Hypervigilance
Consider how the police role is developed in young cops. It begins with the manner in which law enforcement officers are required to view the world. If you take cops in Anytown, USA, and put them behind the wheel of a patrol unit, they are required to view the streets and the community from a different perspective than citizen drivers. Cops realize that “I better pay attention out here! I could get my butt kicked or get somebody else or myself killed if I’m not paying attention!” This reality forces young officers to take a different view of the world from civilians. When viewing the world while in this new work role, officers experience a new physiological sensation, an increase in alertness, an increased sensation of energy and aliveness. This new perceptual style goes beyond just “paying attention.” It includes looking, and watching sections of the community that other people would ignore or consider neutral. In the interest of their own safety, officers have to view all encounters as potentially lethal. This newfound perceptual style, with its emphasis on officer safety, carries with it a parallel physiological and psychological state. As mentioned previously, young officers feel increased sensations of energy, aliveness, and alertness. They find themselves becoming quick-witted in the presence of fellow street cops. Friendships develop quickly, and camaraderie is intensified among people with whom they share potential jeopardy. During the developmental years, young officers experience firsthand the physiological stress reaction, but it is not seen as a negative reaction. On duty, the associated sensation of physiological intensity is viewed as pleasant and enjoyable. They find their job so attractive that it is difficult to leave at the end of a shift. What is unwittingly taking place is that young officers are developing an on-duty style of hypervigilance. This style, though necessary for the survival of law enforcement officers, often leads to the long-term destruction of an effective personal life. Officers go on duty, experience increased energy, alertness, quick-wittedness, and camaraderie, and enjoy their tour. However, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Officers who experience an on-duty physiological “high” find that when they get off duty and return home, this hypervigilant reaction stops, as they literally plunge into the opposite reactions of detachment, exhaustion, apathy, and isolation. Thus officers experience the police stress reaction, an emotional ride on a biological roller coaster.
The “biological” roller coaster describes the extreme psycho physiological swings that police officers experience on a daily basis. One can assume that average citizens live on a more even keel, but police officers are denied this stability. Because of the degree of emotional intensity of law enforcement, the increased sensations of alertness required while on duty, followed by reactions of an equal magnitude in the opposite directions while off duty the police officer’s life is characterized by the extremes of highs and lows. This pendulum-like swing occurs daily. Going to work initiates an increased sensation of involvement, energy, and alertness, coming home, a sensation of apathy, detachment and boredom. The biological reason this roller coaster takes place lies in the autonomic nervous system that controls all the body’s automatic processes: heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, and so on. The autonomic nervous system has two branches that act in tandem. Sympathetic branch alerts the body to potentially intense situations, causing increased alertness, awareness, and the “fight or flight reaction” (like taking a bunch of “uppers”). The Parasympathetic branch controls the body’s quiescent or peaceful counter-reactions (like bunch of “downers”). This biological roller coaster cycles daily for young officers in the first years of their careers as they polish police skills. It produces high-activity, highly involved police officers, but leaves them with under involved, apathetic personal lives. It can be said in no uncertain terms that the first victims of this biological roller coaster are not the officers themselves, but their families. The officers alternate between being “Heat Seekers” at work, where the more intense the call, the more they’re drawn to it, and being “couch potatoes at home. Once the police role is unplugged, there remains only a listless detachment from anything related to a personal life.
The “couch potato” phase of the biological roller coaster can be documented easily by interviewing police spouses during the first decade of the officer’s career. Although the faces and names change the stories remain almost identical.
“She’s different now that she’s a cop. We used to do so many things together, but now she gets off duty and I can’t even speak to her.”
“He comes home from work, collapses on the couch, turns on the television set-I can talk to him for five minutes and he doesn’t even hear me.”
“You know, we drove 150 miles last weekend to go visit my mom and dad. I don’t think she said two words to me on the whole trip.”
“We walk through the mall on his days off and he barely grunts to me, but then he sees two or three of his buddies working off-duty and you can’t shut him up-. ‘Hey, what happened last night? Did you guys arrest that asshole? I heard you come up on the air.”‘
As officers begin experiencing the biological roller-coaster ride, they begin heavily investing in the police role. Their family and personal relationships become thin, frazzled, and very fragile. The police spouse laments:
“I don’t know how much longer I can keep this family together. He comes home angry every night: “Everybody on earth is an asshole.”‘
“I swear she’d rather be at work than at home. She starts getting ready for work two hours before she has to be there. Sometimes I think she’s married to the job and not to me.”
