Hilos cargados en baños al 10% de triclosan w/v

Building upon the work of Pogrebin and Poole (1991), Daus and Brown (2012) and Bakker and Heuven (2006), who raise the idea that officers are depersonalising or desensitising as a way of coping or in compliance with feeling or display rules, this analysis explores what the rules are, in an effort to explore in greater detail what is expected of officers, and whether dissociative behaviour (American Psychiatric Association, 2012) or depersonalisation (Maslach and Jackson, 1981) is a requirement of the feelings rules, as well as an outcome.

147 The strongest theme that came across from participants is that general emotional display is seen as a weakness:

‘I don’t think that you can be openly emotional in an office, you might be seen as a bit of a wimp’

This feeling rule appears to apply to most areas within an officer’s life, whether it be with colleagues, supervisors, back at the station, or with family. Not surprisingly, this is something that officers are very aware of, particularly when they are dealing with potentially violent offenders and they are experiencing fear. However, participants also displayed an awareness of how much acting officers undertake to ensure that they do not display any emotion:

‘I was primed for that, was knocking on that potential offender’s door, it’s a thing you do as cops, you get your game face going on, the way that you stand, present yourself, you know you get your head in the game.’

This also demonstrates the emotional suppression that occurs at the time of traumatic events. Participants go on to discuss how officers continue to suppress these emotions post event, with colleagues:

‘…When that does happen, you know the adrenaline, you know, you can feel it, I get a bit of a leg shake when I feel it, you are not very comfortable expressing that to your colleagues, I don’t think. I think that it is something that, especially as you know, someone who has more experience than your colleagues, as a bloke, to actually hold your hand up and say, “I didn’t want to do that I was a bit scared” is something that isn’t frequently done, isn’t frequently spoken about, especially not publicly.’

‘I think that compartmentalising and squashing down of your immediate reaction is a kind of unwritten rule as a police officer, it is certainly one practice that I have adopted to deal with traumatic incident, because you have got to perform, I think that everyone finds

148 their own way, some people have to squash it down, some people don’t acknowledge it, or maybe not aware of how they are feeling until later, I am always aware of “oh god this is going to be awful” and like a big breath of “ohh don’t panic” and just switch it off, and then it gets released later, but not verbalised particularly well, you know I would just cry later.’

This would indicate that the feeling rule that states that emotional display by officers is a sign of weakness causes officers to suppress their emotions at the time of traumatic events (peritraumatic) and post-trauma (persistent) with peers and colleagues. This would reflect the relationship between peritraumatic and persistent dissociative behaviour and traumatic events that increase the likelihood of PTSD symptomology (Briere et al. 2005; Murray et al., 2002).

The rules go as far to restrict officers’ compassion for each other, through fear that emotional and physical support would make their colleagues look weak. Participant 1 explains how he has responded to a colleague’s emergency call and on arrival has found the officer injured and in need of medical attention. P1 tries to offer support to his colleague, but the officer is resistant, stating that they are fine. This is despite P1’s suspicions that they have been kicked unconscious. He becomes aware of the position that he is putting his colleague in, in offering his support:

‘I don’t want to sort of emasculate you’.

Such withdrawal of support (albeit to protect the officer) will only go to enforce rules that suggest that officers are ‘super human’ or ‘sub human’, and not just in an emotional sense, but also physically. This supports the idea that the feeling and display rules ask officers to depersonalise their colleagues and not see them as complete human beings (Maslach and Jackson, 1981).

It would seem that police officers are considered to be emotionally different to other members of the public, and that they should not be affected in the same way by traumatic incidents:

149 ‘I was still very much of the thought that you are a cop and you deal with this kind of thing day in and day out, and you should just crack on for want of a better phrase.’

This encourages officers to dissociatively suppress or detach themselves from their own emotions (American Psychiatric Association, 2012).

Maintaining the appearance of being unaffected by distressing and stressful events bleeds into relationships with families and partners, where officers still fear that any expression of emotion will make them appear weak and unable to carry out their work:

‘you don’t want to come home and make, and worry her, and make her feel like you are unable to do your job.’

In general, participants felt that they were expected to be without emotional expression in all aspects of their life, and that this had led them to be viewed as sub human, or robotic:

‘you are expected to be the robot that comes in and deals with horrific incidents and supports the family and supports whoever is involved, picks up the pieces and goes away again. I think that society as a general, you know, police officers nipping in to go and get a brew somewhere, somebody nipping in to get something to eat you get the “uh, this is not what we pay you to do, look at you coming here and buying your food” and you are like “hang on a minute I am on a twelve hour sift and I have not eaten yet, I can’t run on empty.” We are not robots…’

This recognition that officers are expected to behave in a robotic manner, without emotional or physical needs, reflects the dissociative behaviour articulated in the DSM V that contributes to PTSD: emotional and physical numbing, a sense of lack of agency and feeling robotic; presenting as a robotic demeanour, hypo-emotionality with others, and hyporeactivity to emotional stimuli (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). This social expectation of behaving ‘robotic’ reflects my earlier

150 research (Lennie et al., 2019) which also finds that officers believe that they are expected to behave in a robotic manner, however, this present study builds this point by making the link to dissociative behaviour in officers.

