 Hi everybody. I'm excited to introduce this panel on trauma informed policing. I think it's a hugely important topic obviously just because it's intrinsically important. We're talking here about the lives and the well-being of hundreds of thousands of public servants in the country but also because I think it represents a really important and different way of thinking about the problems of policing today and and some of the possibilities of police reform. First of all when we think about what's broken about our approach to policing in this country we often focus on the impact that policing has on people in the community who are the objects of policing and obviously that's really important but we also need to focus on the way our system of policing affects police officers themselves. The job of policing is is hard. It can take a huge toll on a lot of officers and when it does that that in turn can have a big impact on the way that police do their jobs in the community. Police make life or death decisions. They get called to resolve crises and conflicts that have reached a boiling point. They see us in our most vulnerable moments you know when we're victims, when we're scared, when we're in distress. It's never easy to manage those kinds of difficult situations in a graceful and professional way but if you are sleep deprived and emotionally spent and struggling with your own mental health challenges it can be almost impossible. Police work doesn't have to happen under those conditions and the fact that it does is a failure of public policy and a failure of police management. This is the kind of issue that should be able to unite people. It doesn't pit the community against the police and this kind of stalemate that we sometimes see in police reform. It's about meeting the needs of police officers and community members more effectively recognizing that in some cases they're both victims of the way we've organized our systems of policing in this country and that fixing that system can benefit everybody. The second way in which I think this topic represents a different way of thinking about police reform is equally important. In policing in lots of other areas of public policy we get really fixated. We have been really fixated for many years on accountability as the key tool of reform and that's important. Accountability is important but a one-sided focus on accountability can have a destructive impact on an organization's climate. It makes employees feel defensive and alienated from their organizations even when they're not doing anything wrong. They experience the accountability systems as kind of suspicious and constraining and hostile and demoralizing. Successful organizations don't just treat their workers as unruly children who need to be controlled. At least sometimes they also treat them as committed but imperfect and limited people who need to be supported, who need to be provided with the tools and the skills and the services that they need to do their jobs well. The mental health support that we're going to be talking about today is one really important example of that. It illustrates this really useful shift of thinking about in the police reform space away from the question of just how can we punish cops who aren't doing what they want them to do towards an equally important question which is how can we give cops the support that they need to succeed to serve the community better, make more just decisions in difficult circumstances and show more empathy for the people they interact with. So I'm really excited to hear from the panelists about the details of how we can do that and so I'm going to turn things over to Daisha to get that conversation started. Thank you David and welcome everyone to this talk about trying to inform policing. I had the privilege of being able to moderate the panel and we have three amazing people that will be talking a little bit about the work that they do and looking at looking at it from a unique lens. So again my name is Aisha Price. I use a pronoun she her and hers. I am a clinical faculty member at the University of Michigan in the School of Social Work and have had the pleasure of providing training to law enforcement officers across the state. So we could welcome Ian, Alicia Dyer and Jeff Carrick and Leah Milch Chapman, our distinguished guests this afternoon and we're just going to jump right into it everyone because we only have one hour and we want to make sure that guests can ask you questions as they come up for them while they're watching but if you all can start with introducing yourself if you want to share your pronouns you can do that as well but we want to know what is your role so what do you do and tell us why you do it. So Alicia can you get us started? Yes thank you Daisha. My name is Alicia Dyer. I go by she her. I am a third year student at the University of Michigan studying public policy and social work. My background is in law enforcement. I was a rural patrol officer for seven years in the county and currently I'm seasonally patrolling the waterways in the county and you know why I think that this panel is so important and why I even went back to grad school is when I was working in policing growing up in Ipsy I was working in a community that I lived in and I cared about a lot and throughout my career even in the beginning stages I really thought a lot about mental health and how I started learning more about trauma and started to then kind of understand how the system is not really set up to value workers inside the system and if you think about it from the origins of our criminal justice system you know this criminal justice system being built in America on slavery and oppression and controlling others it was not built from a lens of let's make sure the people that are working inside it are at their best selves it was more so built under a lens of work work work and so instead of being evaluated for you know passing out stickers or like doing foot patrol you know you see a lot of managers across the country evaluating officers on arrest and tickets and how productive they are and not necessarily focused on how well they feel thank you Alicia and so Jeff tell us a little bit about yourself hi my name is Jeff Carrick I'm a retired deputy from Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office