Introduction

Policing can be as exciting and rewarding as it is challenging. It can give us aptitudes, experiences and mindsets that can nourish and uplift us as well as deplete us. The essence of resilience is to be able to differentiate between the states we find ourselves in and to invest in ways to develop beneficial traits from them. Chapter 1 set the scene for why resilience is needed in contemporary UK policing. In Chapter 2, we hear from individuals about how challenging experiences of policing manifest in common habits of thought, perceptions and the messages we tell ourselves about our potential resilience. Courtesy of Police Care UK, we hear from officers and staff who, among nearly 18,000 others, took part in the 2018 survey TJTL.

Crossing the thin blue line

Rhetoric about stress – be it from sociologists, commentators, influencers or barstool philosophers – describe the highs and lows in the life course such as relationships, house moves, having children, losing parents and changing jobs. Policing is different. For those transitioning from being a civilian to a new recruit, it soon becomes clear that there is a line that is crossed when you join up – and on the other side of that line, the bar of stress tolerance is set higher. There is a logical explanation for this: the police service deals with collective stress, other peoples’ worst days (let's face it, police rarely show up in someone's life simply to help them celebrate something that is going well). The demand to deal with life problems is also a continual one – this is the day job. Each new case or incident will require a stress response stronger than the last to get our attention. The escalating stress response to repeated exposure may be barely perceivable over time. This ‘normalisation’ of distress (and the coping mechanisms that accompany it) is a maladaptation to the job and can lead to burnout.

Figure 2.1 illustrates how the bar of policing stress can be set higher than average lifespan civilian stress, due to the relentless exposure (upward arrows) of police to that civilian stress. The police stress response (upward chevrons) needs to be continually reset (downward chevrons) to avoid burnout.