Eleven years ago, Pennsylvania Executive Deputy Attorney General Robert Reed learned about the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which linked childhood trauma to a higher risk of aggression, substance abuse, suicide and many life-threatening mental and physical diseases later in life.
For him, it was a revelation.
“The [ACE Study] gave me the language to understand what I felt, but didn’t have the language to express,” Reed said. “I had been in law enforcement for 30 years and the same things were happening over and over and over. And nothing seemed to be improving substantially.”
He saw how childhood trauma was tied to all the issues that we face today, “from addiction, to gun violence, to racism, to bullying – they all have their foothold in trauma.” And responding to each issue separately, he concluded, is just not going to work.
“If we just see it as a law enforcement problem, we're missing the boat. If we just see it as an education problem, we're missing the boat, or just as a human services problem, we’re missing the boat.”
Reed was among the speakers at a Feb. 2 webinar that looked at trauma-informed policing. The session was cosponsored by ACEs Connection and the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP).
Other speakers included David Roddy, chief of police in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Marsha Mason, founding director and CEO of Resilience Builders in Kansas City, Missouri; Chris Leusner, chief of police in Middle Township, New Jersey; and Becky Haas, who trains police forces in trauma-informed practices nationally.
Reed chairs a criminal justice team that’s part of a coalition working to break down silos and put trauma-informed practices into place throughout Pennsylvania. Thus far, they’ve formed coalitions in 17 of the state’s 67 counties, with 25 additional counties getting started.
“In talking to district attorneys and police chiefs, they’re saying this is the time to talk about trauma, despite the divisions we have in our society,” Reed said. “They’re saying our officers are struggling, everyone is struggling, and we want to have better relations with the community.”
Finding our “feeling words”
Roddy, the Chattanooga police chief and a firm believer in ACEs science, recalls the groundwork that began the massive changes implemented around trauma-informed practices in his city. It started, he joked, when they increased the size of their victim services unit from none to one.
That new staffer “taught us our first ‘feeling words,” he said. Prior to that, the police force’s range of emotional expression consisted of “whether you were hungry, or you were angry, or you were wet, or you were tired.”
For the police officers, the introduction to new ways of expressing themselves opened up other doors.
“It helped us understand that we lacked the ability to talk about our own trauma, and to truly engage with and talk to the community we serve about their trauma,” Roddy said.
That was in 2016. Since then, the police force has:
- Introduced ACEs science, including trauma-informed training, into the police academy curriculum and police force.
- Sent cadets to neighborhoods they’re unfamiliar with to interact with the locals and present to their peers what they learned.
- Added crisis specialists to their team
Why the immersion in the community? Roddy got right to the point: “I think that it’s a little short-sighted for a police department to suddenly put 30 brand-new police officers out on the street, where some of them have never even engaged with an African American person. Because where they live is predominantly white, their high school is 100%, white. And then you ask them to understand from a trauma experience what that person's life looks like? You're going to have miscommunications all over the place.”
The department also has helped police officers deal with the typical trauma they encounter in the course of their work. Crisis specialists ride along with police officers and assist in interactions with victims of crime. But Roddy said the social workers aren’t there only for crime victims.
“I have a licensed clinical social worker in the car with my officers having conversations about the call they just left, what they’re about to respond to, what they saw a week ago, a year ago, a decade ago.”
“Yes, I need these tools”
Panelist Marsha Mason talked about how police in Kansas City, Missouri were experiencing trauma after responding to calls from relatives of severely mentally ill family members who were brandishing weapons; when police intervened, people ended up dead.
That resulted in the development of a regional crisis intervention team (CIT), which has since spread statewide. The police officers who make up the CIT teams have been trained in curriculum developed by community mental health service providers in conjunction with representatives from the police force.
“We introduced trauma-informed practices into the crisis intervention team training about six or seven years ago,” said Mason. Locally, where Mason is based in Kansas City, Missouri, her organization, members of the Kansas City Police Department, and health experts from Truman Medical Center spent nine months developing training for first responders on building resilience against secondary trauma.
The initial response to that training was tepid, said Mason. “When we rolled it out to other officers, there was a lot of trepidation.”
But after the initial hesitancy, she said, that changed.
“When people were given the space [to acknowledge their feelings], the main question from them was, ‘What else are you going to do for us? We should have been talking about this a long time ago. Yes, this impacts my personal life, my professional life. Yes. I need more tools, more skills in order to stay healthy and well and to address the kind of experiences I’m seeing on the job.’”
Mason and her team trained 80 people in the resilience skills and asked that group to share them with their own teams within corrections, law enforcement and the district attorneys’ offices.
Other local initiatives include:
- A mindfulness program for first responders, which includes yoga.
- A program called The Battle Within for post-traumatic stress that has been deployed nationally.
From “what’s wrong?” to “what happened?”
Police Chief Chris Leusner of Middle Township, New Jersey, had his entire view of crime prevention upended in 2016. That’s when he learned about the ACE Study during a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fellowship that also included the town school superintendent and the CEO of the mental health department.
“And when we learned about the ACE Study, we all realized really quickly that all of our problems were interconnected. And a light bulb went on and I said, ‘This is the root cause of crime and social disorder!” Leusner recalled.
Leusner’s first step was screening Resilience: The biology of stress and the science of hope, the ground-breaking film about ACEs by the late James Redford. “Every officer in the department has seen this film,” he said. Then Leusner himself trained his force in ACEs science. “I wanted our officers to know that this was a message from the top.”
The training included introducing officers to the ACE Study, the prevalence of ACEs, how to recognize behaviors associated with trauma triggers, how toxic stress from ACEs affects the brain and brain development and how to respond to those behaviors.
“The whole goal of the training for me was how to change the mindset of officers from ‘What’s wrong with this kid?’ to ‘What happened to this kid?’”
Leusner, like the other speakers, saw a burning need to build ways to help officers cope with the unending cascade of traumatic events they encounter in the course of a day’s work. Left unchecked, that will only lead to burnout and secondary trauma among officers.
The problem, is that “you start to become desensitized” – and that takes its toll. “We see it in the suicide rates of police officers,” he said.
“We have got to talk about how do we better prepare officers and give them the tools to be healthy and trauma-informed within themselves before we ask them to be trauma-informed in the community.”
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