where I served over 25 years in the community as a road patrol deputy as a narcotics detective in various other roles with the agency I retired six years ago and just prior to retirement I was diagnosed with PTSD depression and anxiety all which led to my big decision to retire when I did um since retiring I've worked in several roles in training around the local area at our local police academy as well as with the um international group where we provide um systems to help law enforcement train as well as the military also since retiring I've taken it upon myself to really be the voice of my fellow officers who have a hard time being able to speak out about mental health and about their well being um the the um industry so to speak I can't think of the word I want to use currently but the industry is definitely set up as Alicia said to work work work and it's not set up to take care of the wellness of the officers and I really believe um not being a social worker or clinically or or education having an education in that area that um the more mentally healthier officers are the better they can actually respond to and do the job and part of that is being able to step back and evaluate their mental well-being and be able to make the decisions that they need to make in order to get help thank you thank you Jeff and thank you for sharing the things you've done post retirement and I'm just wondering if you can tell us in a sentence or less like Alicia shared that she went into law enforcement because she was working in a community that she really cared about what what made you want to be a officer that's kind of a trick question for me because it's not it's not something that I um had really looked into while I was at um Eastern Michigan University I was involved in the ROTC program and was a commissioned officer in the United States Army um I didn't serve on active duty and I really didn't go into my degree area which is computer aided design and manufacturing I kind of slipped and fell into law enforcement and it seemed to be a good fit so I stayed with it I started actually as a seasonal employee um doing what Alicia is doing now which is patrolling the waterways of Washtenaw County in the summertime and I just kind of edged into full-time work there thank you and I'm sure that that will be probably a part of what our next panelists will be able to align with too is having lots of different interests but also being able to find a career that does bring in some of those things that you said Jeff about mental health and wellness and being a clinician so Liam Mills Chapman can you please introduce yourself yes thank you so much Dacia um good afternoon everyone again my name is Liam Mills Chapman um I'm a clinical therapist in Washtenaw County I've been doing this for over 10 years now um so I'm a little you know late into the game but I still feel pretty much well versed in the area I would say that a lot of my interest comes from just simply being a woman of color right being an African-American woman and seeing some of the adverse effects of policing on the black community my earlier time into this career I had a position I would say it was interesting but a position in a high secure facility with pretty much all black males and so that began to really really pique my interest looking at the trauma that they had incurred and a lot of the conversations centered around their engagement or involvement with the carceral system so after me kind of leaving that space I felt a calling knowing that in social work advocacy is a huge part of what we do I felt a calling to kind of look at this from both sides right looking at it from the side of the community as well as the side of officer to find out what exactly seems to be the problem and I think a big piece that was missing as we've been hearing is the mental health aspect of the officers the lack of diagnosing for the officers for them to be able to even know what they're dealing with right and how their trauma interfaces with right the community's trauma and then we have a huge problem kind of ensuing from there so that kind of piqued my interest early on with the carceral system and our involvement with mental health and wanting to aid our officers thank you so much so these are panelists everyone and they have some very unique perspectives that they can offer but again we want to continue to open it up for people to send in questions as we start our conversation so for each of you you all have such a breadth of experience so I know it might be hard to think about what is the one answer I want to make sure I can share with people so I'm going to try to guide us through starting with what is kind of a typical day in the life of a law enforcement officer so Alicia and Jeff you brought up a little bit about what are some of the impacts and ever's impact that have impacted you but can you share a little bit for everyone about what is a typical day we say work work work what does that look like yeah I guess I could start so I would say a it's not like the movies I think the media and movies have really kind of led to this public image that we're like always running around like lights and sirens and you know kicking doors down and I mean there's really no typical day every day is different every situation is so different but there's such a varying level of seriousness that you are and the calls that you respond to it throughout the day so summer and ipsy you know getting into shift you know you might have a domestic violence come out and then you're going to that next thing you know you're talking to a neighbor that's angry about the other neighbor's dog walking on their lawn then you could respond to a homicide and so you're going kind of up and down all day and I think that was something that I really thought about and then especially like then getting home and trying to sleep trying to decompress after all of that going on all day and then even like the report writing and a lot of the stress that comes from bureaucracy and administration trying to deal with that and then like just working a lot of hours so you might think you're getting off at 8 p.m. for example but if a late call comes in then you might get held over till midnight and so just the hardships in how much law enforcement work and then also you