Some participants were more accepting of this identity and were comfortable with the idea that police officers were not expected to have, or to display, any emotional response or need. Again, they seem to have subjugated themselves to the power of the rules:

(My wife) ‘she expects me to be more emotional, but that is not just at work, she expects me to be more emotional full stop. She calls me an android, she says that I am a robot but, and because she doesn’t work with police officers, she is not a police officer, I think she thinks that I am unusual but she would only have to come to my place of work and realise that, we are actually, we are the norm, outwardly at least…I would see it as a sign of weakness in myself if I were having these emotions.’

There are some exceptions to this rule. Displaying aggression towards other officers is one exception, despite this being specifically identified as unacceptable behaviour in the Code of Ethics (College of Policing, 2014). This exception is expressed a number of times by participants, and as explained by Participant 8, aggression between colleagues is potentially a regular occurrence in the service:

‘They were very, very rude about it, one of them swore at me, said “this is piss poor…” they were just very, very rude, obnoxious, so one of them tried to get me to arrest her, one of them told, sort of had a go at us because we didn’t take a statement off this girl… and then one of them, just to jump on the band wagon of his colleagues, sort of told me that it was piss poor, to which I replied and told them to “fuck off” – which was all really unprofessional and uncomfortable but I felt like he left me with no choice… we had a bit of a bust up, like a face to face stand-off with three of our colleagues… it cause quite a lot of conflict for a long time where, I couldn’t speak to them… it was

151 absolutely disgusting and out of order but this sort of thing goes on all of the time.’

This is particularly concerning when viewed in the light of research conducted by Adams and Buck (2010) who found that internal stressors such as co-worker civility was just as detrimental to officer mental health as external stressors such as conflict with members of the public. Also, such permissible negative behaviour between colleagues breaks down relationships and isolates officers, further reducing the potential for officers to open up about their emotional experiences with one another, effectively removing a main source of social support. Officers are also effectively depersonalising their colleagues, again, where they are no longer considering them as human beings that deserve respect and compassion. This is increasingly detrimental to officer’s health, particularly taken in light of the research which shows that early psychological and social support moderates the complexity and debilitating nature of PTSD (Stephens and Long, 1999 & 2000; Heffrena and Hausdorf, 2016). Even senior officers engage in aggressive and degrading language and behaviour which also reinforces the message that officers are not expected to have the same emotional responses as other members of society:

‘…you have to sit there and just basically smile and nod, and it really feels like any sort of transgression from us from the, you are going to sit here and you are going to listen to me and from his own words “I don’t fucking care what you think.”’

This point is reinforced by Participant 2, who accepts the depersonalised relationships within the organisation and subjugates himself to the power of the feeling rules and dissociates himself from his role:

‘I think in this day and age it is shown as a form of weakness and this stigma of mental health is still prevalent and you can’t really show anything… you are seen as weak, emotional, tearful, then there is still this stigma around that, that you can’t display how you feel, you can’t walk in to a room of colleagues and say “oh god that really affected me” and burst into tears…emotions and mental health and wellbeing

152 within my force is just disgusting, nobody cares, I am just a number, I have acknowledged that, it is only a job and it pays the bills and I have sort of embraced that in a way and let things go a little bit.’

Another exception to the rules around emotional display is the permissibility of displaying a deriding or derogatory attitude towards victims, offenders or informants. This seems accepted practice as a way of letting off steam, as explained by Participant 2:

‘one of the few topics I think within the police, certainly within your circle of colleagues and immediate supervision, you know, it is perfectly acceptable to vent about troublesome victims and informants, which is kind of cathartic.’

And reinforced by Participant 7:

‘On this occasion it is very easy to be truthful because perhaps that accepted emotion of anger, of irritation of annoyance it is “us and them” it is like they are all shit, and how irritating and yes, we can all like get behind…’

This demonstrates how the feeling and display rules not only make derogatory attitudes towards members of the public acceptable, but they are also encouraged as a way of releasing the pressure of work (and possibly pent up emotions) and bonding within the team. This ‘othering’ of members of the public is also depersonalising them and can be seen as a requirement of the feeling and display rules as a way of coping with pressure, and in order to bond with teams and the wider police family (Maslach and Jackson, 1981; Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993). This also reinforces the belief that officers are different to other members of society, and perhaps have different emotional needs and responses. This echoes Turner and Oakes (1994) work on social identity, as this data shows how officers can become depersonalised from their own self-perception through group belonging and social identity.

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