Police Resilience as a Multilevel Balance: Needs and Resources for Victim Support Officers

• Published date: 01 June 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10986111221111322
• Author: Ignacio Elpidio Domínguez Ruiz,Alèxia Rué,Olga Jubany
• Date: 01 June 2023

Article

Police Quarterly

2023, Vol. 26(2) 213–244

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111221111322

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Police Resilience as a

Multilevel Balance: Needs and

Resources for Victim Support

Off‌icers

Ignacio Elpidio Dom´

ınguez Ruiz

1

, Alèxia Ru´

e

1

, and

Olga Jubany

1

Abstract

Providing face-to-face support to victims entails one the most intense stress- and

trauma-laden exchanges of law enforcement tasks, which frequently triggers long

lasting negative effects on police off‌icer’s psychological wellbeing. When exploring this

phenomenon, police resilience is often interpreted as police off‌icers’and organization’s

capacity to react and recover from negative experiences and impediments, and as such

it may be perceived as both a trait and a trainable and promotable skill. Yet, in very

recent times, police resilience has faced new or transformed challenges due to the

COVID-19 pandemic, as victims, citizens, and public institutions have encountered new

needs and situations. Drawing from a unique qualitative, in-depth research with police

off‌icers that provide support to victims of gender-based and domestic violence, this

paper analyzes off‌icers’needs and challenges regarding their interactions with victims,

colleagues, superiors, and other occupational demands, as they interplay into stress and

trauma that may lead to burnout and compassion fatigue. Illustrated with the empirical

f‌indings of the case study of the Catalonia’s Mossos d’Esquadra police corps, the paper

explores how off‌icers negotiate individuals’expectations, needs, and procedures

signals towards potential challenges and threats to their psychological wellbeing with

implications for police forces and other public and private institutions. The specif‌ic

needs and demands of the participants’policing, related to support to gender-based and

1

Departament d’Antropologia Social, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Corresponding Author:

Ignacio Elpidio Dom´

ınguez Ruiz, Departament d’Antropologia Social, Universitat de Barcelona, Carrer de

Montalegre, 6-8, Barcelona 08001, Barcelona, Spain.

Email: iedominguez@ub.edu

domestic violence, presents an in-depth analysis of how stress and trauma are un-

derstood and experienced from the police off‌icers’perspectives.

Keywords

victim support, policing, resilience, burnout, compassion fatigue

Policing, as a professional occupation that involves both a series of tasks and work-

related settings, has been studied as a stress-, burnout-, and compassion fatigue-prone

occupation. Both the nature of police work and the characteristics of police organi-

zations make police off‌icers more prone to suffer from work-related mental health

challenges and issues (Burke & Deszca, 1986;McCarty et al., 2019;Rojas Sol´

ıs et al.,

2021;Schaible & Six, 2016). Among the task-related stressors and inducers of other

negative psychological effects of policing, the specif‌ic needs of interactions with

victims and offenders (Losung et al., 2021;Schaible & Gecas, 2010), risk assessment

and on-the-spot decisions in tension- and violence-laden situations (Foley & Massey,

2021;Navarrete et al., 2022), and feelings of unsafety and of lack of control may be

easily linked to burnout and compassion fatigue. Regarding organizational factors,

working within hierarchized organizations that may have little regard to mental health

issues and needs may also affect the police off‌icers’wellbeing and performance,

whereas different forms of organizational and social support may alleviate diverse

forms of stress (Baek et al., 2021;Turgoose et al., 2022).

Burnout and other occupational mental health issues have come to the forefront of

police off‌icers’needs and experiences (de Camargo, 2022;Frenke et al., 2021). Victim

support off‌icers face a series of unique challenges and needs, as their job requires them

to interact with victims and other users or benef‌iciaries of police forces. Gender-based

and domestic violence may create even more trying and demanding situations and

exchanges. These off‌icers face specif‌ic needs and challenges linked to their interactions

with victims, but also to their contact with traumatic experiences and processes and

their collaboration with judicial administrations and procedures, other police forces and

public administrations. As such, police off‌icers who provide victim support depend on a

wide range of factors within and outside their corps, including the victims and other

social actors, whose interplay directly affect the off‌icers’performance and wellbeing

(Losung et al., 2021;Schaible & Gecas, 2010). These interactions also entail a series of

expectations about where does policing end and where do social services begin, and

about the urgency or priority of specif‌ic victims and cases, such as those of gender-

based and domestic violence (Hoyle, 2000;Wilson & Segrave, 2011;Winkel et al.,

2004).

This article aims to analyze off‌icers’needs and challenges regarding their inter-

actions with victims, colleagues, superiors, and other occupational demands, as these

occupational dimensions interplay into stress and trauma that may lead to burnout and

compassion fatigue. Police resilience is here a key concept, directly linked to

214 Police Quarterly 26(2)

contemporary debates about resilience as both a personality trait and a trainable skill

(Liu & Boyatzis, 2021), and as such its relevance is not limited to the individual

experience of police off‌icers, but also to their corps and to the public administrations

they depend on. Drawing from qualitative research within the regional police corps of

Catalonia, the Mossos d’Esquadra (henceforth, PG-ME), this article builds on mul-

tilevel studies of job-related burnout, compassion fatigue, and workplace environments

to study the experiences of police off‌icers who provide victim support, and particularly

those who deal with gender-based and domestic violence. The paper starts with a

theoretical review of resilience, burnout, and compassion fatigue, both broadly and

specially within police settings, as well as a conceptual model that may bridge these

terms and understandings. Following this, the paper introduces the empirical f‌ield and

methodology under the research, as well as the guiding themes or dimensions that

structure the results. Finally, a series of conclusions links the empirical case analyzed to

the wider frame of policing as an occupation.

Police Resilience

Resilience is commonly understood as a reactive capacity, as a form of post-traumatic

growth or ability to bounce back from negative experiences (Liu & Boyatzis, 2021;

Maitlis, 2020). As such, it is composed of (a) a negative experience, whichin our case is

of an occupational nature, and (b) a recovery and/or learning process that draws from

the aforementioned experience. Police resilience may thus be conceptualized as police

off‌icers’and/or police organizations’capacity to endure adversity and trauma, to

mitigate their effects, and even to learn from them. Whereas organizational resilience

may be more clearly seen as a collective effort or resource, even individual resilience

can be understood from two perspectives: on the one hand a personality trait, or “ego

resilience,”and on the other hand a trainable skill, or “state resilience”(Liu & Boyatzis,

2021). Following a comparative analysis of different understandings of and approaches

to the concept of resilience, this section focuses on burnout and compassion fatigue as

the two main challenges for police resilience, which may be understood from a wider

perspective of job demands and resources.

Def‌ining Resilience

The concept of resilience has had a steady evolution as a widely used term, with origins

linked to the natural sciences and a signif‌icant growth in social sciences (Schwarz,

2018). Its contemporary applications, particularly regarding global phenomena such as

the COVID-19 pandemic, range from sustainability research (Nüchter et al., 2021),

tourism destinations (Traskevich & Fontanari, 2021), organizations (Hillmann &

Guenther, 2021), social networks and relationships (Fern´

andez-Prados et al., 2021),

and even discussions about the relation between the def‌initions of trauma and resilience

(Jones & McNally, 2021).

Dom´

ınguez Ruiz et al.215