can't really necessarily always plan things outside of law enforcement you know if I have plans at nine and I have a late call come in you have to cancel them and there were some days that I would work after doing like three or four doubles where it's just no sleep really tired just feeling like and then you're on different shifts when you get forced to work overtime so you can't even like get a consistent sleep schedule sometimes and so yeah I'll let Jeff talk to you but that's some of my preliminary thoughts so the the the big thing for me on both ends of the shift was leaving the house and then returning to the house leaving the house always was the hardest because you had this drilled into you from the very beginning of the your career in the academy that this could be the last time that you walk out of the house very well could be and then when you return to the house as Alicia said we were you're going up and down all day so most people go through their lives and they get adrenaline dumps when when things happen that are you know stimulate them a typical police officer's day there's five to 20 adrenaline dumps in an eight hour period where you're at a heightened level of sensitive sensitivity and then you come back down to what your baseline normal is and then you're right back up and then back down and so you get home and it's time to decompress and you try to do the best you can to leave the job literally for me it was I left the job in the locker I took my gun belt off I took my uniform off that stuff went in the locker and it stayed there and it didn't travel back and forth to work on me or with me other than to get washed and taken right back to the locker room um but you're you're trying to you've seen things and done things all day and you try to go home and have a normal day where you pick your child up out of the crib and and give them a hug um maybe that happened two hours after you responded to a four year old who was run over by a automobile accident the in those types of emotions where you have seen something that is just not normal in anybody's world and then you have to go back and do normal things it's very very hard to to turn that off and turn it back on and that's what that's that's what not only are our profession required but that's what our family is required and that's what I think sometimes society even requires of us and it's very very hard to turn that light switch off and on all the time um and you almost as we said you really never leave the job it's always there is there a policy about taking time to debrief between those difficult calls those generally land um on each agency to determine when or um whether or not there's going to be some type of crisis mitigation debriefing um our agency for the most part was really good about it um however it's not it's generally not mandatory it's voluntary one of the problems with with the voluntariness of it is is you'll tell me I have to go there it doesn't mean I have to become involved in it and there's really what determines what is a um a critical incident or a critical crisis that we're going to debrief and do that on it for one agency say a small 11 man agency in northern michigan that could be a fatal car accident because they see five of them a year in an ipsy township we could see four fatals in a week we could see two homicides or two shootings or uh massive child abuse what determines what is a critical incident um and that's part of what what has come forward in policing in recent years is that we don't see one incident that causes this we see hundreds of incidents that build up inside of you and you may forget 99 of them but one of them like can trigger all 99 to come flooding back in like tomorrow so this I'm sorry to to answer again there is strictly there's really not a solid policy that encompasses everybody but it's kind of left left to the devices of the agencies I really I'm gonna try to step forward I appreciate you adding that Jeff because you even when I asked about time to debrief between the calls you went into like the critical incidents and what is what's occurring for critical incidents I know even myself I need time to debrief I'm going to debrief after this one hour because I need to breathe and so Leah when you hear Alicia and Jeff talk about these things from a clinical perspective what are some things that come to mind for you that you think people should be able to recognize so I would say first I'm concerned that's the first thing that comes to mind and the reason in which I'm concerned is is because each individual enters this particular workspace with their own belief system of self right and so if you believe that you're okay then you will go around and function and operate as though you are okay until as Jeff indicated you're triggered right and then you have an immediate trauma response in that moment so the lack of insight and understanding of whether or not you have incurred a measure of harm right to self emotionally or psychologically is setting up all of our police officers for failure right and so we see these incidents taking place for instance right all of what we see on the media of homicides that's happening right within the community with police and others we don't understand that these are human beings that are untreated right we put the police in a position to to assess whether or not the community is treated or not right whether or not they're having mental health concerns and whether or not they need to be right taken to the hospital but there is nothing in reverse so it again is leaving our police right with responding in and out of trauma right from fight to flight right to potentially freezing and that could bring about harm for them as well as the community at large um when you were speaking days are you know my mind went to self-care right and understanding that self-care is in the moment it's not waiting for vacation time right it's trying to figure out how can I actually regulate myself and my emotions in the moment and that is something I believe a skill set that needs to be taught um and acknowledged within the organization and not for them to have to identify outside on their own because I don't believe they'll do it or many won't and when you say you don't believe that they will do it and but you started off by saying