Worldwide different criteria are used for dealing with body height as an access restriction for the police service, but none of the defined minimum heights is supported by scientific research. ...Therefore, the objectives of the present work were to analyse tall and short men and women on their police-specific physical performance and their interaction with police-related personal protective equipment (PPE) in police-specific situations. For this purpose, the entire work was divided into four sub-studies, which included both laboratory and field tests. Wearing PPE significantly (p < 0.05) reduced vertical jump performance independently of body height. Resilience to external forces (impacts) and pulling force in different grip heights were significantly (p < 0.05) reduced for shorter subjects. Short subjects needed significantly (p < 0.05) more time for rescuing and recovering a person from a car than tall subjects. These results provide evidence that taller subjects perform superior in police-specific scenarios.
This study attempts to illustrate how the careers of police officers affect the academic performance of their children. The research was conducted at Utawala Academy, a primary school that enrolls ...both police and non-police children. It applied primary data from surveys and secondary data from the school administration to address the study's research questions. This research involved 198 pupils, the headteacher, 12 teachers, and 100 parents. The respondents provided quantitative data whereby Multinomial Logistic Regression was employed to establish relationships between the dependent and independent variables. The independent paired T-Test and Spearman's rho correlation were used to examine the relationship between police careers and their offspring's academic achievement. Significant research findings indicated that police duties do indeed have an impact on their children's academic achievement. This study posited the multiple challenges encountered by Kenyan police officers that need attention and resolution to enhance and improve children's performance. This could be achieved by generating an approach where police officers work near their families. They should also be allowed to live outside government quarters, when necessary, while at the same time, all officers are encouraged to freely integrate with other members of society for elaborate socializing of their children. The "Family and Society" module should be introduced into the police training curriculum and taught at police academies.
Police officers are often exposed to traumatic events, which can induce psychological distress and increase the risk of developing post-traumatic stress injuries. To date, little is known about ...support and prevention of traumatic events in police organizations. Psychological first aid (PFA) has been promoted as a promising solution to prevent psychological distress following exposure to a traumatic event. However, PFA has not yet been adapted to policing reality, let alone to the frequent exposure to traumatic events faced by this population. This study aimed to evaluate the feasibility of PFA as an early intervention for the prevention of post-traumatic stress injuries among police officers in Quebec, Canada. Specifically, the objectives were to evaluate: (1) the demand. (2) the practicality, and (3) the acceptability of PFA in a police organization.
A feasibility study was conducted to evaluate the implementation of PFA among Quebec's provincial police force. To do so, 36 police officers participated in semi-structured interviews between October 26th, 2021, and July 23rd, 2022. Participants were comprised of responders (
= 26), beneficiaries (
= 4) and managers (
= 6). Interviews were transcribed, coded, and evaluated according to a thematic analysis.
Eleven themes emerged from participants' responses. Results suggested that PFA met individual and organizational needs. References were also made regarding the impacts of this intervention. Moreover, participants provided feedback for improving the implementation and sustainability of a PFA program. All three groups of participants shared similar thematic content.
Findings revealed that implementation of a PFA program in a law enforcement agency was feasible and could be accomplished without major issues. Importantly, PFA had beneficial consequences within the organization. Specifically, PFA destigmatized mental health issues and renewed a sense of hope among police personnel. These findings are in line with previous research.
ABSTRACT
Most studies on identity work have overlooked the corporeal quality of occupational life. Despite calls to attempt such engagement, little is known about the role of the body in occupations ...for which corporeal elements are central in the affirmation of identity. This study aims to answer such calls by providing a detailed ethnography of police work. Focusing on four bodily practices, we demonstrate how fitness, intimidation, cleanliness, and toughness are central elements to the officers’ construction of self. We thereby highlight the notion of physical selfhood as a way to understand the body/identity nexus among police officers and their capacity to resist new work requirements. We view bodies through a lens of resistance, rather than docility and compliance as much previous research has done. We aim to contribute to scholarship on identity work by portraying the politicization of bodies as a powerful component, thereby helping professionals to deflect some important institutional pressures affecting their work.
