Police Mental Preparation in Police Interventions

  • Jul 26, 2021
click fraud protection

For Mª Dolores Pérez Bravo. Updated: 2 May 2018

Police Mental Preparation in Police Interventions

Some empirical studies have shown that the emotion most experienced by police officers is stress (Pacheco, 2004). In fact, police work is strongly linked to stress for two fundamental reasons:

  1. Most of the time, the policeman develops his profession and his work in a conflictive and risky environment, above all, when he must act or intervene in situations of security and citizen care. At other times, police interventions appear to be harmless but can escalate into critical and dangerous situations.
  2. On the other hand, the policeman's work tools the weapon, defense and / or police baton, generate or add a risk that can considered as a stressor.

For these reasons, it is necessary for the police officer to meet a series of requirements or conditions to help him face successfully any type of stressful, critical or dangerous situation that arises or may arise in their interventions police.

We invite you to continue reading this PsicologíaOnline article, if you want to know more about Police Mental Preparation in Police Interventions.

These requirements refer to:

  • Maintain a perfect physical condition;
  • Have preparation and training in police tactics, as well as adequate practice and training in them;
  • Possess a technical training in police shooting and knowledge about the weapon itself, in addition, that it is sufficiently effective;
  • Last but not least, achieve a perfect psychological condition and adequate mental control over stressful situations.

Risk Factors and Police Protection Factors
The main risk factors that the police officer must face in a critical situation, which may occur in a certain police intervention, are the consequences and effects produced, at a physiological, cognitive and behavioral level, the body activation produced by stress.

Despite this, the police officer has a powerful protection factor in order to minimize these consequences and effects: mental or psychological preparation for crisis situations. This mental preparation consists mainly of the police:

  1. Be knowledgeable about consequences and effects of stress in your own body;
  2. Recognize and be aware of your own reactions in a stressful situation;
  3. Train some basic psychological techniques and effective in helping you improve mental control in these types of situations.

Therefore, a "Pyramid in police psychological training" in which the agent must learn to train the psychological techniques of relaxation and breathing, visualization and imagination, and concentration. Thus, by previously performing relaxation and breathing exercises, the police officer can improve control of his own physiological activation produced in a stressful situation. In addition to the visualization exercises, which consist of imagining with thought the possible situations to which one can having to face, to analyze and look for the best solutions or alternatives to solve them, the police officer manages to improve the reaction speed and improvisation of appropriate responses and can adapt more easily to high pressure situations psychological.

As a complement to the training of the named exercises, it is worth highlighting the importance of combining them with the realization of simulations or “role-playing” of crisis situations in which a high level of stress is generated. In this way, it is possible to acquire, in a more controlled way, certain real experiences of coping with stress.

However, these simulations should be performed gradually, from least to greatest difficulty, to avoid in the police an emotional overflow or a possible "trauma" due to the acquisition of some afraid.

Police Mental Preparation in Police Interventions - Mental requirements of a law enforcement officer

The police officer must be psychologically prepared to face any situation of stress that occurs in their police interventions. In fact, the policeman with adequate mental preparation will be in a more optimal and advantageous position. to cope with the stress of police intervention than another agent whose mental preparation is less or less adequate. Therefore, every police officer should be aware of this need and should encourage their mental training to improve their professional performance.

Police Mental Preparation in Police Interventions - Conclusions

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

instagram viewer