it has a lot to do with sense of self and people not maybe not even recognizing what they need um a lot of times people talk about stigma or mental health and I'm wondering if we talk about how people view themselves if they'll do it themselves what what are some things that we as that mental health professionals need to be mindful of in the sense of the police I guess I need a bit I got really excited so I'm thinking about where you you said well if they don't think they need the help then it's really not likely that they'll be that they'll reach out for the help and so I think that's something for all of us in different roles to consider but specifically as a mental health professional if we know that officers may not be aware self-aware of what they need what do you recommend for clinicians to to do because that's a very different person than someone who is saying yes I have a mental health need and I want to come to you and I'm recognizing that this is a challenge that's a very different interaction so what would you what recommendations would you have for mental health professionals in and needing the needs of law enforcement officers so I would say get to know right the various departments in your area um I have reached out to various departments within um washtenaw county to work along with them to assist their officers in a measure of healing um one particular department and I won't go into right that department's name but one particular department um actually has bought into this notion that they now understand that the mind controls the body and that yes it's beautiful and that with that right they understand that some of the diseases that they are seeing manifest within their body is actually from them not caring from for their mental health and so one of the suggestions that we have been doing actually together um after showing this this documentary called love is the answer it was walking while black love is the answer and it really just started to get some wheels turning um around this how can we get this community engagement and walk side by side by one another without being explosive and so in our conversation we worked it out where look if he identifies that there's someone that is struggling that is an officer on the force then we are going to make certain that x amount of sessions are being rendered so I do believe that that clinicians at large need to get to know right the departments in their purview and see how they can extend themselves to best aid our our officers and when that is done I believe that the community engagement part can then take place absent that will be spinning our wheels okay so thank you so much for sharing that there but that after reaching out to some of these agencies that the management there has been open to having mental health be a ongoing conversation and increasing the ability to access it so Alicia and Jeff what do you all think about from from your side when you think about um what Leah's saying about oh yeah the the mind impacts the body and all of those things oh we're all connected and what are these what do you think how much do you think the typical officer knows can I go you can okay um so I think the typical officers is very mindful of what is going on with them where where the breakdown is in that for me as an officer to seek mental health assistance I put myself in a in a much more unique situation than the general public does um in that if I come in and say I'm suffering and I will share this twice during the course of my career I walked in and said I can't do this um one was in roughly 2000 and five six or seven just in that time frame um and I had been on on the on the force about 15 years at that point and I took some time to myself what that entailed was basically putting myself out there where people were going to look at me like this person's not quite right some other things happened I wasn't allowed to work any longer so you took my job away from me although I burned my sick time and I burned my vacation time in order for me to get healthy but the reason I was unhealthy was because of the amount of trauma that I endured over the course of my career so you've now taken it you put it back on me to become healthy for something that the career caused that's that's a big um a big hurdle to to cross first you have to be able to say hey I have a problem in a super alpha um area where you're putting your career and your um your livelihood in jeopardy and then the way it's handled from from my viewpoint from management is this is great you can go see the department psychologist and there's a very key term there department that psychologist is not my doctor they are not there for my well-being and hear me and to help me become better and to deal with the traumas of the job they're there to tell the department what their best interest in my mental health is I can a either go to work or b I need to continue to stay off of work and if I'm staying off of work that is killing my sick time it's killing my vacation time and at some point when the paycheck is not going to come in any longer you can bet your bottom dollar that I can walk in any psychology office in the state of Michigan and go you know I'm perfectly fine and give them every answer they need for me to go back to work in the in the in to make the money that I need to support my family and myself where we don't what doesn't happen is is we don't get healthy we just meet the minimum needs to go back to work to be able to take care of ourselves and that that's like the biggest issue right in the forefront getting to know a doctor a psychologist a psychiatrist a social worker who you can trust is absolutely imperative for police officers if they don't trust the person that they're speaking to they are not going to open up to what the problems that they're dealing with are and therefore it's just going to be that vicious cycle again they'll say everything they need to do to get back to work and then they still won't be healed again twice in my career the second time was roughly six months before I retired and I walked in and said I can't do this any longer so um sorry Alicia do you fire away now go ahead we're having a conversation because I was definitely going to add to you what what your thoughts were about that and I want to lift up for