This paper examines new meanings that police-citizen interactions take on when officers make sense of them through the lens of body-worn cameras (BWCs). Drawing on 30 interviews with frontline police ...officers in a large Canadian city, we analyse the embodied character of BWCs to show how officers reframe their role and the subtleties of their approach in dealing with the public as more 'robotic'. First, the participants believe BWCs curb their ability to build rapport with citizens, and therefore 'dehumanize' interactions. Second, they report a need to operate more 'mechanically' to follow protocol for case-building and use-of-force. Still, 100 per cent of participants remain in favour of BWC use-in an era of high visibility and pressure for accountability, video recording technology offers protection.
The purpose of this ethnographic study is to analyse the collaborative work among intelligence and operative personnel from different border authorities in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and ...Latvia. The aim of this article is to illustrate and discuss how transnational/inter-organisational police identities and trust come into being through officers sharing a construction of specific significant 'other' - in this case that of 'Russian spies/crooks'. Cross border collaboration among police organisations is made difficult as police officers tend to be suspicious of outsiders and colleagues that they have not yet worked with. In this study, we explore how trust among a specific group of officers was however built by contrasting themselves against not (just) criminals but an enemy that could be found among them or have an influence over their colleagues, namely Russia or Russian spies. We refer to this category as 'norm-dissolving Russian'. This category included concepts such as being a spy, a criminal and a potential military threat, and became a sort of 'Other' that reinforced their own in-group bonds. Intelligence and operative personnel present in the analysed collaborative sequences create their professional identities by contrasting themselves with these categories. Drawing on ritual theory as well as symbolic interactionism this article discusses how an in-group feeling and idea of a higher moral order was created and re-created during their collaborative work. Morality is thus created and re-created in the encounter with people that are associated with being the 'enemy', present in the situation both in physical and invisible form.
There is no conclusive evidence that predictive policing is effective in reducing crime. Further, our interview partners, the representatives of the scientific-analytic branches of three German state ...police forces, do not claim that their predictive policing programs directly reduce crime rates. In this article we ask what — in the absence of effectiveness — are the core legitimised narratives employed to underpin the conception and implementation of predictive policing in Germany? Analysing our semi-structured in-depth interviews with representatives from the state criminal investigation departments in Berlin, North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria, we find five legitimised narratives. Those narratives can be separated into positive legitimisation narratives (efficiency and transparency within police administration) and negative ones (autonomy/independence, human control, transparency to the public, and soft-pedalling). The former give reasons for actively introducing this new technology, while the latter aim at preempting criticism. Interestingly, security-driven narratives remained absent from the interviews which we discuss at the end of this article.
Summary
While scholars have demonstrated that emotions play a central role in cognition, behavior, and decision making, most of the studies on emotions in work contexts show that emotions, or their ...expression, are often suppressed. We thus investigated how workers in high‐stress work environments deal with emotions and remain functional by focusing on the range of extrinsic regulation strategies used by workers in these environments. Drawing from participant observations and in‐depth, semistructured interviews, we show how police officers are flexible in their choices of emotion‐regulation strategies and how contextual factors emerge as the crux of this process. We contribute to the understanding of regulatory flexibility—defined as the process of matching emotion regulation strategies to environmental circumstances as they unfold in real work situations—by identifying two main enabling factors: coregulation and third party interference.
When they shape expectations about professional behaviours, reforms can threaten professional identities. Using an ethnographic study of police investigators, we reveal how threats to professional ...identity trigger two collective processes of resilience: working the legal boundaries and securing elitism and cohesion. These processes reveal two types of relationship to compliance: apparent compliance and peer-induced compliance, which manifest through rule-bending and workarounds. At the team level, these forms of compliance fostered resilience by helping police officers to maintain their preferred identity. This study also finds that these manifestations of resilience have mixed consequences for both officers and their institution.
