You guys ready for a technique?” the trainer asks. “Everybody, sit up straight. Uncross your legs. Just look straight ahead.”
Eric White gathers his 6-foot-8 frame and straightens his back in the conference-room chair. Instead of his usual police uniform, he wears a blue polo shirt and jeans. The trainer, Don Chartrand, is visiting Emeryville, California, to talk with officers here about how to reduce their stress and build resilience with exercises like intentional breathing. “This is not anything weird,” he promises. “This is absolutely science-based.” Cops appreciate evidence, he knows, and so Chartrand has come equipped with PowerPoint graphs and lessons about heart-rate variability, the stress hormone cortisol, and how to keep the autonomous nervous system in balance.
Chartrand reassures the 18 officers that his goal is practical: boosting their performance on the beat. “It’s not about going to your happy place. This is not la-la lightweight nonsense,” he says. “I’m serious: This is blood and guts, sometimes life and death.”
He directs them to place their hands over their hearts. Some comply more eagerly than others. “Use your imagination,” he says. “It’ll sound weird. Pay attention to your breath. And imagine that the breath is flowing into your heart through your hand. Deep breaths. It’s a little odd. Now I want you to imagine that the breath is flowing through the back, the bottom, and the top of your heart, and the sides of your heart. Air is coming into your heart from all sides, 360°.”
Later, some of the officers will privately make wisecracks about the exercise. Not Officer Eric White, though. The 51-year-old former professional basketball player, a soft-spoken man with a shaved head, tries to visualize his heart receiving oxygen. And he feels it: a clean breath, carrying his stress away.
Studying Police Trauma and Mindfulness
Working in law enforcement can be life-threatening, and not just because of violent encounters. Researchers have linked policing careers to high rates of depression, PTSD, and substance abuse, along with physical ailments like sleeplessness, diabetes, and sudden cardiac death. Officers are more prone to attempt suicide than the general population, and more likely to kill themselves than get killed on duty. Plus, because police culture values stoicism, officers are often reluctant to seek out mental-health treatment.
One study of almost 2,800 white male police officers in Buffalo, New York, found their average life expectancy to be 22 years shorter than their civilian counterparts. The authors, from the University of Buffalo and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, suggested that stress, trauma, obesity, shift work, and exposure to toxic chemicals might all contribute to the early deaths.
The consequences go beyond the occupational hazards. When police suffer from debilitating stress, they are more likely to exhibit problems at work, “including uncontrolled anger toward suspects,” researchers at Oregon’s Pacific University noted in a 2015 study.
Little surprise, then, that over the past few years, the United States has been rocked by repeated news reports of police killings of civilians. The highest-profile victims have been African-American men and boys: 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot while playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park; Eric Garner, a sometime vendor of untaxed cigarettes who died in a police chokehold in Staten Island, New York; Philando Castile, a school cafeteria worker shot during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota; Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal spinal injury while shackled in the back of a Baltimore police van; and most famously, 18-year-old Michael Brown, shot six times in Ferguson, Missouri, during a tense street encounter. Castile had notified police that he legally possessed a gun; none of the rest were carrying rearms.
According to Washington Post databases, 963 people were shot dead by police in the United States in 2016, and 991 in 2015. Some of the recent killings have triggered large protests and helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“It’s a reasonable question to ask: What is going on?” says Matthew Hunsinger, an assistant professor of psychology at Pacific University and an author of the 2015 study. “How are officers coming to make this decision to use their firearms when the black male turns out to be unarmed?”
It’s a vexing question that doesn’t lend itself to simple policy solutions. But some experts are suggesting that one way to help reduce unnecessary police violence is by improving officer wellness. “If I’m clinically depressed [and]
undiagnosed—which I would argue many of us are—and I’m struggling to even regulate my own space, how the hell do I have the capacity to have empathy?” asks Richard Goerling, a police lieutenant in Hillsboro, Oregon. “How are we supposed to navigate someone else’s suffering if we can’t even navigate our own?”
Goerling is the founder of the Mindful Badge Initiative, a consultancy that provides resilience training to first responders. (See “To Pause and Protect,” Mindful, October 2013.) He’s one of the leaders of a growing movement to introduce mindfulness practices to police departments—and, in the process, to cultivate compassion toward the communities they serve. Goerling is working with law-enforcement agencies around the country, participating in research, and helping develop a set of best practices for the young field.
“We believe this [mindfulness] training will build resilience—our ability to bounce back from stress—and resilience is going to have all sorts of downstream consequences in the community,” —Matthew Hunsinger, an assistant professor of psychology at Pacific University
Some initial findings look promising. The Pacific University study, in which Goerling took part, led 43 officers through a curriculum called Mindfulness-Based Resilience Training (MBRT), which includes meditation, martial arts, and breath- and body-awareness. (It’s a police-friendly version of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.) At the end of the eight-week program, the researchers found “significant improvement” in health outcomes like stress, fatigue, and sleep quality.
“Fatigue and sleep disturbance are predictors of dysregulated mood, particularly anger,” says lead author Mike Christopher, an associate professor of clinical psychology. “And we know that anger is a big predictor of negative outcomes for police officers on the force.”
Newer, unpublished data from Pacific show a second group of officers drinking alcohol less frequently, feeling less burned out, and having fewer aggressive feelings and behaviors after undergoing training.
What remains to be learned is how these early results translate to the street. The Pacific team tried to measure whether mindfulness training can reduce implicit racial bias—“that level of bias we all have at an unconscious level,” says Christopher. They used a simulation game in which officers had to make snap decisions about whether people of different races were holding weapons (as opposed to, say, soda cans). But the officers performed so well before the training, Hunsinger says, that researchers could not measure improvement.
Still, Hunsinger feels optimistic. “We believe this [mindfulness] training will build resilience—our ability to bounce back from stress—and resilience is going to have all sorts of downstream consequences in the community,” he says. One measure psychologists use is “response inhibition,” the ability to suppress a