everyone I just said it took 15 years to say I can't do it and that's one thing but I also am wondering if you have thoughts about whatever you were going to say but he also mentioned needing to have a mental health professional that you trust so yeah go ahead I just wanted to validate what Jeff was saying right one of the officers that I do now have a standing relationship with um indicated that the desire is for the culture to shift right and he had worked in various um you know departments and it was for the first time he said I really feel like they care about me no one has ever asked me how I am doing really to the point that they would be willing to connect me to a mental health professional and not just like Jeff is saying right the psychologist or the psychiatrist um so that they could just kind of like go ahead and and man up again or whatever it may be that's exactly yeah yeah so I just really wanted to validate what you were saying Jeff and and honor that space because I'm hearing that from multiple individuals that are officers yeah and Alicia started often in her introduction by saying that just the history of the structures and systems of law enforcement it was never designed to support the actual people who are doing the job and so Alicia what what do you have to add to some of this dialogue too yeah I just um you know I definitely agree with what's being said and you know in doing the job you know when I left to go back to grad school and I left road patrol I just remember feeling like a weight lifted off my shoulders in a lot of ways um I a I could actually sleep um you know a lot better I mean I still have trouble sleeping but it's much better than it was um and I'm not in such a militaristic environment where I often felt like I was just a body and not a human being and I feel like that comes from the bureaucracy and the militaristic structure um in the systems right and um and thinking about um something else I just wanted to add about mental health a lot of the times too you know like your partner in your patrol car becomes sort of like a informal counselor or therapist you you talk with them you can debrief after a call um and something that I thought about a lot with the the pandemic is deputies and officers were no longer allowed to double and and to have a partner for a limited time because of COVID and so you think about the more isolated you are in the profession um something I noticed about my own mental health is it seems like the more connected I was with the community I served and especially being from the community the better my mental health would get and so when I was working in a um a community engagement role I noticed I started feeling a lot happier and it was because I was doing things that were very positive and I got the opportunity to not just you know respond to people in crisis 24-7 but to take a break and to really I mean there was a lot of uh there were still things that happened that were hard for me to deal with particularly some kids I mentored um being killed um and that's what ended up me leaving and going back to grad school but I think that even having that break um is so important and I wish that more administrations and managers would would value that um and as we think about policies um and you know I would hang out with social workers a lot when I was doing the community engagement role and they would say oh after shift we all debrief and we all check in and we talk about our feelings and we're not doing that law enforcement we're out the door right we're not we're not sitting around afterwards like hey man are you okay you know um it's very much I mean I don't know if it's the the hyper masculine environment I don't know what it is but it's definitely like a tough up you know hold in your feelings don't talk about it kind of mentality. Alicia when you bring that up about social workers it actually is a part of our code of ethics to do that that was why the question about the policies and what are their policies in place that kind of create a culture that if you don't do it it's kind of required on the other end so what that might be able to look like um Leah you're Alicia and Jeff talking about just the stressors again and then Alicia brought up this isolation and a community connection and it made me think about sometimes people say oh yeah that's kind of common sense but there is actually some clinical we have some clinical understanding on what it does to an individual when they are going through these types of experiences and being isolated and I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about that for people who are watching. I would just simply say that right we are created as social beings right and so for us to be in isolation we are left sometimes with our thoughts and we don't necessarily have clarity on what it is that we have that's ruminating and and we're rehearsing over and over again in our in our minds and so I think that it is vastly important to build community for support whether it be a peer support that you could have to be able to talk with as as Alicia was stating you have your peer writing along with you right and not necessarily would they have all of the answers for you but just for you to be able to articulate your thoughts and your feelings in that moment at least releases some of that right emotional vow for you where you're not just kind of holding and retaining all of that at one time so I would say definitely as you're saying Dacia with social work we have supervision that is required of us where we need to come together and we need to talk and bounce certain things off of one another for the sake of clarity as well as for our own healing so we have therapy for the therapist during those consults right and I you know I just kind of believe that that would be something that would be extremely beneficial for police officers to infuse within their policies in their their departments so Jeff and Alicia you you share that there's not that there's not a culture or a specific policy that is standardized to say this is the way we're going to operate um so if you were able to say hey we have this idea for a policy that needs to be incorporated across all agencies that are doing law enforcement if you're an accredited agency there should be a basic policy around behavior