The police family begins reverberating with this biological roller-coaster
Police officers’ life-styles change drastically. These elevated sensations while on duty are necessary. Officers do not have the luxury of viewing the world as primarily peaceful and benign. Officers’ very existence depends on their being able to perceive situations from the perceptual set of hypervigilance. They must interpret aspects of their environment as potentially lethal that other members of society see as unimportant. Without hypervigilance, police officers would be seen as “not good cops.” However, the tragedy is that while law enforcement officers are trained to react during the upper phase of the biological roller coaster, there has been very little training done or education provided on how to adapt to or avoid the pitfalls of the bottom half of the ride. In the first decade of a police career, the valleys of the roller-coaster ride destroy the emotional support systems and the family support systems; -systems that will become increasingly important if officers are to survive the second half of a police career.
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The Lives of Cops
After approximately two years on the job, officers are riding this biological roller coaster daily and consider most of the outside world “assholes.” While these two reactions are going on, however, officers are typically doing-their job, have high on-site activity, are enjoying police work, and in many-ways, although still quite naive to the realities of the long-terms effects of a police career, could be experiencing the “golden years” of their own individual law enforcement career. They enjoy going to work, they are highly energized and enthusiastic, enjoy coworkers, and will state “I love my job.” This fragile lifestyle and paranoid way of perceiving the world will typically come crashing down on officers in the not too distant future. Officers find themselves staying away from home for longer and longer periods of time. If the shift ends at midnight, cops realize that once they walk through the doors of their house, the exhaustion, apathy, and bottom half of the roller coaster will hit them hard; unwittingly they spend more time away from home. Younger officers in smaller police departments find themselves going down to the department on their days off just to see what’s happening. The economic realities of police management can be quite exploitative of young cops’ over-invested, biological enthusiasm. Sometimes the hardest thing about managing young cops is not in getting them to come to work but in getting them to go home. Many small police departments actually could not exist without this over-investment by young officers and also by non-reimbursed reserve officers whose only payment is a ride on the biological roller coaster. These officers have over-learned the social perceptual style that comes with assuming a police role. The longer they are cops, the more they interact only with other cops, all learning to see the world in only one manner.
Young officers continue to over-invest in their police role. For the first few years, this over-investment leads to an exciting, enjoyable, dynamic job. Very often, early in their police careers, officers not only isolate themselves from non-police friends, but also overindulge in their professional role by listening to scanners while off duty or on days off. One of the potential hazards of this over-identifying and over-investing in the police role is financial. From the beginning, cops learn the financial realities of a police career: “You’re never gonna get rich being a cop.” Off-duty work can be an extremely seductive lure for many police families. Officers can provide the necessities and a few extra luxuries of life by working an extra two or three shifts per week, either as security at the local shopping mall or doing point control for construction projects. Although the extra cash certainly helps, the additional time away from home spent in the police role continues the officers’ over-investment and leaves little time for them to develop competencies in other social roles and to build a personal life for themselves and their family.
This over-investment in the police role goes beyond justifiable pride in the profession. Officers begin linking their sense of self-worth to the police role in what at first glance appears to be a basically benign sense of pride. However, this creates an intense form of emotional vulnerability for average police officers. When you ask a group of cops who controls their police role, young cops often say, “I do.” The older, wiser cops respond, “I wish I did.
This link of self-worth to the police role creates a social dynamic that turns many enthusiastic, energized police officers into cynical, recalcitrant employees who resist administrative direction. As their police role is altered by external administrative authorities and the inevitable decline occurs, their sense of self-worth also takes a tumble. Police officers do not control their police role and must admit, upon reflection, that it is controlled by administrative authorities. Not until after the first several years of police work do the realities of this type of administrative control hit home. Then there is a “rude awakening.” This vulnerability is particularly salient to specialized police officers-the narcotics agent, canine officer, or detective in some special assignment
This psychological phenomena of having your sense of self-worth controlled by other individuals leads to very normal feelings of defensiveness and resistance. This linkage explains why police officers, after the first few years, may grow to resent administrative authority, mainly because they are so vulnerable to the changes that can take place in their police role. This resentment and resistance to administrative control leads to an occupational pseudo-paranoia, in which officers begin making such statements as: “I can handle the assholes on the street but I can’t handle the assholes in the administration.” Although the streets contain physical danger, the major psychological and emotional threat comes from those who control their police role, with its emotionally over-invested sense of self-worth.
