Police Resilience as a Multilevel Balance: Needs and Resources for Victim Support Officers

Abstract

Providing face-to-face support to victims entails one the most intense stress- and trauma-laden exchanges of law enforcement tasks, which frequently triggers long lasting negative effects on police officer’s psychological wellbeing. When exploring this phenomenon, police resilience is often interpreted as police officers’ and organization’s capacity to react and recover from negative experiences and impediments, and as such it may be perceived as both a trait and a trainable and promotable skill. Yet, in very recent times, police resilience has faced new or transformed challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as victims, citizens, and public institutions have encountered new needs and situations. Drawing from a unique qualitative, in-depth research with police officers that provide support to victims of gender-based and domestic violence, this paper analyzes officers’ needs and challenges regarding their interactions with victims, colleagues, superiors, and other occupational demands, as they interplay into stress and trauma that may lead to burnout and compassion fatigue. Illustrated with the empirical findings of the case study of the Catalonia’s Mossos d’Esquadra police corps, the paper explores how officers negotiate individuals’ expectations, needs, and procedures signals towards potential challenges and threats to their psychological wellbeing with implications for police forces and other public and private institutions. The specific needs and demands of the participants’ policing, related to support to gender-based and domestic violence, presents an in-depth analysis of how stress and trauma are understood and experienced from the police officers’ perspectives.