health of the of the staff there and the personnel um what would you what would you hope that policy would say and and displace it all so it's up to that just comes to mind uh is the not allowing officers to work when they haven't slept like that's a big one for me because I know officers that have crashed their cars I know officers that um I mean we know sleep deprivation is similar to having a BAC of alcohol uh 0.08 and so you know when you're driving around sleep deprived with a gun like that's a hazard in my opinion and I feel like we don't have policies in place to protect officers from um being from not being forced to work when they haven't had sleep and so there are some policies like you can't get forced um for eight hours uh in between shifts but then if an officer drives an hour and a half home or an officer has to get up for court in two hours and then go back into work I think it it really uh there needs to be a way to ask the officers have you gotten enough sleep to work and if you haven't then figuring out a way to make sure that they're not out there driving around because in my opinion that's one of the like number one things that I think would be um really important to focus on and I don't know if Jeff if you want to add so you would say having a policy around sleep specifically and what their state is then and Jeff do you have a one basic policy that you think should be implemented I'm not so sure it's a policy but it's the really take a good hard look at our profession and the way that we view the officers who are in crisis um and allow them to be able to come forward without any potential repercussions and get the help that they need those sleep that sleep deprivation that Alicia talks about I've been retired for six years um I was last night was a weird night I was up and down quite a bit um but on a regular night I'm out of bed three to four times or awake three to four times a night for over a half hour at a shot um some of it stuff's creeping back from the job some of it's you know stress with the current job I have so there's a little bit of both of those things but sleep is sleep is definitely important but I think having the ability to get the help that the that the officer needs would definitely push their ability to get that sleep do the other things that they need to do um and I I'm an honest I honestly believe that the better the officer's mental health is the better their interaction with the community is the better their interaction with the community is the better the stronger those relationships become and some of the stuff that we current that's currently being played out in the media would really die down um it's a it's a small spark that we fanned into a brush fire that's building into a forest fire and a lot of it still has to do with that ability to gain trust and part of that has to do with the officer being able to be healthy at the end of the day that's really helpful and I think one of our viewer talks about how now with more training around crisis intervention and co-responses it is creating ripples of people trying to recognize this issue and in some of those trainings trauma-informed policing is described as not only being able to recognize trauma in the community or policing but also being able to recognize trauma yourself we're going to switch to think about the patient kind of client experience but before we do that I wonder Leah you mentioned that there are some agencies that have been willing to partner with behavioral health professionals in order to deliver services in a in a different way that's not like oh we're going to have you evaluate it to see if you're fit for duty but more this is something we want to support to you um to offer to support you I am wondering we think about policy and mental health policy as well around diagnoses and I've just mentioned that sometimes opening the door if you have to get a diagnosis to have your insurance cover your treatment depending on what that diagnosis is there can be some negative ramifications with that so have you and that agency or have you ever been able to talk about making it so people can have more of a barrier free experience without needing a a qualifying diagnosis to receive mental health services yeah that's exactly how it's run so it isn't a you know go to your healthcare provider sort of scenario right it is having someone that is planted within the department that's just there to assist right so if there's a difficult day let's say that um you just made a run and you've experienced the most traumatic thing ever you could come back to the office and you would have someone that you could actually talk to download this right traumatic experience and then be able to kind of collect yourself and go along either with your day or if you need to be tapped out I like to use that term right at least two taps tap you out and then you're able to kind of go home to kind of get the care that you need right as best as can and so yeah there there is funding that is being set aside and allocated for those services for the trusted behavioral therapist at the time so yeah it's it's a really progressive sort of look at this because it's not putting the onus on the officer again to go out and seek out the assistance that they need but the assistance is present right for them to go to when they know that they they've had a difficult day so by being able to do that that's one way to reduce what I'm hearing is that that's one day to reduce stigma because it doesn't mean you have to have a diagnosis it doesn't mean you have to take off a ongoing amount of time at work but it's normalizing being able to talk about thoughts and feelings definitely so Jeff said that if we can support officers and being healthy that helps the interactions with the community and and it's kind of a revolving support but when people have clients at this moment there are still a lot of people in the community that have some very negative interactions with law enforcement officers that can be traumatizing for them so what do you say Leah from a clinical perspective what can people do to support their patients and clients who have had that very difficult experience with law enforcement to kind of navigate in their treatment so I would first say validate the experience of their client right