Abstract
One in five UK police officers suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, yet there is no gold standard measure of trauma exposure available. This study coded 4,987 exposures reported by 1,531 UK police officers, using their own language. The resulting checklist describes over 70% of typical ‘worst’ reported traumatic incidents (plus situational factors, including Covid19). The Police Traumatic Experiences Checklist is a practical tool of value for self-assessment and peer support, and can facilitate attempts by Occupational Health and management to improve monitoring and treatment access.
Highlights
Encountering events that are traumatic is commonplace in UK policing and global law enforcement (Cartwright and Roach, 2020; Syed et al, 2020; The Royal Foundation, 2020)
Of the 1,531 participants whose traumas were coded, 60.4% were male, 38.2% female and 1.4% preferred not to say. This was consistent with the wider UK policing population in the larger The Job & The Life (TJTL) dataset of 2018 (n 1⁄4 16,857) and Home Office figures
The study provides an assessment tool that identifies over 75% of UK police trauma exposure and is based on the recent experiences of over 1,500 officers and staff on the front line
Summary
Encountering events that are traumatic is commonplace in UK policing and global law enforcement (Cartwright and Roach, 2020; Syed et al, 2020; The Royal Foundation, 2020). Experiencing a traumatic event (defined as ‘an extremely threatening or horrific event or series of events’: Maercker et al, 2013) is required for a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder. Over 90% of serving officers and staff report exposure to such events and one in five police officers currently have either Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD: Brewin et al, 2020). There is no gold standard by which trauma exposure is measured in UK policing. We report the development of a new measure of trauma exposure based on the narratives of over 1,500 police officers and staff
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