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.

In Force Under Pressure, Dr. Lawrence Blum, who has devoted his life's work to the survival and wellness of "those who serve," describes the sources of danger, injuries, and victory to police officers in a down-to-earth, readable style. Blum argues that there are missing "ingredients" in the training and socialization of police officers. These ingredients include techniques and tools to condition the officer's decision-making and concentration during conditions of emergency; internal controls necessary to maintain the will to survive; and aids that will prevent officers being defeated by any threat. Distressing and/or disturbing physical and psychological reactions are common in a police officer's workday, and the officer must be prepared for them. Blum's work has uncovered many of the casues of compromise to officer safety and wellness, and he contends that police officers will be well prepared to cope with unanticipated or rapidly changing encounters if they possess the right tools and the know-how to command and control field encounters and life's pressures. Here Blum provides practical tools for survival in law enforcement, by combining his clinical knowledge with true stories of police officers for an attention-grabbing and informative book.

There is no question that more police officers die from suicide than those killed in the line of duty. The suicide and attempted suicide of police officers is a mental health concern that has been neglected for far too long.Police Suicide: Is Police Culture Killing Our Officers? provides realistic insight into the life of a police officer through a

This book provides a general orientation for survival, using the author’s “everyone goes home” approach as in previous editions, to keep the police officer safe and secure. It details the specifics the intelligent police professional must master in order to survive the many types of risky situations he will be exposed to over a career. The book is painstakingly thorough in its approach to officer survival in an era where peacekeepers are required to be highly transparent and accountable in all their actions. Every use of force by a law enforcement officer will be closely scrutinized. This is one reason why it is important that today’s officer has access to every viable tactic and technique that may prevent the need for force in the first place. The book details everything from searching an arrested individual to searching a building; arresting a 300-pound outlaw biker to a surly teenager. Techniques and strategies discussed in the book include personal preparation for risk reduction, vehicle stops and contacts, defusing disturbances, domestic violence, burglaries and structure searching, barricades and hostage-takers, vehicle pursuits, ambush attacks, emotionally disturbed and mentally ill persons, prisoner control and transport, terrorist threats, off-duty confrontations, and reducing the emotional risks involved. At the end of each vital chapter, a quick and concise “Risk Reduction Checklist” is presented. These chapter summaries are excellent for review and merit rereading by the police professional intent on surviving to a healthy retirement. An Appendix has been included containing informative accounts of police deaths, culled from the “Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted Report” put together by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Other accounts are also found at the end of each chapter. Each one makes a point by way of grim example, yet every tragedy described can help save the life of an alert police officer who might otherwise become one more statistic. This unique and comprehensive text will be invaluable to all law enforcement professionals, investigators, policymakers, and police academics.

The massive uprising following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020--by some estimates the largest protests in US history--thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefront of international politics. It also made The End of Policing a bestseller and Alex Vitale, its author, a leading figure in the urgent public discussion over police and racial justice. As the writer Rachel Kushner put it in an article called "Things I Can't Live Without", this book explains that "unfortunately, no increased diversity on police forces, nor body cameras, nor better training, has made any seeming difference" in reducing police killings and abuse. "We need to restructure our society and put resources into communities themselves, an argument Alex Vitale makes very persuasively." The problem, Vitale demonstrates, is policing itself-the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. Drawing on first-hand research from across the globe, The End of Policing describes how the implementation of alternatives to policing, like drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs, has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. This edition includes a new introduction that takes stock of the renewed movement to challenge police impunity and shows how we move forward, evaluating protest, policy, and the political situation.