because a lot of times we lead with our own particular biases for and or against a particular system and that could impose harm right on the fact that you're not validating what they said we know in trauma when one is giving a narrative that narrative does not have to be rooted and grounded in fact right it simply has to be what the person said it was so in honoring your patient by simply saying yes I validate your experience let's look at joining with them to see how best they could remedy whatever that encounter is and as advocates we have the opportunity to reach out to those officers and say hey can we have a conversation right can we come together we look at restorative justice practices and we only want to implement them in school systems why can't we implement the same thing within the community with the police and right the citizens those same sorts of practices can be done there and I think as clinicians we can push the envelope a bit further with that even if that department doesn't necessarily want to each officer has the ability to say yay or nay right and I believe that this is teaching empathy right where empathy is perceived to have been lost with the the department thank you so much Leah for adding that resource I'm sorry Jeff go ahead no no just to to talk about empathy I use this as a way to explain it when I retired my empathy tank was overdrawn and it's it's very easy in our job to have to to to empty that tank and not just empty it but we went to somebody else's tank and borrowed some of theirs too and um six years it's taken my empathy tank almost six years to get back to where I feel like for the most part when somebody says something to me I can fully embrace what they're saying and then at least as Leah said validate it to the point where they understand that I'm curing them it doesn't mean I have to agree but there's a point where we don't there there isn't a empathy station where we can just go plug in and fill that tank back up it's and when it's constantly pulled away from you it really I think that's part of what causes um officers problems is that they really realize at some point I'm not the person I was five years ago 10 years ago 15 years ago and you look back and you're like what happened to that person and you're like you're trying to get back to that point but every time you do it you feel like you're pulled the opposite direction so I think exactly what you said it it it works both ways for me we have to understand as officers what's going on in our community and have that empathy the big thing um for me has been over the last year is to really try to meet the community and let them know that your officers are also human beings and they have a lot of the same issues in their personal lives that you as a community member do and that if we can understand that both sides have those issues that we again can kind of meet in the middle it humanizes everybody at the at that point where they can say I understand where you're coming from and I get I I don't agree with what you did or how you said it or anything else but I understand how you got there because I've been there before um so I'm sorry no you don't know I think that I'm trying to figure out why was that okay it's not going right here all right so Jeff when you bring that up it's like those are some of the things that you know people might know about um policing that but just don't keep it in the forefront of their mind that oh police are humans their bodies and minds were very similar to us but you brought up something about the fact that people often see themselves differently after they've been on a force for some period of time and and don't know when they lost that who they were and so Alicia another to add on to that people are asking what else should the public know about policing beyond the power relationships because they said that's already very obvious so you mentioned like it's not what we see on tv so what other things so Jeff brought up the understanding that all enforcement officers are people too often coming in with the history of trauma already Alicia what else would you say would be some things that people should know I think something to be aware of is a lot of officers when they start they're very young and like whether what department they're at kind of makes them who they are right and so like I started policing when I was 21 um and I grew I was still like a child in a lot of ways right you're 21 you know the studies have shown even the brain's not fully developed now till 25 so you have a lot of younger people coming into policing um and I think that one of the um the you know going back to like the way that police are trained and how problematic my a lot of my beef of uh regarding the system comes from you know looking back now and thinking about how I was kind of taught to fear people and it was very much um this like us first them mindset that I think makes the mental health even worse and at some point in my career I said you know the heck with it you know this is my community and for me it's not there's no divide because I live here I shop here like these are my family and friends and so I think that the more that we can start stomping that out and I think that you have to really look again at like how the system was created and and then think about how to build a system that's not gonna center um some of these philosophies inside it um I think that's really important but I also want to say I think about a quote I went to a wrongful um conviction summit uh a couple months back and someone at this summit said I would like God to take you back to when you first started your job because somewhere you got cold and that quote has sat with me since then and it just rings so true even the best intention people going into law enforcement over time the job like you see them change and it's it's sad it really is yeah if I could add Desha kind of piggybacking on what Jeff and Alicia said and integrating something you said as well back to this notion of empathy right and being cold and callous right I believe that that's a protective mechanism that the human right develops unconsciously right because they too are fearful Jeff said early on he was taught you might not come home right to have that language shared to you very early on right is already