HEALTH & WELLNESS
Building resilience in New Jersey
law enforcement officers
Before, during and after your job as a law enforcement officer, Cop2Cop is trying to be there for you.
Cop2Cop is staffed by retired officers and licensed clinical experts in police psychological support to offer law
enforcement prevention services through a variety of
resources such as Cop2Cop question, persuade and
refer (QPR) suicide prevention training, Cop2Cop intervention with peer counseling 24/7 with a police peer
CHERIE
CASTELLANO who calls you back for a week, month or year and
Cop2Cop post-vention support after a critical incident
LPC
Cop2Cop with crisis debriefings. Perhaps building your resilience
for all of the above may be the way to go in the year
ahead.
Leadership at the New Jersey PBA is all about “getting ahead” of
problems for officers throughout our state; so, besides the post-vention
of Cop2Cop debriefing after a shooting or critical incident, what can
we all do to build the resilience before an officer answers that call, to
enhance his or her capacity to “rebound” or be more resilient in general?
In an article entitled “Police officers: in search of coherence and
resilience,” researchers explored the impact of resilience training to
lower stress levels among law enforcement officers and improve our
communities. Most people experience anxious, fearful and angry reac-
tions to violent and tragic events, whether those events take place in
their own communities or distant places. These reactions have been
especially evident in the past few years, as large groups of people have
turned their anger, fear and grief on law enforcement in response to
officer-involved shootings.
The public’s outcry will always be widely reported in the media,
however the negative impact of these incidents on the officers themselves, and on their families, is often ignored.
As I have referenced before, despite the 100 wounded officers in our
Cop2Cop Wounded Officer Program, and the thousands of officers
wounded in the line of duty, somehow the media does not highlight
facts about officers involved in critical incidents, either in our state or
our country.
In New Jersey we have learned, after 18 years, that creating a confidential Cop2Cop critical incident response team to provide crisis
debriefing and psychological first aid is almost a daily function of our
work in 2016. At Cop2Cop, we have averaged approximately two
Cop2Cop debriefing requests per week, or 100 per year, based on the
climate and need officers have for support after a critical
incident/shooting. Feedback has been superb, and many of the officers
we debrief become peer support callers whom we talk to regularly for
peer counseling and follow up.
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