen to retrieve hostages from a dangerous place. If a psychologist works on scene where a hostage-taker holds innocent people in danger, one is supposed to construct the malefactor’s psychological profile, define his aims and, if possible, to predict his further actions. Thus analyzing the personal features and desires of the hostage-taker the psychologist decides which method of negotiations would be the most constructive, so he either holds the parley himself or advices other policemen how to act (Borum & Strentz 1993). The story of Dr. Julia Ramos-McKay described in New York Times showed precisely what police psychologists often do on scenes handing complicated cases engaged with hostage-holding and defining of psychological profile of malefactors. Thus Dr. McKay saved a three-month-old little girl whose father was holding a knife to her throat. The psychologist used psychological techniques of parley and managed to get on the right side of the man and let him give up on what he was about to do with his daughter (Bass 1987). It turns out that police psychologists often work with different kinds of criminals. They help policemen to deal with criminals who have certain mental disorders, activists and different fanatics, terrorists, and even prisoners; a police psychologist has to be prepared to work with the most dangerous and mentally problematic personalities and know how to find a specific approach to each of them regardless their age, race, and ethnical diversity. It has been proven that almost a half of all hostage-takers usually have some mental disorder, as well as their victims. The phenomenon of Stockholm syndrome is one of the most controversial issues a police psychologist must deal with, as far as having this syndrome a victim of a hostage-taker feels sympathy to one’s offender. This often makes a psychologist conduct one’s negotiating strategy on pure improvisation, based on all the psychological knowledge he has (Borum & Strentz 1993). Such kind of activity is not the only one what police psychologists often do helping policemen and FBI agents to investigate different crimes. Their job often consists of serious analysis of both a victim’s and a murderer’s psychological profiles; moreover, the psychologist has to use one’s deductive skills in order to solve crime issues on an equal basis with a crime investigator. It also frequently happens that police psychologists are being invited in police departments in order to help police officers to conduct interrogations of suspects or to help policemen to get a confession from a suspect. However, policeman job not only consists of dealing with difficulties and risks, it mostly concerns handling simpler situations engaged with ordinary people’s conflicts and multiple difficulties. Thus policeman often has to be a savior, a babysitter, a public servant, and even a psychologist himself. The point is that policeman’s job consists of multiple kinds of interactions with other people and handling their interpersonal and personal problems. So a policemen needs to know how to find a specific approach to anybody and the work of a police psychologist is to teach policemen how to help people and find interpersonal links with others. From this perspective the ability to hold a parley with dangerous malefactors are just en extreme of the ability to negotiate with people in general, which might mean multiple kinds of negotiations. It is important to note that both policemen and police psychologists often have to work with civilian casualties. The people who become victims of witnesses of crimes frequently get severe mental traumas and need psychological help. Thus police psychologists should often turn into an ordinary psychotherapists or even psychiatrists in order to help the sufferers to overcome their hard mental conditions. In such cases police psychologists apply general principles of psychotherapy and help the victims before they receive clinical help. However, in the order to be able to provide the sufferers with psychological support police psychologist needs to have a solid education in psychological realm. Police psychologists also work with groups and even masses of people when it is needed. This work of psychologists often helps policemen to handle such issues as massive panic and prevents investigation obstruction. This might be possible in the cases when policemen have to deal with crimes in public places or massive disasters, because the mechanism of social contagion might disseminate massive disorders. Thus in terms of victims’ support police psychologists often provide law enforcement agencies with help in handling the psychological aspect of different harms that might be caused by crimes. A separate realm of psychological counseling that police psychologists work within is children-victims’ counseling. When a child becomes a victim of sexual harassment or domestic violence, a psychologist not only needs to provide the child with psychological support but also to retrieve some information about the offender in the way that wouldn’t traumatize the child even more. Thus police psychologist should use multiple techniques and approaches in order to get the information as slightly as possible (Reese & Horn 1988). In addition police officers themselves also get severe psychological disorders engaged with the kind of job they have to do. Thus they need psychological counseling as well as victims of crimes. Police psychologist is supposed to provide policemen (as well as their families if needed) with psychological support and even prescribe them specific course of medical treatment. The traumas that policemen might get during completing their duties might be of different character. They might have sleeping disorders, panic attacks, and hold hidden phobias inside. All these disorders would anyway be harmful not only for psychological conditions of law enforcement system’s workers but also would ruin the organization itself, because there is no way for the entire system to work being based on traumatized employees. Thus police psychologists contribute a lot to the work of the entire law enforcement system as they provide it with precise monitoring of personnel, psychological support of police employees, and duty assessment. Moreover, police psychologists are very helpful in negotiating issues that policemen often face with and might even help in crime investigations. References Rostow, C. & Davis, R. (2004). A Handbook for Psychological Fitness-For-Duty Evaluations in Law Enforcement. Binghamton, NY: Haworth. Scrivner, E. (1994). The Role of Police Psychology and Control of Excessive Force. NIJ Research in Brief. Retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/ppsyc.txt Reese, J. T., Horn, J.M. (1988). "Police Psychology: Operational Assistance". U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigations, Washington, D.C. Retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/130933NCJRS.pdf Bartol, C. & Bartol, A. (2004). Introduction to Forensic Psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Butler, W., Leitenberg, H. & Fuselier, G. (1993). "The Use of Mental Health Professional Consultants to Police Hostage Negotiation Teams." Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 11, 213-221. Poland, J. (1978). "Police Selection Methods and the Prediction of Police Performance." Journal of Police Science and Administration, 6, 374-393. Wortley, R.K. and Homel, R.J. (1995). "Police Prejudice as a Function of Training and Outgroup Contact: A Longitudinal Investigation". Law and Human Behavior, 19, 305-317. Borum, R. & Strentz, T. (1993). "The Borderline Personality: Negotiation Strategies." FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin (April): 6-10. Bass, S.L. (1987). "Police Psychologist Helps Peers Cope". New York Times (July), n.pag. Read More