infusing a measure of fear and what does the human body do when fear sets in it immediately right with an autonomic response clicks in and it tries to protect and preserve itself so if you're going and leading into a profession from that vein then we see why there's a lot of right incidents that are taking place and so that is even right a bit more convoluted to the space of history right what in your history individually were you taught to be afraid up so if there are human bodies that right are fearful one another let's say based on the racial dynamic or construct then a white body next to a black body that is catastrophic in and of itself by one's perceived thought of that individual that they need to fear them so that is we have to kind of work on again what we're teaching from the youth right and then it looks at right the empathy piece one of the interventions that I used with one of the officers was something simple and what I had him do was go back and get some of the letters right and cards that he had received from some of the citizens that he had assisted over time and just read them and he sat there and cried like a baby like a baby because it touched his heart again and he wasn't just operating right as this robot that we kind of see right it brought him back to a space of humanity and so it is identifying certain interventions that can be crafted and brought into again the departmental space that just lets them remember who they are and to touch into the humanity of who they are so that they can go back out again and interface with the public from right a space of honor one to another then when that happens I believe that the community can then kind of bring down their guards when they see a lack of incidents is occur because now it's not of them against us right it is all us yeah when you bring that up you kind of touch on all different layers of how we all have to start really young to think about how do we perceive things and the things that you mentioned about fear I just want to highlight that you're saying this is automatic and it's what our bodies do automatically and then when you talked about the community and talking about the black body and the white body standing next to each other it made me think about how often even social work professionals might engage law enforcement to call on a person or just the general citizen because they're in fear they call up law enforcement and a lot of times law enforcement they they're like this why don't you call me for this this is not what I'm claiming to this job for that's Jeff and Alicia that's why I wanted to ask you all why did you come into this job because a lot of times people have been law enforcement officers from what I understand often come in because they want to serve and protect and then they often get in the middle of interpersonal conflicts from say it's a person who feels threatened by me for no reason and then they're calling law enforcement and not me and law enforcement have this interaction so we have to also I think it makes me think about how all of us have to be much more intentional about being aware of what we're doing with our fear responses because a lot of people their immediate reaction when they feel afraid or feel like they want someone to step in is to call law enforcement and that doesn't work if we want to create healing in our community I would agree really quickly I'm working on a project with Washington State University right now where we are looking at implicit bias and how the dispatcher if they show bias in the middle if you have bias on the front end from your caller then there's some bias that's handled by the dispatcher and then obviously the officer is going to be biased to some level themselves you can stack that bias and it lands on the police officer's shoulders and they don't even know that they were forced into a bias type situation where there maybe their personal bias would have never even played into it had all the other things been done correctly in front of them and then again the same thing happens with the citizen interaction they've had some biases that they bring to the table and now all this stuff it's not just one layer it's multiple layers that land immediately and some of that again goes back to what we started to talk about is mental health and part of being um healthy mentally is understanding what's going on with you and being able to see it and adjust to it and find the things that help you fine tune those issues so that you can be a productive member of society no matter what your job at the end of the day is thanks chef I think that that helps some things up right when we're coming up to this hour and I'm hearing everyone just to summarize because I want to make sure we got everything out and if there's something you would add that I'm hearing that the way that we can address these things is to create a culture amongst management at every agency that supports mental health behavioral health awareness self-care also having policies in place that would support people being able to access behavioral health services without any negative ramifications towards them that will make them feel like they're going to lose their livelihood and then having opportunities to support individuals at all different parts of our community thinking about the apart in the restorative justice practices as and that might be another policy to incorporate instead of you know punitive punitive how can we think about restorative practices would that also help officers see crime in a different way you don't know so it sounds like those are some of the things that I'm taking away what what can people do to address some of these concerns and having people embed it and now Jeff had to throw in the dispatch part so they make sure that you talk to them about do they have that counter in there for the dispatchers because their biases are going to come up really fast if they're not getting mental health services as well so I just want to thank everyone for watching we had the one hour hour one hour go so fast we need to have a part two three four something so thank you all for watching thank you all panelists for being able to come and bring your experiences and all of your training and knowledge and sharing that with us thank you thank you thank you for having me