Why Cops Die And How To Prevent It

This book provides time- and experience-proven advice for responding safely and effectively to threats to a law enforcement officerfs safety. It relies on law enforcementfs bloody history to reveal what has gone wrong for a very long time — and how to fix it so that no more cops die needlessly. This book identifies the cop killers and the fatal errors that cops make, and it explores how these incidents happen and why. Most important of all, the book goes into detail about how to prevent these terminal errors and furnishes to-the-point advice for avoiding them. These tactics and techniques work. It offers the same common sense advice that solid patrol sergeants have been sharing with their briefing room charges for a long while. It has been assembled by a police chief who spent 15 years as a sergeant. WHY COPS DIE can be used in a lot of ways, all of them useful for drastically reducing the number of officers who die on the job every year. It should be issued to every law enforcement academy recruit. It is aimed across the spectrum of the law enforcement organization from the rookie to the first-line supervisor to the command staff. Chiefs and sheriffs will find it of value, as will those directly responsible for the training of law enforcement officers. By applying practical, potentially lifesaving advice to their daily duties law enforcementfs first-line practitioners can sharply reduce the number of peacekeepers who die or are maimed in the future. That effort begins here.

The purpose of this unique book is to provide police officers and administrators with a simple and effective handbook to improve the safety of police employees. It is research-based and uses the most up-to-date statistics from the Department of Justice, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, and the Uniform Crime Report. The first chapter of this book contains a complete list of actual cases of officer deaths during 2010. This list provides an overview of how officers are dying in the line of duty. After a problem is identified and discussed in one chapter, the next chapter details strategies that can be implemented to reduce injury and death by employees. Additional topics include specific problems including traffic fatalities, assaults on officers, police homicides, physical health, psychological health, moonlighting, shift work, substance abuse, heart disease, nutrition, suicide, and family issues. The importance of comprehensive wellness programs, and the interconnectedness of employee morale with health and safety are examined. This book has detailed the true causes of Job-related police officer injury and death. It has also identified effective strategies that police personnel at all levels can do to prevent these tragedies from continuing to occur. These recommended strategies will prove useful for officers and administrators alike.

In this fascinating new book, Vincent Henry (a 21-year veteran of the NYPD who recently retired to become a university professor) explores the psychological transformations and adaptations that result from police officers' encounters with death. Police can encounter death frequently in the course of their duties, and these encounters may range from casual contacts with the deaths of others to the most profound and personally consequential confrontations with their own mortality. Using the 'survivor psychology' model as its theoretical base, this insightful and provocative research ventures into a previously unexplored area of police psychology to illuminate and explore the new modes of adaptation, thought, and feeling that result from various types of death encounters in police work. The psychology of survival asserts that the psychological world of the survivor--one who has come in close physical or psychic contact with death but nevertheless managed to live--is characterized by five themes: psychic numbing, death guilt, the death imprint, suspicion of counterfeit nurturance, and the struggle to make meaning. These themes become manifest in the survivor's behavior, permeating his or her lifestyle and worldview. Drawing on extensive interviews with police officers in five nominal categories--rookie officers, patrol sergeants, crime scene technicians, homicide detectives, and officers who survived a mortal combat situation in which an assailant or another officer died--Henry identifies the impact such death encounters have upon the individual, the police organization, and the occupational culture of policing. He has produced a comprehensive and highly textured interpretation of police psychology and police behavior, bolstered by the unique insights that come from his personal experience as an officer, his intimate familiarity with the subtleties and nuances of the police culture's value and belief systems, and his meticulous research and rigorous method. Death Work provides a unique prism through which to view the individual, organizational, and social dynamics of contemporary urban policing. With a foreword by Robert Jay Lifton and a chapter devoted to the local police response to the World Trade Center attacks, Death Work will be of interest to psychologists and criminal justice experts, as well as police officers eager to gain insight into their unique relationship to death.

This book takes an in-depth look at the phenomenon of police officer suicide. Centered on statistical information collected from cases of officer suicide from 2017 to 2019, this volume helps readers understand the circumstances surrounding death by suicide amongst law enforcement personnel and makes recommendations for identification and prevention. Through interview and case presentations, this volume examines the lives and last days and weeks of several officers, using findings from social media, departmental surveys, medical examiner reports, toxicology reports and interviews with loved ones and colleagues to create a psychological autopsy. With 14 chapters contributed by former law enforcement, researchers, and mental health professionals, it addresses national, state, and local policy implications and strategies, presenting a theory for better understanding and preventing the phenomenon of officer suicide. This volume will be of interest to researchers in policing, to law enforcement and first responder leadership and administrative professionals, and to mental health practitioners and clinicians working with this unique population

Power corrupts, and absolute power will absolutely corrupt the police. The American Founders understood the importance of limiting governmentÕs power, thereby putting in place balances and checks to achieve it. The police have a lot of power: as you walk or drive, they can stop, detain, arrest, assault, vandalize, and even kill you with impunity. With the vast resources at the command of the police, itÕs easy to see how even a humble person can become intoxicated with the powers granted the police. Police Violence outlines the origins of the police, and how those origins, certain behaviors, and other factors explain the deaths of people like Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Samuel Dubose, Walter Scott and many others. The U.S. media has extensively reported police violence, but analysts have offered little information on why it happens or ideas for prevention. This groundbreaking book takes you on an honest intellectual public health journey while staying true to the realities of the issue for the everyday reader.

I am writing this book out of a broken heart of what I see happening here and around the world, about every other time occurrence, death, brutality, permanent injury of people in the community, only because of a stop or encounter by the police officers. But this problem is reversible by making some changes from both the police officers and the people in the community. If the police give enough time for verbal orders, the person of interest will stop resisting arrest; not resisting arrest will help to avoid police brutality and save lives. But if the police use enough verbal order and the person of interest still resists arrest, in order to save lives, police officers can use a Taser instead of gunshots, which is deadly. Also, police can successfully de-escalate situations without anyone getting hurt. No matter the skin color, ethnicity, gender, or zip code, people no longer need to die or be brutalized or permanently injured, only because of a stop or encounter by the police, including police officers.

Join veteran crime-fighter Stephen Smith on a journey through the dark and dangerous world of the Metropolitan Police specialist firearms command from its inception in 1966, when the cold-blooded murder of three police officers sparked a revolution in the training of armed officers, to the present day. This unique police unit battled against the IRA in the 1970s, experienced its first operational shootings in the 1980s and underwent massive expansion in the 1990s. In the new millenium it fought against Dome raiders, kidnappers, and al-Qaeda terrorists, then worked to provide London with a secure environment in which to host the 2012 Olympic Games. From a gunman ordering cannabis smuggled in fried chicken during a siege to a deranged killer holding toddlers hostage, London's armed police have seen it all. With his wealth of first-hand experience, Stephen Smith has woven together historic and up-to date accounts of perilous and often famously controversial firearms operations across England's capital. Using hundreds of photographs, illustrations and drawings from several archived sources, this fascinating volume spans five decades of the Metropolitan Police's fight against crime and many of its photographs and illustrations have never been published before. Packed with detail and intrigue, 'Stop! Armed Police!' is a must-have for those with an interest in police firearms matters and is a captivating behind-the-scenes look at the dangerous business of policing London's streets.