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FEBRUARY 1990                                                     

                                                                  
          CRITICAL INCIDENT STRESS DEBRIEFING                               
                                                                  
                          By

               Capt. Richard J. Conroy, M.S.                                  
                 Assistant Chief of Police                        
              Saint Cloud, FL Police Department                                
                                                                  

	*	As the first responder to an early
		morning pedestrian accident, a police
		officer comes across a severed leg
		protruding from a shoe lying in the
		middle of the highway prior to locating
		the victim.

	*	While stopping his car, a "back-up"
		officer responding to a domestic distur-
		bance call sees a fellow officer take a
		shotgun blast to the stomach just as the
		front door to the residence opens without
		warning.

	*	An 18-month-old child is pulled from the 
		family's backyard pool by the first responding
		police officer, only to have the child pro-
		nounced dead at the hospital emergency room.

     These accounts typify the wide-range of emotionally 
traumatic incidents that law enforcement officers may encounter. 
As first responders on the scene, they must act without delay, 
often without the support or backup of other emergency services 
personnel.                                                        

     Research conducted by Dr. Jeffrey T. Mitchell (1) of the 
University of Maryland suggests that almost 90 percent of all 
emergency services personnel are affected at least once by 
critical incident stress during their careers.                    

     In the past 2 decades, much emphasis has been placed on the 
effects of critical incident stress on the emergency services 
worker who is not a law enforcement officer. Unfortunately, the 
law enforcement community has been rather slow to accept  the  
fact that critical incident stress can also be a potentially 
debilitating syndrome that seriously affects both the job 
performance and personal lives of police officers. (2)
               
CRITICAL INCIDENT STRESS
                                          
     Critical incident stress can be brought on by any action 
that causes extraordinary emotion and overwhelms and impacts on 
an individual's normal ability to cope, either immediately 
following the incident or in the future.  Police officers' human 
coping mechanisms are no different than those of others, just 
because they carry a badge and a gun.  And the myth that police 
officers always have total emotional control in all situations is 
just that a myth, not a reality.                                  

     Any incident that results in deep emotional impact has the 
potential to overwhelm an officer's ability to cope.  Oftentimes, 
it makes the officer come face to face with his or her 
vulnerability or sense of mortality, such as in an 
officer-involved shooting, the death or serious injury of a 
co-worker, prolonged or extraordinary rescue operations, or 
life-threatening, dangerous, or ``close'' calls.                  

     For the most part, society expects law enforcement officers 
to handle whatever comes their way, to turn emotions on and off 
at will.  But, is it reasonable to expect police officers to be 
all things to all people?  And what happens if they can't live up 
to the expectations society places on them? Are there solutions 
to the problem?                                                   

THE DEBRIEFING PROCESS
                                            
     The Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) process has 
been developed in an effort to make law enforcement officers and 
emergency service workers understand that they are normal people, 
having normal reactions to abnormal events or situations.  These 
debriefings are not the operational critiques that law 
enforcement administrators traditionally schedule after a major 
incident.  Instead, they are gatherings led by a trained mental 
health professional with the assistance of supportive peer 
personnel.                                                        

     The concept behind these debriefings is to encourage free 
expression of thoughts, fears, and concerns in a supportive 
group environment without losing status among one's peers. In 
fact, debriefings are much more successful and the feedback more 
positive when peer support personnel are more active. (3)
         
     The debriefing process allows individuals to gain insight 
and reframe the event in a different perspective.  As  short-term  
initial intervention, it often aids in preventing some of the 
long-term cumulative effects caused by traumatic incidents.       

     Some departments require personnel to attend a debriefing 
session after being involved in a critical stress incident, while 
others make attendance a personal choice.                         

     All debriefings are confidential and provide an opportunity 
for educating officers on stress responses, as well as letting 
those involved know that they are not alone in their thoughts and 
feelings.  Successful law enforcement debriefings have been 
conducted after the Winnetka, IL, school shooting, the Palm Bay, 
FL, shopping center shooting, and the Cerritos, CA, air disaster.  

DEBRIEFING TEAMS
                                                  
     Debriefing teams are support groups composed of volunteer 
trained mental health professionals and emergency workers who 
learn to talk with others about job-related stress.  The team 
counsels others on dealing with the emotional toll of their 
professions.                                                      

     Team members undergo 16 hours of training before they can 
conduct a counseling session, which is usually scheduled within 
48 hours after emergency workers have been involved in a critical 
incident.  During the training, these volunteers are taught to 
identify critical incidents and the physical and emotional 
symptoms resulting from them, as well as delayed stress 
reactions.                                                        

     Team members must also become familiar with a debriefing 
model.  Basically, this model covers how to get people to 
identify what happened, their role in the incident, and what 
impact the incident had on them.  If additional assistance is 
needed after the debriefing session, the individual is given a 
list of referrals to contact for one-on-one counseling.           

     Almost 100 CISD teams across the country operate on 
national, statewide, regional, and local levels.  These teams 
have conducted in excess of 4,500 debriefings for law 
enforcement, as well as other emergency services workers since 
1983.                                                             

     A number of larger police agencies have formed their own 
departmental teams and have trained peer debriefers, written 
operational procedures, and gathered administrative support for 
the CISD concept.  Other police agencies have networked their 
members into county and regional teams where multidisciplinary 
resources from police, fire, emergency medical, hospital, 
chaplaincy, and mental health are pooled and shared as the need 
arises.                                                           

LAW ENFORCEMENT CONCERNS
                                          
     The many administrative misconceptions about police 
involvement with mental health professionals are changing.  The 
philosophies like ``we can handle anything'' and ``it all comes 
with the job, take it or leave it'' are becoming archaic.         

     Police managers who have witnessed officers suffering from a 
vast array of emotional, physical, and behavioral symptoms are 
beginning to recognize that these conditions can be the resulting 
effects of critical incident stress.  Employee turnover, sick 
leave abuse, an increase in alcohol consumption, extreme 
aggressiveness, and substance abuse are just a few of the outward 
signs that an officer may need help from the department and 
peers.                                                            

     Training and education in the area of stress management have 
become somewhat common practices in the police profession. 
Within the past few years, any law enforcement conference, 
workshop, or seminar would not be complete without a segment or 
speaker on stress management, stress symptoms and their effects. 
But, there is still a long road to travel.  Agency administrators 
need to realize that training programs will be more effective if 
they cover more than just the basics of stress education.  
Programs should encourage the dissemination of information 
specific to critical incident stress and the associated 
debriefing process.                                               

CONCLUSION
                                                        
     Providing critical incident stress debriefing services to 
law enforcement officers should be no different than giving 
officers the proper tools and equipment to perform their jobs 
correctly.  Agency administrators owe it to their communities to 
assist in dealing with the effects of critical incident stress. 
The well-being of their departments, officers, and the citizens 
they serve depend on it.                                          


FOOTNOTES
                                                         
(1) Jeffrey T. Mitchell, Roles, Stressors and Supports for 
Emergency Workers, National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. 
Department of Health and Human Services, 1985.                    

(2) Thomas Pierson, ``Critical Incident Stress:  A Serious Law 
Enforcement Problem,'' The Police Chief, vol. 66, No. 2, pp. 
32-33.                                                            

(3) Jeffrey T. Mitchell, Critical Incident Stress Debriefing 
Training Seminar, Orlando, FL, April 1989.